I’m getting a mind to resell some of my old textbooks, and I’ve been getting quotes from an independent textbook store near my community college, and from a couple of different websites. What I’m asking here is for any Dopers with experience selling-back college textbooks, to fill me in on your experiences: Is it better to sell online? If so, which website? Have you found it useful to “shop” for buyback prices at different schools in town? How do you feel about “marketplace” (sell directly to students on websites or through postings on campus, etc.) vs. “buyback” (sell to bookstores, online or off) methods? What problems have you run into? How much of the cost of your books are you generally able to recover? The bookstores are telling me that the best time to sell books is right after finals in May (this semester); does anyone have any experience that confirms that or differs from that?
Right after finals may be the only time the bookstore will buy them back - but if you go through the bookstore, expect to get only a small amount of what you spent on the books back. Plus, if there’s a new edition of the text coming out, the bookstore probably won’t buy them back.
If you can sell to someone who’s taking the class next semester, you’ll be far better off, especially if you know how much the bookstore sells those particular used books for.
I’ve never tried to sell online and never shopped different bookstores to see what type of price I would get, so I can’t speak to those at all.
I sold some grad school text books on eBay and did pretty well, though I wouldn’t say it delayed financial doom. Maybe filled the gas tank a couple of times.
About 15%. A super-grand champion book-seller backer may be able to hit 25% over the long term with some short-term successes that are greater. It is risky to wait too long to sell your books back because the market can evaporate in the course of a single day and it is worthless then.
You are going to lose most of the money you paid for books. You may manage to lose a little less than some people if you work really hard at it. The healthiest view is to just consider the books an unrecoverable expense when you buy them and then consider it a bonus when you get something back for them. A $300 book may have a new edition come out during the semester and then it is worth less than a dog-eared paperback.
I’m trying to figure out what the deal is with eBay’s sellers fees; I’ve got a so far buying-only account and it seems to want me to make a commitment to paying a fee in order to set up a seller’s account, before it tells me what the fee is. Can you enlighten me on this? Is it a per-sale commission like Amazon Marketplace, or some kind of regular (or one-time) subscription to a service?
For selling textbooks, I used Half.com. This way I can set a price threshold and not have to worry about the listing fees unless it sold. I did very well with this and used it after my last few semesters.
Well…I’m not an eBay powerseller or anything. But it will cost you about .70 to list something (excluding cars, real estate etc) and then a tiny percentage of the sale.
Honestly, the best place to get the lowdown on eBay selling regs is by going to their seller FAQ, or the incredibly active discussion boards.
Not to totally hijack this thread. I’ve sold quite a few vintage and special interest books. I figure it will cost me $1.00 to sell a book. Setting all the auctions to end on the same day makes it easy to do the mailing in one visit; most people pay via PayPal. Media mail costs on average $1.50/per book. Most sellers charge between $3-4 for shipping; that takes care of the charges, even if you just sell the book for a buck.
So. You won’t get rich doing it, but you can make a couple of bucks on things you can’t unload any other way.
To the OP…if you want to see if your books will sell on eBay, do a search on what you’re planning on selling. That’ll give you an idea of the market.
Don’t know about half.com.
I don’t have my banking account info with Paypal/eBay, just a credit card. As a seller, you do have to provide either credit, debit or checking account info so eBay can deduct those pesky little charges.
I’ve done pretty good by hitting up the bookstore and checking out the used prices. Then go to the first sessions of the class when it’s offered again, and offer the new guys 10-20% off the used price that the bookstore is offering. You get more, they pay less, everyone wins. It does take some time investment though.
I think I average something like a 60-70% return, but I don’t resell textbooks all that often - most of the time I wind up with technical references I’ll need for later.
The suggestion to go into the next semester’s classes is a good one, and one that was actually used quite succesfully in one of my classes this semester. I bought the book for that class for $9 on Amazon marketplace. A student from the last semester sauntered in and pawned his copy off in a couple of minutes for ten times that much.
Back in my day, I used to read the bulletin board in the Student Union to find used textbooks for sale. Sometimes I found a good deal, sometimes I had to buy a new book. Do Student Unions still HAVE cork and pushpin bulletin boards any more?
On half.com you can opt to have half.com send you a check instead of direct depositing what you made into your account. They recommened direct deposit because it is faster and easier to keep track of. They only send out payments twice a month, so if you sell something at the beginning of a month, for example, you won’t get your payment for a few weeks. I’ve never sold anything on ebay so I can’t help you there.
Yup. All over the place. I get textbooks for much cheaper online, though, so I don’t read those. It might be a good idea to use them to sell my books, though…