Bosda just opened his Alibris store!
Around 5% of my stuff is available, because it takes awhile.sh me luck!
Or, buy something!
https://www.alibris.com/stores/bosda000/browse
I have an Alibris store as well, with about 300 titles.
I find that the relentless pressure from the huge warehouse sellers drives prices for any common book down under a dollar, and it’s just not worth the time and effort for me to post those and try to compete. At the same time, Alibris makes it difficult to post any book without an ISBN number so vintage books also require work.
I’ll be curious to see what patterns you find when you get more experience.
I can post books sans ISBN.
There’s a setting to make your own listings.
For those of us not in the business: what are you talking about? Please give some context.
Is it just me or does the “browse” link not offer any means of browsing? It only has a search tool, which is only useful if I already know what I want. I tried a title search for “the” and “of” and it didn’t find anything.
Also, I’m not sure they fully thought through their site name. Two common e-commerce sites are
Ali Baba
Ali Express
And now we have:
Ali Bris
Sounds like a circumcision-themed store.
Amazing what can be done over the internet these days. Glad I run a pop-up blocker, though.
But seriously, this is a terrible site. I genuinely can’t find a single item that Bosda is selling. Their search tool would have been considered janky in 1998 (I know, because I was writing janky search tools like that in 1998). It also times out and returns server errors like the good old SDMB search.
Yeah, I didn’t say it was impossible if there’s no ISBN: I said it was difficult. You have to input all your own information and then you can’t do an automatic price comparison against similar titles. It’s a pain, not a moon landing.
Alibris is one of many sites that allow individuals as well as businesses to list books, CDs, DVDs, and the like on the net. It handles all the back end databases and finances. All the individual has to do is list the books and then respond when an email arrives announcing the name of a buyer. Basic cost is around $20.00 a year and a cut of the selling price.
Unusually these days, it’s privately owned. It’s been around since 1997, making it almost as old as Amazon, and it offered a sales floor before Amazon thought of its Marketplace. You can go directly to alibris.com or through a meta site like bookfinder.com. Other sites like Barnes & Noble have access to the database, so orders may arrive from a variety of originators. It’s not perfect, obviously, but it’s cheap and easy to use for an individual.
Here’s my store, Farstream Booksales. (A clunky name but taken from an sf story I wrote.) It shows the browsing books by category. I don’t know why Bosda’s doesn’t. Maybe it takes time for the system to process a new store.
All-in-all, I can make money there, but not on Amazon.
Nuff said.
Congratulations!
What a great way to get in the book selling biz.
Been selling, on Amazon, since the 1990s.
Now, Amazon has made it impossible to make money there.
Bye-Bye, Amazon.
Nor can I.
Ditto.
@Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor, do you need to fix your storefront so that your books appear?
That feature seems to be available to Gold Sellers only.
Gold level ain’t practical for me.
If you understand Alibris better than I do, help is certainly welcome.
I’m not a Gold seller. Just the Basic platform.
You should ask customer service why nothing shows up under Browse.
Browsing seems to work now. I’m not sure if Bosda changed something or it was just a matter of waiting, but in any case I see a bunch of categories now and can click to see a list of items.
They were having a minor tech issue.
Fixed now.