New
online booksellers frequently ask whether it is better to sell their
inventory of books in an auction marketplace or a fixed price
marketplace, and it is becoming increasingly obvious that there are
advantages to both.
When a new online bookseller sets out to establish their own online
bookselling business, they are faced with making a number of decisions
that can ultimately make or break their business, including, which
scouting tool(s) to use, which scouting service to use, whether or not
to use an online postage system, which inventory management system to
use, how/where to store their inventory, etc. Of all the decisions they
have to make, the one I have found to be the most perplexing to them is
where to sell their books.
The choices are abundant if you consider the online auction sites along
with the fixed price marketplaces. Some of the more recognizable
marketplaces include, Amazon.com, Alibris.com, Abebooks.com, Half.com,
BarnesandNoble.com, Biblio.com, and ebay.com. All but ebay.com are fixed
price marketplaces where the seller establishes the price and if the
buyer opts to pay it, they can purchase it for the established price.
It would seem that a book is best suited for a fixed price marketplace
where it is priced competitively alongside other available copies, but
this is not always the case. Many times, a rare or collectible book
will sell for more profit and much quicker in an auction environment. It
is also sometimes true that collections of books by a common author,
encyclopedia type collections, and some journal series' will do better
in an auction environment, but the vast majority of books sold on the
Internet will sell better in a fixed price marketplace.
The biggest advantage to the fixed price marketplaces is not necessarily
the number of potential buyers alone, it is the ease of adding
inventory. In order to list a book for sale in an auction environment
requires typing up a full description, entering the specifics of the
book, e.g., title, author, publisher, publication date, ISBN, etc., and
most of the fixed price marketplaces only require entering the ISBN and
they fill in the rest from a database, including cover pictures for most
books. This means a lot of time to an online bookseller, time that
could be better spent scouting for more inventory in most cases.
