Q&A: How should I price my used books on Amazon Marketplace?

QUESTION: I purchased your book "The Home-Based Bookstore" and believe it's a good guide for Internet bookselling, but I am puzzled about one thing: I find that our Amazon listing prices must be at the bottom end of the price scale, or they don't sell. Yet your book implies a different pricing strategy.

We upload to Amazon via HomeBase and also sell on ABE, Alibris, and Biblio. Can you clarify a decent pricing strategy for Amazon that will get us to the $10 to $15 price range you mention in the book?

ANSWER: You are right, selling commonly available used books promptly on Amazon Marketplace does depend on being "visible" in the listings. So that usually means having a price low enough to be one of the three lowest-priced listings displayed when the buyer clicks on "new and used."

For scarcer books, I recommend pricing in the higher range of available listings on Amazon Marketplace. I'm referring to uncommon books that you know (from researching comparable listings on AddAll.com, for example) are worth over $40. In that case, I recommend waiting out the lower-priced competition on Marketplace. Customers who are shopping in this upper price range pay lots more attention to the information in the listing, such as book condition, shipping options, and of course the seller's feedback and apparent care in writing the description. So in that case you're competing more on service and reputation than just price. Lowball sellers on Amazon are not particularly successful with higher-priced books.

Unforunately, for more common books which make up the vast majority of your unit sales, you are forced to be more competitive on price simply because the buyers are more uninformed and careless. While buyers of the high-end books seem to scroll through every listing and put some thought into their choice, buyers of the low-end books seem to make a snap decision -- they don't consider much of anything except price. I'm continually mystified by these buyers who will buy from a dealer with horrible feedback just because the book is priced a penny less! After all, why would you spend your hard-earned money with a seller who has only 80 percent positive feedback? Common sense tells you it's a gamble, and there's a 20 percent chance you'll be unhappy with the transaction.

One thing I have noticed that has improved things within the past six to eight months on Amazon Marketplace is that the listing displays have become more detailed, and they now indicate the percentage of positive feedback ratings the seller has received in the past 12 months. (Previously there was only a series of colored stars, which looked practically the same no matter what the seller's feedback.) After Amazon added this new detail to the display, I noticed that a lot more of these casual low-end buyers were making their buying decision based on seller feedback. I could see the effect immediately, because I started selling lots more common books where my listing was five or six places from the lowest price. Certainly, this has been a change for the better for buyers and sellers alike.

Another way I've been able to raise my average sale price over time is concentrating more on acquiring unique, specialized books. For me, this means esoteric nonfiction, for sellers with more expertise in fiction collectibles, it could mean first editions of great literature. Over the years I've gotten a lot better at finding great books and having the confidence to pay for them. When I started out I wouldn't spend more than $2 on any book.