Variations in BOOK listings - yes it's possible to do but there's a trick to it.

[city*satins]

If you've ever wanted to offer a choice listing of books that are in a series/collection for instance the LEFT BEHIND series or the Nancy Drew series or the books in the various titles in the Harvard Classics etc and allow buyers to select just the titles they want, you know this appears to be impossible since BOOKS does not offer VARIATIONS when you use any of the eBay listing forms.

Sellers typically offer the titles, say Pick the quantity of books you rwant and message me with the titles and hope that they're still available. If the seller has 1 only of a particular title  and 2 buyers buy it at the same time, one of those buyers is going to be mad and the seller can end up with a defect.

There is a workaround which I learned today texting with an eBay rep who walked me through the process.

1 pick a title but not an obvious BOOK title.  Even 'thing' will do. and start the listing

2. eBay will default to some category like who knows?  In my case today is was men's shoes.  Complete with the item specifics for mens shoes.  Ignore that

3. Select ADD VARIATIONS   none of the  variations it offers you will be any use whatsoever. That's OK, select CREATE VARIATION

4. If TITLE is one of your variations, whatever you do, don't create that name!  You won't be able to launch your listing.  But you can make up something else, like VOLUME or NAME etc.   Add variations as you please

5. Remember not to enter any quantity of zero  (e.g. say you have 5 titles and multiple copies of each, some hardcover, some softcover.   if you don't have any of title  4 in softcover don't put the quantity as zero - just delete that particular variation)

6. When you've entered all your variations, quantities and prices and finish, you'll go back to the main form.   Enter the right listing title you want.   Choose the right category in books. Add your other item specifics like publisher etc.

7. Launch the listing

It would be nice if you could just create a book listings with variations from scratch, but for some reason you can't. But this workaround it not horrendous. Just kind of head shaking.

Thanks to the agent REA, who worked on this with me and got the listing successfully launched.

[bugler1998]

As an advocate of choice auctions from the early days, I think this is encouraging.

I looked at your Leheye listing, and it appeared that it may work well,  I chose one book, noticed that it only had one hardback available, no softcovers.  Then another had 4 hardcovers and 1 softcover shown as available.

My first reaction was you should sell only hardbacks in one listing and paperbacks in another, but 
I am wondering if your way exchanges more  confusion for the chance of more combined sales (which is good).

Is a $1.50 shipping cost high enough?

I may try this in my spare time.

Mike

[taylor_memorial]

I have about 60 choice offers out there, and I do it the easy way: 

Take a pictures of them all: front, back, spine and foreedge. Let them email me with the choices.

I have had one instance where there were potentially conflicting asks, where the same listing generated two responses within the same 24 hour period of time. But there was no overlap in selection. 

I think the loss of those who shop by category is a greater risk that the duplication of order--I doubt there are many people who shop books in the shoe category. Yes, I assume that if you change the category you lose the variations. 

[city*satins]

No. You don't lose variations when you change the category to books.

You just start the listing creation with a category other than books, manually add your variations, being careful not to use the word TITLE as one of the variations, but instead picking some similar word, and then before you start the listing, you change the category to BOOKS.  The variations remain.

So that listing I created of Left Behind books, while it began its creation as a shoe listing, was converted to a book listing before I submitted it, and everything was retained.  It's listed in BOOKS not shoes, so there's no category issue.

I had no idea you could do this - the rep who helped me with it knew it could be done but originally thought you had to list it in two categories, starting with the category that accepted variations and then adding BOOKS as a second category.  She sat with me while I set up the listing and was going to refund me for the second category listing fee, but then we tried just changing the category to BOOKS when the listing was ready to start and TAHDAH!   It accepted it and started without any difficulty.