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.