Recently I received an invitation to sell through the eCampus.com marketplace.  Since my inventory included a number of textbooks, I decided to give them a try.  Setting up an account was easy enough, but their website is a little confusing to navigate.

After completing the registration to become a seller, I decided that the first books I would list for sale would be my own.  In the process of listing them, their website informed me that they could not be listed because they were not in the eCampus.com database.

Rather that trying to list my inventory one book at a time and encountering the same problem with many other titles, I opted to send eCampus.com an email to see what it would take to have an ISBN added to their database.  My first email went unanswered for a week, so I sent
another.  This time, after three more days of waiting, I got a response back that was rather curt, telling me that I would not be able to list my book because they only allow listings by their trusted vendors.

Now I was not only annoyed, I was confused.  If eCampus.com is a marketplace for independent booksellers to sell their new/used books, how come they are trusted vendors only if the book they want to sell happens to be in the eCampus.com database, but not trusted if the book is not listed in their database?  Furthermore, I had explained to them that
I was the author of the book I wanted to list, and I was not interested in trying to list 3,000 more books - one at a time – only to have a substantial portion of them get rejected. If I could not list my own book or work with them to have ISBN's added to their database, I could just imagine the frustration of one-by-one rejection as I spent days entering the data for each book.

After getting the last email from them, I sent another, directly to the person from whom I had received the rude reply before.  So far, I have not heard anything else from them, so I thought I would share the experience with all of you with the intent to save you the hassle of even bothering with eCampus.com.

In my opinion, eCampus.com is a waste of time and effort for online booksellers.  Just to give them the benefit of the doubt, I tried to list several of the textbooks I have in my inventory, and only one of twenty was even recognized by their database.  Of course, whether you opt to use their marketplace or not is up to you, but from my perspective, I am
not the least bit interested in entering 3,000 books individually only to have 150 (5% as my 1 in 20 indicated) of them be accepted, and having that many accepted assumes that books that are not textbooks realize a comparable acceptance rate.

Also, you can forget about listing any books that do not have an ISBN, eCampus.com is unable to handle any of them.

 From my brief experience with eCampus.com, I would have to say it is an unfriendly marketplace for independent booksellers, their customer service is not only unprofessional, they are rude, and they are not the least bit accommodating or flexible in working with third-party sellers. A big disappointment, but a valuable lesson learned that I can pass on to all of my customers and website visitors.