The Best Online Sites for Selling Books

I have never had a problem finding places to buy good books, but finding good places to sell them is another story. One major difficulty is that what worked last year may not work this year.

I have been selling books on the internet for ten years, and there are several sites I recommend for selling books. The first site, Alibris, has two plans for sellers--Alibris Basic and Alibris Gold. Alibris Basic is for the casual seller, with less than 1000 books. Alibris Basic booksellers pay $1.00 per transaction and a $19.99 annual subscription fee, instead of a flat monthly fee.

Alibris Gold booksellers pay a monthly flat fee based on the number of books they list. This fee ranges from $9.95 a month for 0-500 books to $450 a month if you list over one million books. Both Basic and Gold booksellers pay a 15% commission for items priced $400 or less. For items priced over $400, sellers pay a flat sales commission of $60. Their is also a $19.95 non-refundable application fee.

The thing I like about Alibris is that Alibris has partnered with half.com, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books-a-Million and several other companies. I can elect to have my listings show up on the partner sites. There are no additional monthly fees for signing up with most of the partners. Sales through these channels generally cost you an additional 5% in fees, however, there is no extra work on your part for listing on partner sites. When your books are uploaded to Alibris, they automatically get listed on the partner sites. You also access all of your orders through the Alibris seller hub, rather than the partner sites.

Alibris does have standards that you must maintain if you want to remain a seller. The primary one is that you must have an 85% fulfillment rate. While I sell a lot of books through Alibris and do recommend the site, there are some disadvantages compared to other bookselling sites. The main one is shipping reimbursement. While most sites allow you to set your own shipping rates, Alibris does not. Alibris does not remit the entire shipping fee to the seller. The amount they do give the seller barely covers the cost of shipping. If a book is heavy, the shipping costs will often be greater than the reimbursement. The seller must then decide whether to reject the order and lower his or her fulfillment rate, or ship the book and eat the extra shipping costs. On the other hand, all international orders are shipped to a central location using a postage due label which is paid for by Alibris.

The other site I sell a lot of books through is Abebooks. Abebooks is very similar to Alibris. If you only have a few books, you can sell them to textbooks.com through Abebooks. Abebooks has a million titles that they buy. All you have to do is enter the ISBN numbers and Abebooks will let you know how much they are paying for the books you are selling. There are no fees or commissions and Abebooks even pays the postage.

If you are a full fledged bookseller, you can apply to sell on Abebooks without paying an application fee. Monthly rates start at $25 for 500 or less books to $500 a month for five hundred thousand or more books. Abe also takes a commission of 8% of each order and a 5.5% service payment fee for books under $500 in value and 3.5% for books over $500 in value. Basically this fee covers what Abebooks pays for credit card processing fees, although it seems somewhat high to me.

Both fees are charged on the entire order amount including shipping and taxes. This is one of the downsides of Abebooks. Essentially, Abebooks takes a 13.5% commission on each order of under $500. This can be a problem for people selling a lot of inexpensive books to people in other countries. For example, if you sell a $5.00 book to someone in Japan and ship it in a flat rate priority envelope and charge the customer the actual postage of $11.95, the total order will come to $16.95. From that Abebooks will take $2.29. If you paid $1.00 for the book, then you are left with a profit of $1.71. If you are paying a monthly fee of $25 and sell 25 books a month, then you have to subtract another dollar from your profit, leaving you with 71 cents, hardly worth the bother of buying, listing, selling and shipping the book. Some sellers compensate by charging a little extra for shipping.

Still Abebooks is a good site to sell books through, especially if you sell a lot of books. Biblio is another favorite site of mine. While I sell fewer books through Biblio, I like Biblio because it is the most seller friendly site when it comes to fees. If you select Billing Option A when you join Biblio, you pay a 15% commission on each sale and no other fees including monthly fees. If you start selling a lot of books on Biblio, you can switch to Billing Plan B. This option benefits the power seller because it reduces the commission to 7.5%. However, Plan B does charge a monthly fee, but it is one of the lowest in the trade. It starts at $10 per month for 10,000 or less books and goes up to $25 for 40,000 books. For each additional 10,000 books above 40,000, you pay an additional $5 per month.

Biblio also gives you fulfillment discounts for having high fulfillment ratings. Biblio's fulfillment ratings are some of the tougher ones in the trade. Only sellers with a fulfillment rating of 95% are five star sellers and eligible for fulfillment discounts. Still if I had to choose one bookselling site on the internet to start with, I would choose Biblio.

What about ebay and half.com which ebay owns? I used to sell on ebay and I did fairly well. What I like about Abebooks, Alibris and Biblio, however, is that they are dedicated to selling books only (Alibris does allow you to list CDS and DVDS). They are run by people who know books and most of the dealers are professional booksellers who can be trusted. I did not find ebay to be as professional. Also in the time it took me to list one book on ebay, I could list ten on Abebooks.

I already sell on half.com, but I do so through Alibris. I don't get many half.com orders, but since I don't pay any extra to list on half.com, I am pleased with the site. You can sell directly through half.com, without going through Alibris. Anyone who is serious about selling should check out both ebay and half.com.

I also have my own website. It was set up by Chrislands, an internet company that specializes in setting up online bookstores. I have been with them for about seven years and am pleased. Their setup and monthly fees are reasonable, and you don't have to know much about computers to maintain your site. Setting up your own website is probably not worth it for the casual seller but can boost sales for a professional.

Many booksellers are now selling through craigslist. I have attempted to sell books through craigslist, but have not been very successful. You might have a different experience. It is worth a try, since it is free. However, be wary of scammers. They love craigslist.

There are many other online sites for selling books, some of which I have checked out. You can check most of them out for yourself by looking at the list of booksellers at Bookfinder.com. One site that is not listed there is eCrater.com. It is relatively new and is totally free--no fees for anything. I have looked at it and plan to join soon.

Of course, there are still many ways to sell books offline. Hopefully, I will deal with them in another article.