Selling Your Stuff on Amazon Part 11 - Advice for newbies in first two posts

rare_stuff

sarahs999 wrote: »

I just sold my first book! Very exciting. It's a heavy one so I won't make as much as it looks at first, but I had only just listed it today so I'm quite pleased..

Well done on the first sale! Hope you do make some money on it after postage though!

sarahs999 wrote: »

IN other developments, there's an annoying store that keeps revising its price every time I revise mine to be the lowest. Read about that at the beginning of the thread; I suppose there's nothing you can do if someone is determined to be the lowest on the list.

There are a number of people/stores running various different software to ensure they are priced the lowest, often the really big companies can react to a price change within minutes, and most within hours. Trying to compete against these sellers to be the cheapest is a fools game as you are unlikely to ever win, after all their software runs 24/7
A much better strategy is not to try and compete on price with these sellers, and price a little higher** with a good description of the book and good feedback you will find that many buyers will prefer to spend a couple of pence more than buy from someone using a generic description and can at best manage 98% feedback, most though only manage 95% who do this.

**(some don;t just undercut by a penny, some it's a whole 10%! Though most who use this software will set it to simply match the lowest price, often excluding the known undercutters)

soolin

I sometimes even add a 1p to my book rather than even price match an undercutter. I sell a lot of otherwise 1p books at 2p or 5p even when there are pages of 1p copies. However, I only do this if the ranking is very high, I rarely bother with 1p books otherwise. For more expensive books I usually match the lowest price in the same condition or even add 1p to the price.

As for heavy books you can send 1.5kgs first class Royal mail for £5.

sarahs999

Thanks. Useful info there. I made about £10 on the book in the end, which is a great start for me. I can see I shall be raiding the bookshelves at home - I had sorted out a big bag for charity but I think I might see if any would sell first.

Is there any way on amazon to see how recently copies of that book have been sold and what they sold for, like there is on eBay?

soolin

Unfortunately you can't check completed history on Amazon, however the ranking on the item page shows how much of a good seller it really is. I rarely even bother listing stuff that has a rank over 2 million for instance, but may increase my item price if the sales rank is in the hundreds and I have a very good copy.

sarahs999

Thanks again - off to check that now.

Joe_R

soolin wrote: »

Unfortunately you can't check completed history on Amazon, however the ranking on the item page shows how much of a good seller it really is. I rarely even bother listing stuff that has a rank over 2 million for instance, but may increase my item price if the sales rank is in the hundreds and I have a very good copy.

I find that the ranking has very little effect on the sales rank - I wrote some code to analyse the sales ranking of my books against the time it took them to sell and found that there was almost no correclation. I admit its counter-intuitive, but there a couple of reasons why this might be the case. When looking at the results it seamed that year of publication and price both had a much greater impact on the time-to-sell field.

I should mention that when I ran the experiment I only had a test set of only 400 completed listings and I had a policy of not listing books for 1p so that may have affected the results somewhat.

Thanks,

Joe

soolin

I've done nothing scientific at all but I just know if I list a book that has a ranking in the hundreds it will normally sell within a day or three, if it is in the thousands it usually takes a month or so and in the high thousands several months or more. In the millions I rarely make a sale.

I don't sell many 1p books, but I will list them if they have rankings in the low thousands and mine is in good condition. I sold one yesterday, ranking was about 5500 and I sold it at 5p within 7 days of listing.

helsbells

Aaaah the penny has finally dropped soolin - I know you have talked about the sales ranking before but being rather slow witted I have just understood how that might relate to potential sales. I had thought to disprove that theory by checking a collectable out of print book I have just sold - thinking that it could be rare and therefore not have a great sales ranking but nonetheless be sought after. But it does have a reasonbable sales ranking - how can this be? I thought it would be simply be based on units sold....

Apart from that one very good sale on a collectable from my childhood things are very quiet? I think it may have more to do with the no postage on £4.99 than credit crunch...what do others think

soolin

I was doing very well, better than last year in fact, but then it was as though someone switched it off and I've now had no sales at all for days.

soolin

Cue spooky music..just as I pressed send on the above message I had a ping to say I had got a message, and I've just sold a book!

This is th eone and for info even after my sale the ranking stays at 509,333

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0552094773/ref=olp_product_details?ie=UTF8&me=&seller=

I had it listed for about 2 weeks and the ranking was higher when I listed it than it is now.