The only remaining part of my mother’s estate is a couple boxes of books, so I told my sisters that I’d sell them on eBay.
So I got my seller’s account, and yesterday I decided to try this selling business. It went pretty well at first; I plugged through the first couple screens, filled out my Item title and description, hit “Continue”.
Got a message back: “Please supply the required information in the highlighted fields”. No fields were highlighted; and in fact I had filled in all the fields. Hit “Continue” again; same result. Again. Again.
Got on the eBay help chat line. Described my problem. “Well, the site doesn’t work with Safari. You should download Mozilla.”
Gee, thanks. Like I want to install another browser just so I can sell on your stupid site. Why not write the code so that it works with everybody’s browser?
Oh, and here’s the dumbest part: In their chat room, the “t” on my keyboard didn’t work. I sounded like an idio. My yping was incoheren. “Wha’s up wih ha?” I asked the eBay chat guy. His explanation: “You need to update your Safari.”
I have the latest version of Safari.
So here’s my pit: Write your god-damned website in a little less Explorer-centric manner, okay? You guys are making a mint; surely you can afford some competent coders. Somehow all the other major sites I use (Amazon, Netflix, Google) manage to work with any browser; why can’t you?
It goes deeper than just that. A lot of the third-party auction management software uses IE calls to perform their functions, and tons of sellers (and buyers) use them.
I use Firefox for browsing and eBay works fine with it. However, I have to keep IE updated and fully functional because my sales management software depends upon it, whether I like it or not.
Rocketeer, admittedly it sucks when a website doesn’t look or function perfectly with whatever browser you choose, but you can hardly expect coders at hugely complex sites to tweak for every available browser in the world. It is more efficient to pick one standard and concentrate on making the site work as well as possible within those parameters.
The sad thing about this rant is that, as a group, books are a notoriously unprofitable item to sell on ebay. I would be surprised if you made more than $5 a box.
I’ll have to remember this, the wife and I paid for our last trip to Australia by selling books on ebay. We wont make that mistake again. You never know with books, I purchased a book at a yard sale for .05c and it sold for $100 on ebay. I’ve also purchased books for up to $10 thinking they’d sell and didn’t. What I do know for certain is we made way more than it ever cost us and I’ve still got approximately 30,000 books in the basement.
It depends on the books. To sucessfully sell books on eBay, you need to do your homework first:
[ul]
[li]Know what edition you have. There is a huge difference between the selling price of a first-edition-first-impression copy of The Grapes of Wrath and the first-edition-second-impression.[/li][li]Use a good independent search site like www.bookfinder.com to help you determine exactly what you have and find out what online booksellers are getting for the same editions.[/li][li]Write your listings so bibliophiles will know exactly what they’re getting, for example: “Smith, John. Joe’s Big Adventure. NY: Hyperion. 1962. 1st edition. Excellent condition DJ, grey linen hardcover. Front board blind stamped with unicorn design, spine embossed in black and gold. Slight bumping at spine, no chipping, corners sharp. Binding tight and clean, no hinging, no marks on eps. This is the rare first impression with the color frontispiece protected by tissue and typo on page 44, line 7. Textblock perfect. 375 pages, ix, large 8vo.”[/li][li]Don’t bother with book club editions.[/li][li]Don’t bother with outdated textbooks unless they’re antiques.[/li][li]Keep packaging efficient and inexpensive. Books can be safely shipped by folding them within a corrugated cardboard “sleeve” and then putting them in a padded envelope. Weigh them before listing them, look up the Media Mail price postage fee, and then quote your shipping price up front in the auction so there are no surprises. The minimum weight (and therefor, charge) for Media Mail is one pound, but it’s cheap. Shipping books any other way gets prohibitively expensive.[/li][li]Put kid’s books in box lots. They sell much better that way.[/li][/ul]
On preview: GawnFishin’, you’ve probably discovered that when a book sells, it often sells BIG. Book sales have been very good to me on eBay, as they have - obviously - for you. But Fear Itself is right. For every you or I sell at a sweet profit, a lot more go begging. I think a huge part of selling books in a crowded market like eBay is how they’re presented.
I can’t speak to Ebay, but in general it isn’t that difficult to write standards-compliant code that works across a wide variety of browsers(the exception often being IE, whose standards compliance, while improving, is still pretty bad in some areas).
It really depends on how Ebay is designed, though. If most of their stuff is done server-side then there’s no reason for any browser not to work. If they do a lot of processing client-side with Javascript then achieving cross-platform support is much more difficult, although IMO this is a very good reason to avoid heavy use of javascript on most websites.
I’m perplexed by the responses to GawnFishin’'s post. Given that he’s bought over 30,000 books, one would think the law of averages would have caught up to him by now, if his profits were based on a few fluke purchases that sold for $100. Since he has sold some fraction of the books he’s bought for a good deal more than he’s paid for the entire stockpile (enough to pay for a vacation for two to Australia, he says), ISTM that unless he’s bullshitting us about how well he’s doing, or unless he’s hit one or two lucky big sales for way more than any mere $100 that account for most of his profits, he’s making money because he knows what he’s doing, rather than because of unusual luck.
Indeed, this is why I’ve got so many damn book in my basement, when we go buying we buy in bulk and sort it out as we go. We also buy discarded library books in bulk, one time we brought three truck loads of books for around $50 per load. A LOT of garbage but once it was all sorted it was very much worth it.
Not all books sell but, buying in bulk has helped keep overall cost down. Knowing what you’ve got and doing the job properly with good detailed descriptions of each item is essential. I have two friends who have started doing this after seeing what my wife and I were doing. They themselves have also been quite sucessful. I’ll admit they had a hard time to begin with but they have since copied our method and things have turned around for them, though they don’t like our buying method.
Fear Itself, I would like to agree that groups of book don’t sell because to me they are a hassle. But honestly my wife prefers selling grouped books Author, Genre, whatever. I wouldn’t buy a group of books like that, but she keeps selling 'em like that so I don’t know what to say. I know she wont just group any old lot of books together, she does take her time and researches whatever she’s listing.
It’s not a case of good individual purchases but rather taking everything you can get and driving the prices you pay as low as possible. When buying discarded library books, and you can get some good discards. Buy the lot, We’ve called library districts and purchased huge loads of books for not much money. It saves the libraries time and money by not having to do sorting, pricing and running book sales. We’ll take the lot now let’s talk price.
I was talking about books as a category on eBay, as opposed to other vintage items like toys or musical instruments.
So do you believe websites should hew to that standard at the expense of 95% of their visitors, or should they code so that the vast majority of their visitors will have a trouble-free experience?
First off, thanks for all the advice posters have given on selling books. I appreciate it.
But that’s not really the choice. Somehow, professional websites (as opposed to the wretched mess that is eBay), like Amazon, manage to make it work right for everyone. It isn’t impossible.
No problem, I guess taking into account the number of book I still have compared to the number of books we’ve actually sold your probably right, I was just pointing out that selling books isn’t necessarily a no win situation.
Agreed, though I doubt you’ll ever get them to change.
Indeed, this is why I’ve got so many damn book in my basement, when we go buying we buy in bulk and sort it out as we go. We also buy discarded library books in bulk, one time we brought three truck loads of books for around $50 per load. A LOT of garbage but once it was all sorted it was very much worth it.
No problem, I guess taking into account the number of book I still have compared to the number of books we’ve actually sold your probably right, I was just pointing out that selling books isn’t necessarily a no win situation.