I received an email today from A1Books asking me to list my books on their site.  I never really considered listing my books on A1 before as I viewed them as a competitor.  A1 has thousands of books for sales on Amazon and they are priced low (and their seller rating is lousy).  Something about listing my books on their site just bugged me plus I did not like their fee structure.

A few years have passed since I last even thought of them as a marketplace which show a lack of diligence on my part.  I should always be looking for new venues. I need to start looking around to see if the fee structures and traffic have improved at other marketplaces – I am annoyed with myself for not looking. I generally focus on growing my inventory.

I am not sure if A1Books gets much traffic but given that they are not charging a monthly fee to list (like the crappy Abe Books) then I figure A1Books is worth a shot.  I will let you know if I get any sales.

I will also give some feedback on other marketplaces and take a look at their fee structures in some future posts.

If you are interested in selling on A1Books you can click here to go to A1Books.

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?