The Downside EBay is the fast nickel of online book selling. While books may take forever to sell through the listing services, there they garner full retail minus the commissions, where as in eBay auctions the average sell-through price for a book is wholesale to high wholesale. Despite occasional bidding wars that drive book prices above retail, high wholesale sell-through prices occur on eBay consistently enough to be the rule. This is why book dealers with brick-and-mortar stores and/or a heavy listing service presence make up a healthy percentage of eBay book buyers.
And, eBay can be a crapshoot. While the site still garners great traffic, most users are not consistently active; success on eBay depends who is surfing at any given time. While high-demand, desirable books will always garner bids, the selling of average books often depends on luck.
Frequently, books that fail to achieve the minimum on the first posting will sell on the second or third try, sometimes for multiples of the minimum. This seller's experience of a 40-percent sell-through rate on re-listed items has held steady over the years; but meanwhile, the listing fees add up.
EBay Stores: The Auction Alternative EBay is geared toward its auction format with its Stores widely considered a weaker venue; eBay itself warns prospective sellers that the Stores format has "less visibility" than the auction or buy-it-now formats.
Still, if you have huge stocks of low-value, common books and are set up for mammoth uploads, you may want to join the mega-listers that sell in Stores — and there are many. A check of "Non-Fiction," just one of 11 book categories in the Store format, shows 36 sellers offering between 10,000 and 164,000 books each. Like the listing services, eBay Stores charges monthly fees ranging between $15.95 for 'Basic' to $49.95 for an 'Anchor Store.' Unlike the listing services, there is a 5- or 10-cent insertion fee per 30-day listing based on price, and a 10-percent closing fee up to $25.01, graduating downward for larger sales.
Shipping fees frequently exceed the book price in Stores. To give an idea of the competition here, one seller with 81,000 listings has over 11,000 books priced at 99 cents or less. While there is the advantage of eBay allowing a link from auction sales to a seller's Store, this is mainly a venue for low demand books, or, books that would languish forever on the listing services and don't stand a chance in eBay auctions. Stores work best for sellers with gargantuan stocks, no rush to sell — and plenty of manpower.
The eBay Book Auction Ocean Like the listing services, there is a glut of books being offered in eBay auctions. A recent check shows close to 600,000 for sale by auction on the site, (Rising approximately 5 percent in total numbers from a check we made two years ago.) Book sales break down as follows by category:
Antiquarian & Collectible: 74,442
Catalogs: 4,226
Children's: 53,111 (with a children's sub-category within Antiquarian)
Cookbooks: 13,668
Fiction: 126,507 (with a fiction sub-category within Antiquarian.)
Magazines Back-Issue: 69,837
Non-Fiction: 179,971
Textbooks: 30,775
Wholesale Lots: 2,638
Audio Books: 26,236
Tips for Volumes of Sales While the number of books for sale in various categories can indicate the level of interest in the area, this is not a hard and fast rule. That the majority of these books will not sell is a hard and fast rule. Next we will outline some tips on how to avoid posting "hopeless" books, and on helping your eligible books stand-out in this ocean of offerings.
Deciding What To Sell at Auction Many books are not appropriate for eBay auctions. If a price check on Bookfinder shows 20 or more copies of a book with prices ranging $10 or less, it's not a good idea to offer it on eBay at any price. By the time your done photographing, uploading, describing, e-mailing, packing and shipping the book, you may find yourself working for less than minimum wage.
If the value of a book is reasonable on listing services but the topic extremely obscure and specialized, it should probably stay on the listing services. As a few examples, books on sports, militaria, quality histories, pop culture in all its forms, popular and collectible fiction, quality art and illustrated books, books on various modes of transportation, among others, do well on the site. Textbooks are a perennially hot category, as buyers must have the book; their numbers offered for sale are down 40 percent from two years ago, but this is probably due more to the amount of available books rather than to popularity.
Accentuate the Positive Most eBay buyers use keywords and description searches to seek out books in their areas of interest. For this reason, if a catalog on widgets is from a factory in Brooklyn, play up Brooklyn in the header and description as there are far more Brooklyn collectors than widget-lovers.
Use all 55 characters in the header to tout the books appeal, for instance, first edition, exceptionally clean copy, scarcity, topical appeal, etc., and use as many appropriate keywords in the description as possible. Conversely, do not tout a book as "scarce" or "rare" if it is not; collectors and dealers know the difference and won't even look at your post, much less consider your other auctions, if they think you're misrepresenting your wares.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, eight pictures must be worth eight thousand. Post as many photos as practical or needed to show the book in its best light; most booksellers post between five and 15 images with their auctions. Sometimes books sell simply because an image shows or means something unexpected to an eBayer that you're not even aware of, or the user sees something of extra-interest they were not expecting.
That said, also give a full description of the book. After all, book buyers like to read; without sounding like a carnival barker, point out the reasons why a book is interesting, special or important. Readers love to see extraneous facts about the subject or topic, so, throwing these in can only help. As a general rule, no descriptive text can be too long, as long as it sticks to the facts.
(Continue to Page 3 for Listing and Inventory Acquisition Tips)
Books for Bucks: How To Sell Books on eBay
