Transition From Half to Ebay

[act2books]

I'll start by confessing that I am woefully ignorant on this topic. I searched discussions, but didn't find any on this topic.

I had a little over 7,000 books on Half. It wasn't our largest selling marketplace , but it was steady.   ( We also sell on ABE , Biblio and BN )  Now that Half is gone...is there an Ebay option that's comparable? One that you can load 7,000 books and not have to renew listings?  Or... are all Ebay selling options for a limited length of time? Ebay store?

Thank you so very , very much for any advice / help you can offer. I've always gotten thoughtful, and helpful advice on this board.

Mike U. Act 2 Books , Flemington , NJ

[rfund2021]

You can check the good till cancelled box on your listings, but you will be charged a listing fee everytime it renews if you do not have any free listings left. All items only stay on eBay for 30 days unless you manually renew or check the good till cancelled box. You get 50 listings for free every month. You can open a store for a monthly fee to get more listings per month.

[candd205]

That is correct, if you choose "good til cancelled", your listing renews every 30 days automatically, without your intervention, until the item is sold. Every time it relists, it uses up one of your free listings for the month. If you have more than one of the same book, it only counts as 1 relist.

Check out the ebay store description to see how much an ebay store costs and how many free listings you get per month with that size store. The store is cheaper if you go with annual renewal of your store instead of month to month.

[act2books]

Thank you! MU

[act2books]

Thank You! MU

[lachto5]

Check this link, which says that half listings are migrating to ebay.

http://www.indiewire.com/2017/06/half-com-ebay-shutting-down-1201843531/

Do you currently list your items simultaneously on Abe, Biblio, and BN?  There are software programs that allow you to synchronize your listings so you dont sell the same book twice.  There is software that allows you to synchronize your listings on other platforms with ebay, but i dont have any experience with that.

Out of curiosity, how would you compare your results on Abe, Biblio, and BN?  If you could only use one, which one would it be?

Tom

[jmgrobe]

It is probably not financially worth it to list these 7,000 books on eBay. Right now it looks like you would want to get a $300/month Anchor Store (which allows up to 10,000 listings) plus commission on sales.
http://pages.ebay.com/seller-center/stores/subscriptions.html

And note you need photos for each of these books.

[1786davycrockett]

As several others have previously noted, on eBay you will be charged each month for re-listing fees for each unsold book which you re-list, above and beyond the free listings which you would receive by opening up an eBay store.  With an inventory of 7000 books, an Anchor store would be appropriate for you (10,000 free listings each month).  However, the monthly store fees are staggering, plus you will pay a commission fee to eBay for each sale, plus another fee to PayPal for each sale.  So you might wish to consider a Premium store (1000 free listings per month), with a monthly store fee of only about $60.00 per month, plus commissions and PayPal fees.  Or, to get your feet wet, you could try out the Basic plan (50 free listings) with NO store fees, plus commissions and PayPal fees.

Another alternative is "the ranch", where you can list everything at one time, and you pay nothing until you see an item.  However, "the ranch" doesn't get the exposure that eBay gets, and sales may be few and far between (I've sold only 13 books there since May).  But it is an inexpensive option to eBay, since you don't have to worry about re-listing each month, though it is definitely not a money-maker.  

[taylor_memorial]

So they finally did it.

I guess Amazon's decision to change their shipping approach on books triggered it.

Only you know what your sell through is on Half.com. You'll get much more exposure here, but that exposure diminishes with each month the book is listed.

What I would do if I were you, is this: get an inventory snapshot of you HDC inventory just before you close up shop there so it is as current as can be--if you have this inventory on Homebase, or Bibliodirector, you can skip this step.

Bibliodirector is a good option for inventory control and it will update other sites (to 5) without any cost at all.

I would join Amazon as a professional seller for exactly long enough to upload my inventory.

And then return to a casual seller, avoiding the monthly fee.

I'd check the comparable prices for every book I have and simply get rid of those that I can't be competitive on. The lowest price for a book seems to be in the $3.65 range, with shipping included, and from that Amazon gets $1.85.

I don't sell on ABE, but I have sold on HDC, Biblio and BN for quite some time. Alibris as well.

I found HDC to be too restrictive--ISBN books only, no book clubs for most of my things. I quit Amazon a few months ago and don't really notice the change--sales there tanked for me with the shipping change. I raised my prices to cope with their fees and that affected sales there.

And improved sales at Biblio.

Good luck.

eBay is still a solid venue for some things. But not all things.
I still sell MMPB and so forth but I sell them in lots. Packing up 10 books for $40 in one box makes more sense to me than the same number in 10 separate boxes for the same money.

[dreambooks]

Half is closing because it lost the competition to Amazon. So the obvious market is there.

If your books are the rare types, Ebay may be a good place.

If you are confident that you can make enough sales, you may use one of these only systems like The Art of Books to manage your listings and sell on multiple plateforms.

If you already have your inventory database, you can upload an Excel file on Amazon or AOB, AOB will populate them to Ebay, BN, Alibis, Abe, etc.

[hartmann219]

I am a bookseller who had over 9000 books listed on Half.com.  It was a good, easy-to-use place to sell modern paperbacks, both low & high prices. Now gone. Yes, the dropshippers were active on Half, but lots of individuals also purchased books there. 

I did download an inventory snapshot that I have saved for possible future use.

The eBay electronic catalog used for listing modern ISBN books along with their pictures seems ok, and you can ask for a good shipping amount.  I am not yet ready to go for the cost of a store without lots more experimentation trying to sell books at both fixed price and auction.  It would seem to me very unlikely that a book only listed for 30 days has much of a chance to sell.  Many of my Half items were listed for from 2-6+ years before selling. I have had books sit on shelves from 15 to 20 years before selling.  Oh well, I guess it into the brave new world.

[taylor_memorial]

It depends on the book itself, but I agree that the likelihood of anybody with a small inventory of 9,000 paperbacks is likely to be able to sell enough at a big enough profit to make a decent revenue stream within a month.

You can't think of it that way: you have to think in terms of sell-through percentages and cost per listing.

My own feeling is that there isn't enough margin on eBay at retail pricing to warrant even trying to experiment with "commodity books": if there are penny-sellers on Amazon with that title, then it's junk because you simply can't make money competing at those prices.

The megaseller pays 85 cents to ship the same MMPB you ship at $2.63. Add eBay's 10% and you are at $2.94 without paying for the label and the packaging. Say $3.00 if you are good at sourcing. Another quarter for the listing and you break even a $3.25.

So competing at $3.64 leaves you with $0.39 profit with a market that eliminates most of the East and West Coast which have book stores a plenty that will sell those titles for under $3.00 to beat Amazon.

But here's the thing: you get 50 listings for nothing a month here.  After that FeeBay switches into high gear.

It is easy enough to build a calculator to run various scenarios to determine the break even point for various levels of store: the higher your average sale price the fewer number of listings you have to have to hit that magic roll-over point where you put money in your pocket with every sale.