Bookselling online in the UK

With spring still a whopping 2.5 months into the horizon, the urge to clear out our flat and make it more live able during the dark winter overwhelms. Mr. Me and I are seriously overstocked when it comes to clothes, records, games and hugely, books. Our living room could be a small bookstore for all of the stacks of literature on the floor and on the shelves. We've gone double stacked, sometimes triple, in an effort to store them all. The books bleed over into the bedroom, the spare room, the kitchen, the table... Everywhere you look, you see books.

This infestation is a large part of the reason I've been investigating ways to rid myself of them and make a little bit of money. After a fair bit of investigation and Cost Benefit Analysis, I've put the vast majority of them on Amazon.

I tried 3 different ways of selling my books online as a test run. There was tried and tested EBay, the hippie friendly Greenmetropolis and our tried and our jungle friend as contenders.

EBay
EBay, for me, is rapidly becoming a last resort for unloading my stuff. My satisfaction with their fees and way they handle difficulties has diminished enormously since I set up my first account in 1998. I understand that they need to make money to keep such a large and useful business going but can't understand how the fees are increasing. Surely the more customers are around, the more money they make and they can still afford to have little bonuses like free listing days? EBay appears to have turned itself into every other greedy corporate sucking fish, which slowly gouges you whilst providing absolutely nothing in return. A rather timely reminder of they're continuing price hikes jumped into my e-mail just today with further increases in EBay Autos fees.

The benefits of using EBay:
1. Lots of users
2. Book selling competition seems to be limited
3. Can sell products with strange or missing ISBN numbers (book club, academic texts.)
4. EBay does a lot of the promotion for you.
5. No VAT
6. You can sell a hell of a lot of items.
7. What money you do make can stay in your Pay Pal account for future purchases.
8. Feedback system

The disadvantages of using EBay
1. Lots of users
2. Extremely short time to list books. 1 week, unless it's for something collectible or rare, isn't a very long time.
3. They take their fees anyway, making it not all that cost effective.
4. You still have to use that interface with all of its little charges and advertising.
5. Pay Pal one of the easiest but also the most irritating way of transferring money.

Greenmetropolis
Part of my deep and enduring love of used books comes from a desire to re-use as many products as possible. I'm not that Eco really but for me, there's nothing quite like the smell of mustiness from a great old book. I also collect antique books and some very specific first editions, not really for the value, more for the history and differences in how they were made. I have an 18th century copy of Les Miserables which has paper just as yellow as my 1998 copy of High Fidelity. It's not anything I can put my finger on as a definite, just an impression of better quality and the appearance of Books... instead of books.

Greenmetropolis appeals to my desire to circulate books as much as possible and also gives money toward the Woodland Trust to plant more trees. The set price is pretty decent as well at 3.00 to you plus postage and packing. It's more ethical and profitable than just listing things on EBay and hoping for the best. The disadvantages to using it, whilst few, are massive hindrances to actually selling anything.

Advantages of using Greenmetropolis
1. Good user interface
2. Easy ISBN/ASSN look up system
3. Well priced for sellers and buyers
4. Donates money to the Woodland trust
5. Does not use Pay Pal
6. What money you make can stay in an account for purchases on the website.
7. Easy packing/condition and postage guide.
8. Better for selling bestsellers or popular books.
9. Listings remain for 6 months
10. No VAT taken from seller account.

Disadvantages of using Greenmetropolis
1. The system for selling is based on a first come/first serve basis. You might be in a long queue.
2. The site doesn't seem to be as well known as Amazon or EBay.
3. Can't sell books with obscure or non-existent ISBN numbers.

Amazon
The progression from online bookseller to used bookseller seemed to be pretty intuitive. Amazon, even with their behemoth warehouses, can't possibly stock every book all of the time. What they can do is list the books of people who might have them in stock, giving them a wider target audience for all of the other stuff they want to sell you. It also provides a consumer base for what you want to sell. It's a pretty win/win situation for all concerned. I've had pretty good luck with Amazon during this venture. Out of the 40 or so items I've listed, about 20 sold with no trouble and there's still more online. Some things linger on yet, with no hope of being released from their bookshelf prison. Why? That good old bugbear, competition.

In conjunction with competition brings some difficulty with the fees and expense of Amazon. The price you list for your book is in addition to a standard charge to the buyer of 2.75. When you create a listing, Amazon tells you whether you're the best price and what that number might be. As a result prices are continually dropping as booksellers come into head to head for the lowest price tick box. The lowest it can possibly go is 1p and many bestsellers actually get to that price and stay there.

Ideally the combined P&P charge and price of 2.76 should cover the cost of sending a book and give you a small profit. In practise that's not always the case. Keep in mind the price of postage, packing, Amazon fees and VAT rapidly mounts and sometimes eclipses profit on more popular items, even if the price is rock bottom. How does that happen on an item priced at 1 measly little pence? Listing fees and 17% VAT comes out of the bonus Amazon gives you for shipping. So, for a book I sold at 1p, I ended up only gaining a bit of shelf space.

