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.

Selling Books on Ebay is a little different than selling books on Amazon.  One of the great things about selling books on Ebay is the flexibility you have over promoting your listings.  I have an Ebay Seller Store (not a ProStore) and here are some of the tools I use to maximize it:

• Flexible Shipping Costs – for my expensive books I provide Free Shipping.  This might catch a buyers eye and help with the seller scores Ebay has plus it does not really eat into profits.
• Sales Tool – I use the markdown manager to offer discounts on certain books (up to 250 at one time).  Again the listing reflects that the book is “on sale” and might help get the potential buyer to actually buy.
• International Shipping – is much easier on Ebay then the other marketplaces since you can charge the actual shipping cost and not just a flat fee like Amazon.  I allow for international shipping for most of my books on Ebay.
• Photos – Many of my older books do not have stock photos.  I can’t say a photograph them all and upload them to my listings but I do provide photos on request.  You can also state in your listing that you will provide them
• Best Offer – This feature is the best.  Everyone loves getting a great deal and Best Offer allows them to.  Best Offer helps sell some of my more expensive inventory or some of my more esoteric academic/religious texts.  I find students always use Best Offer.  This provides me flexibility to either wait for the full asking price or if I want to sell for the lower offer if I want the cash flow.  There is no cost to offering Best Offer.

The only major concern I have with Ebay is the monthly costs which can add up with the per book fee.  I do not list my full inventory on Ebay because of this and I still find how they charge sellers to be difficult to follow. 

Also – the inability to leave neutral or negative feeback to a buyer makes no sense.  I have never left either for a buyer but it was nice to know I could if a buyer was being completely unreasonable.

Selling books online can be very profitable. When individual sales are quickly glanced at the potential for profits can seem great.  I have bought many books for $1 and sold it for $30 or more many times – very fat profit margins.  The thing of it is that becasue I do everything online I can lose track of my margins.  Managing your bookselling venture like a small business is important. 

I sell my books online and do almost all of the back office business online.  This creates a very simple business to run but because so much of the processes are done online.  My books and envelopes are the only real things I store.  I manage my overall business on a cash basis but keeping track of the details is important.  Here are things that are easy to lose track of in terms of really figuring out what your margins are:

• Marketplace monthly fees – Amazon is straightforward but eBay is variable
• Commissions taken per book by the marketplaces
• Postage – Amazon takes another chunk here
• Cost per envelope
• Monthly fees of Endicia
• Monthly fees of Inventory Management System – in my case The Art of Books
• Cost of books

The list can go on and it becomes depressing how much others make when I sell one book – everyone gets their cut.  So when I sell a book for $10 that I bought for $1 I am not making $9 (or even $8).  This is one reason it is some important to figure out your margins as you can figure out what books are not worth selling.

Keep track of everything, work the numbers and focus on the bottom line and you should see your profits increase.  Regulary shop around for new vendors.  Is your inventory management provider the best for the money.  How about your envelope provider? Ink toner?  All of these eat into profits.  Spend time shopping and save.

If you are an online bookseller you are going to need an inventory management system such as The Art of Books.  What should an inventory management program do?

• Keep a database of all your current inventory and all past sales
• List your books on all the marketplaces you sell on – not all systems work on eBay and other sites
• Help you price your inventory and re-price as needed – this can be a pain
• Allow you to track your cost of goods sold and postage expenses
• Help you avoid double sales by quickly removing sold books from all the markets
• Have responsive customer service
• Use servers that are reliable
• Integrate easily with your shipping software such as Endicia
• Be reasonably priced

I am likely missing a few things but an inventory management system should be robust.  There are many companies which provide these services and the pricing for them is all over the map.  I currently use The Art of Books and have previously used Fillz and Amanpro.  I have looked at other services but found their pricing to be nuts for the amount of books I have listed (approximately 2500).

I think The Art of Books is the best service if you are selling on multiple marketplaces.  Their re-pricing is not the best but I can muddle through it.  I used Fillz but it had many issues integrating properly with eBay and their re-pricing was also not user friendly.  Amanpro is fantastic but it only works with Amazon – it think Amanpro probably is so good is because it is a database that is stored on your own computer.  I loved Amanpro but needed to grow my business beyond what it was capable of offering.

A lot of the inventory management providers have slick web-sites with all sorts of claims and neat flowcharts but nothing on the backend.  The Art of Books website looks amateurish (relatively speaking) but it offers excellent value.  I found their customer service responsive (and helpful!!).  The instructions on how to use it were accessible and not hard to follow – so if you are listing on more markets than just Amazon they are the way to go.

Hello and Welcome to the Bookselling Blog. I have been selling books online for over two years.  Selling books online can be fun and profitable and I intend to use this blog to talk about how it is both.  If there is a topic relevant to selling books online that you would like to hear about send me a line and I will gladly post about it.

How I Got Started in Online Bookselling

Before I begin posting about other topics in the world of online bookselling I would like to tell about how I ended up in this business.  First – I love books and always wanted to own a used bookstore but this was something I envisioned occurring well into the future. The desire to own a used bookstore was based on how much I enjoyed the experience of shopping in them.  Anyway I lost my “regular” job and was provided a fair severance and was encouraged to explore opening a bookstore.  A bit of research showed me that the cost and time commitment of opening and running a bookstore was beyond what I was willing to do.  In the course of this research I came across the idea of selling books online. 

I had boxes of books in my attic and listed some on Amazon and thus began my new career of selling books online.  If you sell used books online let me know how you got into this business.

In future posts I will delve more into the getting inventory, some of the mistakes I have made, product reviews and many other facets of the business of selling books online.