My book sales are slow as usual for this time of year. Even though I know they will slow in July I still get demoralized.  I am going to set up a sale on my eBay listings and hopefully get a little uptick on sales.  If you have a eBay store (not the Prostore which is separate) you can use the markdown manager that is provided.  In the markdown manager you can give your sale a name and pick the titles and how much you want to discount the titles by.

The maximum number you can put for sale is 250 titles – and I think I will be using the full amount.  You can offer free shipping which I recommend as it improves your best match search results.  When offering free shipping inside the markdown manager you have to make sure you are not also offering insurance as an option as this causes some sort of conflict and none of your  books will get added to the sale. 

When I have a sale I generally provide a 10% to 20% discount on my 250 highest priced titles.  I may tweak this formula this time and only pick the titles that are below $40 and see if I get more sales as I already provide “Best Offer” on everything above that.

There are lots of ways to get your inventory moving during slow times – just don’t get to demoralized.

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:bookselling,selling books on ebay

Related posts

Tagged with: •

Filed under: Marketplaces for Booksellers • Selling books online

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