Sell your new and used books on eBay’s sister website
One of the fastest, easiest, and cheapest ways to start your own online e-commerce business is to sell books on eBay’s sister site.
Getting your own seller account is a pretty simple and straightforward procedure, if you already have an eBay account it’s even easier because you can always just add an account to the sister site from your existing eBay account.
One of the great advantages of selling new and used books on eBay and its sister site is that they already have the stock information for most modern books in their database, and all you have to do is enter the ISBN number or title to see if stock information is available for your book. If so, and you decide to put it up for sale, all you need to do is describe in a few words, concisely but accurately, the actual condition of your copy, all the other information: the publisher, the author, the publication. date and often even a stock image of the book is automatically added to your listing.
Another great advantage of selling books on eBay’s sister site, half.com, as opposed to selling on one of the many other book-selling sites, is that you don’t have to pay a listing fee, a maintenance fee, or anything else. another fee until you actually sell your book, at which point you pay a flat commission. Even this is pretty straightforward because eBay’s sister site collects the book payment from the buyer, deducts their fee, and then pays them the rest of the money. Payments are made to you by direct deposit into your checking account twice a month, details of which you will need to provide when you set up your account. Your balance is calculated on the 15th of each month and the last day of each month.
At one point, eBay even considered shutting down this media selling website in hopes that sellers would transfer their inventory to eBay stores. When they saw their half.com sellers migrate to other sites like ABE and Amazon, they changed their minds and ultimately decided to stay with half.com.
Of course, you can also sell your books and other media on eBay at auction, a fixed-price listing, or you can open an eBay store to list your inventory. You can even combine a traditional eBay auction and a fixed price listing by adding a buy it now feature to an auction listing.
There are quite a few different sites on the internet where you can sell used books and media. Amazon is the biggest but there are others like: ABE, Alibris, Biblio and many others. Sellers who start with half often end up selling on some of these other sites as well.
Some sites only allow books to be listed on your site, other sites allow you to sell other media such as: CDs, DVDs, video tapes, computer video games, and software titles. half.com is one of the sites that allows its members to sell many different types of media.
Some people sell their books exclusively through a single site, while others list their inventory on multiple sites at the same time. There are advantages and disadvantages to doing this. The main advantage is greater exposure of your inventory, which results in more sales. One downside is that sometimes you’ll sell the same book on multiple sites on the same day when you only have one copy. Then you have to cancel orders, disappointing customers, which is never a good thing. Another downside is that most online book sales sites require a monthly fee, and so if you sell the same inventory on multiple different sites, you’re paying multiple monthly listing fees.
There are a number of companies that market software and also provide a service to list and maintain inventory on several different sites simultaneously. This service/software of course involves another monthly fee.
Book prices can change a lot, usually but not always falling. For some particular books, copies are added and sold daily, even hourly with some of the most popular titles. To stay competitive, sellers have to frequently reprice their inventory. You need to price your books low enough to remain competitive, but you also don’t want to lose money or “leave money on the table” by selling them too cheap. Book prices are set solely by supply and demand, rising when demand exceeds supply or, as is often the case, falling when supply exceeds demand. If you only have a few hundred books, then it’s a simple but somewhat tedious task to go through and re-price them manually. If you have a few thousand titles, there is software available to automate this process that you can consider, but again, this also comes with another monthly fee.
If you decide to start an online business selling books on half.com. I think you will find it very interesting, quite profitable and a lot of fun and I wish you every success in your new e-commerce venture.