SELLING SOLUTIONS & ADVICE

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By following some, or all of the advice and techniques outlined below, I have seen sellers increase their sales 4 and 5 fold.

One seller has gone from $10,000 a month to $40,000 a month in sales and they are still increasing.

TIP: You can ship from the US yourself either by driving your parcels to the states and using USPS postage, or by using a convenient shipping service like Chitchats Express to the US in the East, or Books to the Border in the BC area.

TIP: You can also print US Postage from your own computer using a service like Endicia.com. This is very convenient, quick and easy, and much cheaper. The savings are clearly apparent and in some cases, actually lower than the US Postal rates.

TIP: A US address can be used to make your item as appealing as the US sellers simply by opening a USPS PO Box, or using the box address for the service you choose to deliver your mail, for example: Chitchats Express to the US. This alone will increase your sales AND profits dramatically.

Once you are Selling and Shipping from the US

• It is important that once you become a US seller, to maintain high feedback ratings. Good ratings instill a sense of trust in your buyer. Questionable ratings will turn them off. It's that simple.

TIP: If you sell an item that you are out of stock on, buy it whenever possible from another seller and have it shipped to your customer directly. Canceling orders can earn you negative feedback.

TIP: Sign up for Google base and Google checkout and link your website to Google’s search.

TIP: Compare shipping costs on international sales. (Often it is cheaper to ship an item to Canada from the US than ship it from Canada.) Often it costs $12.00 or more to ship a light item from Canada and the same item can be shipped from the US for as little as $3.75.

Some general tips from Brian at KBooks:

1. The more web sites you books are listed on the greater the number of sales that will be generated. The sites that generate the most orders are Amazon.com. Ebay, Alibris, ABE, Barnes & Noble, Amazon.ca, and Amazon.uk for English speaking books. For a Canadian based seller with French language books the Amazon.fr site works very effectively. All of these sites charge significant listing fees.

2. Intermediate sites that also charge up front listing fees are, Biblio, Tomfolio, AntiQbooks to name a few. (Although Biblio offers an option with no fees but higher commissions)

3. Books that have no listing fees and only charge commissions on books that sell are: Half.com, Zvab/Choosebooks, Valore, ecampus, and TextbooksRus, to name a few. These sites unfortunately , with the exception of Half.com, do not generate many orders.

4. If you are tempted to have your own web site Chrislands is recommended. It is very unlikely that this site will generate more than 3 to 5% of your total sales but it does allow you to direct customers to you own web site which of course has no commissions. It also is a site that will host your pictures that can than be used with your ebay listings effectively.

5. While many debate the value of pictures with your books. It is clear that they are very important on Ebay. It can be time consuming to take and upload pictures especially if you are listing on many different web sites. One of the local area sellers has developed some visual basic instructions that uploads all the new pictures to the Chrislands web site, ABE, ZVAB, and Biblio automatically. The software than files those pictures into a group of folders and discards the pictures for items that are no longer in the sellers inventory. This upload process is automated and takes about 2 to 5 minutes depending on how frequently it is done to upload to all the sites. Most pictures for the more modern books are available on the internet and it takes only a few seconds to capture the image and link it to your book.

6. Amazon.com is now the big gorilla for online book sellers. With Amazon.com you can expect more orders than any other site you can list on by at least a factor of two, Unless you have cracked bulk listing on Ebay. To list on Amazon.com however you do need a US physical bank account. It is also critical to be shipping through the USPS otherwise the loses on shipping charges will be significant. Amazon provides a shipping reimbursement of $3.99 which is adequate to cover most US postage charges but if you are shipping from Canada $3.99 will not cover your costs.

7. EBay is a very effective site to sell on (Second only to Amazon.com). It is however much more difficult to list books on EBay in bulk and the options are many and the fees are high. The recent change to listing fees for Fixed Price items has made this very attractive. The listing fees for Fixed Price books that are in the Ebay catalog (with ISBN numbers) is $.05 for a 30 day listing. The commission on a sale is 15% of the selling price and the Paypal fees are on top of this. One seller in the Toronto area listed 6500 titles at the Fixed Price using the new fixed price option of $.05 per item when it became available on September 15th. Another 8000 items were listed in the Ebay stores and since September 15th those listing have generated $7740 in sales as of October 6th. It cost $325 for the Fixed Price listings and another $240 for the EBay store listings. The commissions so far are roughly $925 and the Paypal fees are about another $250.00 (total=$1740) this translates so far into about a 22% fee but there is still another 9 days to go for this listing period of 30 days. It appears that the overall costs of listing in bulk on Ebay will come in some were in the 20 to 25% range. This makes Ebay the most expensive and the most productive selling site for books. In the same period Amazon.com generated $6050 in sales and Amazon commissions are around the 20% level as well.

8. A few tips for listing on Ebay. It is not straight forward but one of the area sellers has developed a method of listing on mass from a booktrakker database that utilizes all the information resident in the Booktrakker database to flush out all the features including shipping charges, book condition and description, It also works out which category within Ebay to list the item and links the pictures from a Chrislands web site to be displayed on Ebay as well. To determine what books from the database will meet the criteria for the $.05 listing. Excel is used to test all the books in the database with ISBN numbers against the ebay catalog prior to uploading to ensure that they will be accepted, Those that are not accepted for the $.05 Fixed Price listing are than uploaded to the Ebay stores. It is clear from the three week trial so far that the Fixed Price listings generate far more orders that the Ebay Stores.

9. If tackling ebay is to challenging for you to do directly there are online sites that will do this for you for a fee. Fillz has a basic fee structure of $50 per month and transaction fee. They interface well with Booktrakker, Homebase, and other database systems. They can get complicated to use as well as you need to have special scripts written to suit your application and if you can not write them yourself there are additional fees involved in having them written for you.