Ebay Free Listing Weekend 16-17 June

porto_bello

Crowqueen wrote: »

I must say I'm sold on Amazon listing - just the ISBN and a one-line description.

It's certainly so much easier than listing on eBay, but if it's a book you are selling, unless it's small and light, (due to the fixed postal charges) after Amazon take a large cut of the sale price, I find the preset postage rate insufficient.

I also find many large sellers listing books for £0.01 plus the postage, even though, given the size and weight of the book, after the cost of postage, they are either going to end up with peanuts or even take a loss!

[I once bought a £0.01 book form Amazon found it arrived with postage paid by an NHS Hospital Trust! Clearly the seller was selling stuff for 1p, banking the postage and despatching in her employers mail!]

I've found Amazon is brilliant if you've got a rare and valuable book. As long as you're prepared to wait a few months, you can get a very good price for them.

I have tried listing valuable(ish) books on eBay and I've found it doesn't work out - presumably because people will generally look first to find them on Amazon or Abebooks?

silvercar

I went to relist on previous unsold items and its charging me a fee:(

soolin

silvercar wrote: »

I went to relist on previous unsold items and its charging me a fee:(

Try relishing one at a time and see if that helps.

If not check you haven't got a second category showing or a sub title or anything else chargeable

silvercar

soolin wrote: »

Try relishing one at a time and see if that helps.

Thank you, listing one at a time worked.

RoyaleMale

Ebay used to show my current listing fees when I listed an item.

They don't have this now.

soolin

RoyaleMale wrote: »

Ebay used to show my current listing fees when I listed an item.

They don't have this now.

Mine still do.

soolin

Just bumping for any stragglers

Crowqueen

I have tried listing valuable(ish) books on eBay and I've found it doesn't work out - presumably because people will generally look first to find them on Amazon or Abebooks?

Depends what you're looking for.

Ancient books - I'm talking about anything pre-ISBN, of which I have a couple listed on eBay at the moment - are still obviously better sold on eBay as the collectable market is there. Last summer I was looking for Victoriana and found a lot of nice stuff on eBay and even one book on eBid (a tatty but readable medical almanac from the 1870s which made my fictional descriptions of Victorian medical practice come alive - I went on eBay and bought another two volumes of the same manual - a slightly different edition but still the right vintage).

ABEbooks is good if you know what you're looking for - browsing is horrendous. They sent me a voucher there so I used it but I tend not to look there unless I absolutely can't find it on either eBay or Amazon (though prices are generally quite low, shipping costs can be ridiculous as all the books being sent from overseas are lumped in with the books sent from the UK). I used not to browse too much on Amazon either - but recently I've been looking a bit more there.

The NHS person might get cheaper postage through work - don't discount the probability that they paid for postage and it may have got them a discount and still been cheaper than an ordinary service. I've done that a couple of times with my mother's workplace but I've always paid for it at the normal rate, or sometimes just handed over an arbitrary payment.

Also, I believe that big volume sellers get a service that is much cheaper through RM, allowing them to sell penny-books without the regular Josephine Schmo price-tag on the postage. They would also not pay Amazon the additional 80p-ish non-professional closing fee as I'm assuming they have the £25 per month merchant account.