Q&A: How can I list my book when Amazon's catalog data is wrong?

QUESTION: Sometimes the descriptions Amazon gives for a book may differ from the copy I want to list for sale. Sometimes the cover graphics or the number of pages will be different. According to Amazon's rules, the book has to match completely.

In some cases, new books I've ordered from Amazon have these discrepancies too, but I want to resell them now. How do you handle this kind of situation when listing books?

ANSWER: I have listed and sold tons of books that differed in some way from what is specified in Amazon's "Product Details" section -- page count, covert art, sometimes even the binding. If it's something that seems really minor, usually I'll make a note of the discrepancy in capital letters in my Seller's Comments. I always hope that if a customer pays close enough attention to Amazon's data about the book, that they'll read my description too.

It's a good idea to check these details on each book, because heaven knows we have customers who will take any possible opportunity to complain, like when the page count is off by a few pages.

In some cases, a catalog error is serious enough to prevent books from selling at all. For example, sometimes Amazon has the author's name misspelled, or has the title wrong. In those cases you should submit a correction to Amazon's cataloging department. Usually there's a link somewhere on the book's product page for "Update Product Info."

If you can't find the catalog link, go to Aaron Shepard's Sales Rank Express. (This is also a handy tool for checking sales ranks on Amazon.com and its international sites.)

At Sales Rank Express, after you type in the book info and click "Get Ranks," you'll see a button for "Fix Data." After logging into your Amazon account, you'll be at Amazon's Catalog Update Form for that book. Here you can suggest changes to the title, author name, binding, publication date, publisher name, number of pages, edition, format, language, and language.

I've submitted changes several times this way, and almost every time my suggested changes have appeared on Amazon's product page within a week. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Sometimes there will be a weird discrepancy that makes a book unique. For example, sometimes you'll end up with a softcover while all the other sellers have hardcovers listed with the same ISBN, and there's no product page or ISBN for the softcover. In these cases I'll list the book as "Acceptable" even it it's like new, give a big discount, and explain everything in the Seller's Comments. That has worked for me so far, even though it's technically against the rules.

The eBay curse

eBay can be a lot of fun, but I usually avoid auctions when it comes to my bookselling business. I just like to set my price and be done with it. If I had a ton of collectibles it might be different.

So it's Buy-it-Now on eBay (or Amazon) for me. I just hate to mess around with the buyers who want something for an unrealistically low price.

Of course the other side of the coin is when the auction buyer pays an unrealistically high price. An interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor finds that many auction bidders end up paying more than they could have bought the item for using Buy-it-Now.

This is where eBay users fell prey to what Malmendier and her coauthor, Stanford University economist Hanh Lee, call "bidder's curse." Apparently, some bidders grew so enthusiastic about winning the auction that they lost sight of the "buy it now" price, sometimes offering more than $185.

We found that in 43 percent of the auctions the bidders ended up paying more than the 'Buy-it-Now' price," Malmendier says. This is really huge. It's far more than I could have expected