Here's the breakdown:

Buyer's Price: £0.01

Postage & Handling: £2.75
Total Amount: (£2.76)
----------
Less Amazon.co.uk Marketplace Fees: (£1.18)
Less VAT on Amazon.co.uk Marketplace: (£0.17)
Total Due Seller: £1.41

The envelope cost me 35p, which brings it down to 1.06.
Postage was 1.35.

In the end I lost 29p.

This might not seem like a huge loss, but the point of selling books is to make a little bit of money and clear out the clutter. If I was interested in other things I'd put a pile on Freecycle or take them to my nearest charity shop without losing anything.

So why as an individual seller, keeping VAT, postage, packing and fees in mind, choose Amazon? The benefits far outweigh many of the costs.

Advantages
1. Massive potential customer base
2. Free until you sell something
3. Standard postage price usually enough
4. Ability to link to listings of books for promotion on other sites/by e-mail
5. Listings remain for 60 days and you can easily re list
6. Amazon also includes selling CDs and DVDs with the same system
7. Direct deposit to your bank account
8. Feedback system
9. Clear condition guide
10. ISBN/ASSN look up system
11. Easily adjust prices if someone undercuts you.
12. Easy vacation settings that automatically add more time to listings.

Disadvantages
1. Price cuts can turn into price wars. Real booksellers can often sell for far cheaper than individuals. Not a great place to try and sell bestsellers.
2. Oddly, you can't use the money in your seller account on Amazon.
3. You're limited to 30 purchases in one month.
4. The seller account interface can be a bit mind boggling. Not user friendly.
5. Can't sell books with unusual ISBN numbers
6. Flat postage rate means you must remember to up price of hardbacks and larger paperbacks.

I'd personally like to see Greenmetropolis get to be a bit more popular. By focusing on charity, ecological issues and bestsellers, it's likely to be a much better place to try and offload Stephen King than larger websites. Sadly, without a potential customer base and with companies using the service, it makes it difficult for socially conscious individuals to gain anything from listing books.

Overall, Amazon came out on top, no doubt due to the nature of the website and business itself. After all, before they started selling rabbit carcasses for Christmas, that's all they did.

My Amazon listings

Coping mechanisms

You know those days where everything turns you into a teeth grinding witch? Usually before the start of uterine lining shed week, where it's everyone out of the pool. That's what these first two days have been like. The difference being, of course, that in the past when coping with illogical homicidal rage, I HAD CIGARETTES.

Everything is grating on me. The black girl at the tram stop with her bumping ghetto "music" up on her mp3 player. The chubby hipster in the yellow jacket that didn't bother holding the door behind her at the train station, the whining Scouser's constant muttering about herkidsmotherhusbandsmotherjobnewshift. Today I realized my way of coping with life's minor irritations was to light a smoke and glower at them from behind my stinky cloud.

My coping mechanism, my poison is gone.

It's not the lightheadedness, or the boredom of being latched to my desk all day. It's the lack of something to do when people anger me that's making this most difficult. I want to scream, or chew on the legs of life's minor irritations. How do non-smokers deal with this?

Pumped up on nicotine

I've a rather excellent week and some off work. It seems cruel to return now, with all of life's daily irritations. To enjoy and be nicer to the world is my only real 2007 resolution, outside of generally improving my quality of life. I suppose I have to get over the angst about how bleak it is first.

I don't suppose the presence of stimulant fuelled tension and anxiety is overly helpful. My nicotine patches are just igniting whatever low level seething I'm already a part of and causes me such difficulty. I didn't realize my intent to have good will toward your fellow man is easy when you're A. smoking and B. safely contained inside a warm apartment with Magnum PI on in the background.

That same good will is far more difficult to muster with the North wind blowing your messenger bag all over the train station, your hair into your eyes and paper into your chest. It's even more difficult when you realize the whiny Scouse woman that always stands next to you and moans to her significant other about whatever tiny thing has raised her ire is also a smoker. Not only am I inadvertently regaled about her life and its petty difficulties every morning, I also have to face the sickly smell of our shared addiction.

Giving up cigarettes and adopting a better outlook would be so much easier if everyone else did too.

I wasn't overly prepared the last time I quit. I didn't expect the withdrawals to be quite as nasty as they were toward the end. With the last patch brought a rash of shivers, twitches and overwhelming desire to light up. Within a few weeks of finishing my last pack of NHS subsidized patches, I was back to smoking. When I tried to stop cold turkey, I wasn't prepared for the harshness of cracking the addiction and the habit at the same time.

So why will anything be different? I'm hoping my awareness, or the mental preparation I'm doing will make the light headed desire for a smoke better. If I can get out of the habit of smoking one cigarette in the car on the way, one at Atherton, one at Salford Crescent, one at Deansgate and one when I step off the Metrolink... then perhaps ceasing the drug completely will be easier.

It's only been 11 hours since my last drag.

Right now I'm sitting back at my desk, twitching silently whilst an itchy, sticky thing on my chest pumps me full of drugs. My stomach aches, my head is a little light, my jaw keeps clenching and the next period of forever without one of my comforting little sticks looms in front of me with a certain bleakness, matching the rest of the world after New Year's Day.

Here's to hoping.