Abebooks – I don’t get them and now they do not get me as I have closed my seller account with them.  Their fees and commissions are nuts for the average seller of books.  Maybe they think they are Amazon or eBay and can get away with the higher fees.  After the monthly fees and the per sale commission coupled with low volume they were getting closed to 50% on every book sold. 

Abebooks doesn’t seem to care either.  Some sites try to get traffic and sales – I must get two emails a week from Alibris offering a 10% coupon on their site.   I guess the main problem with Abebooks is their monthly fee schedule relative to the little traffic they get (at least for me).

Biblio does right what Abe does wrong.  Biblio seems to understand that they do not have the sales volume to charge a high monthly fee and they provide options that are reasonable to list a few thousand books on their site.  I have about 2500 books listed on Biblio and maybe get three sales a month from them but that is fine as they do not charge for listing my books there but only take a commission if there is a sale.  Makes sense – they get my inventory and I get access to their market.

Abebooks charges you for access to their market which just isn’t worth it.  If anyone is having success selling on Abebooks I would love to hear about it but also are you making money on those sales after all the fees and commissions?

Textbook Season Ending & Return Season Starting
There is almost never a case when I do not accept returns - most markets require you to accept them (see Amazon's A-Z policy). I keep my return policy simple. The only time I have not accepted a return is when a significant amount of time has passed between the purchase date and the return date or if the books condition is materially different from when I sold it (such as full of highlighting). Sometimes it is easy to lose sight of the customer experience when I run a business from home and do not interact with the customers. Continue reading
Amazon Charge When Shipped (Amazon CWS)
What does CWS mean for us booksellers? Not much. You will not have your account credited until you ship a book. If you use The Art of Books or a similar inventory management system Amazon should be automatically updated when the book is shipped. There are a couple of downsides to Amazon's Charge When Shipped - you do not get to send your own confirmation email to the buyer and the buyer can still leave feedback on a canceled order. Continue reading
Is the Amazon Kindle bad for Online Booksellers
Sales of the Kindle are one thing but it remains to be seen if people are actually going to adapt to using it as their primary way to read - as we have seen with Amazon recenlty deleting Orwell titles there are several issues with the Kindle that will effect its popularity. Continue reading
Tags:abe books,bookselling inventory,guide to selling books online,how to sell books online,make money selling books,online bookselling,selling books on abebooks,selling books on amazon

Related posts

Tagged with: • • • • • • •

Filed under: Marketplaces for Booksellers

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!