Used books - cannot understand pricing
I have set up my account to sell used books, I have the app with scanner, I have read and read and read and feel ready to sell barring one thing. Almost every time I scan a book that is apparently worth something, there always seems to be two identical ones. One will be worth anything up to £77.00 and then the one below is worth about £3.50. Believe me I have checked every single part of it. Both have FBA choices so it isn’t that, they are the same condition etc etc.
In addition to this, out of interest I double checked the price of the same books on ebay - one very well known used book seller literally was selling the same item - for £77.77 on Amazon (not even FBA) and for £7.66 on ebay!!
Could someone please tell me what I am missing here as I am keen to get started but wondering if the used book market on Amazon is more hype than truth?
Sorry for the long winded question just getting so frustrated!
17 replies
Seller_taDBgt7LctucW
Got a spare hour or three? Have a read through the Duplicates Thread.
Seller_DROodOAYHftnc
It used to be great, but unless you know the systems and Amazon’s search then as a newbie it is very confusing.
As Bairstows said it would take hours to explain !
Basically, in the past some rogue sellers (mostly from US) created multiple duplicate product pages without using the ISBN and using ridiculous publication dates such as 1600 and 1730 to ‘trick’ the Amazon system into thinking it was a different book (thankfully Amazon have tightened up a bit on this), but thousands of these duplicates still exist in the book catalogue (also CDs etc) .
These sellers often put high prices hoping that buyers would fall for it and unfortunately Amazon’s search algorithms are now returning these bogus duplicates as the first result and hide the correct listing.
Selling books on here was brilliant, but over the years has become increasingly frustrating.
What I have described above is only the tip of the iceberg - there are multiple other issues with selling media on Amazon.
I wish you luck.
Seller_amUAzjvL5uIzu
As a new seller on Amazon you would probably have more success selling unicorns than books!
