Selling used books online is not much of a daunting task. At least not until you find your simple hobby of selling a course in miracles podcast to buy new titles turn out to be a profitable business. Deciding to put up an online bookstore means that you no longer intend to sell used books online just because you want to de-clutter your bookshelf; in fact, this can mean getting new shelves for your inventory.
One of the challenges faced by an internet bookseller is organizing his or her used books inventory. It becomes more challenging if the bookseller is not a reader himself. If you know your titles, authors and book genres by heart, it will be a lot easier for you to sort out your inventory in terms of how the customers choose to browse your online catalogue. For this purpose, it is practical to organize books in terms of book genre or subject, author and price.
Times like these, you can always find customers who are looking for bargain books. As an internet bookseller who offers mostly used books, customers flock to your store mainly because they don’t really go after the book condition; they are buying from you because you sell the same content for half the price of what they can get from a seller who has the books new. Sorting your used books inventory by price is giving readers who are on a tight budget a nice treat.
First, categorize your used books inventory between fiction and non-fiction. Further categorize fiction by genre and the non-fiction by subject or trade. In betweens such as poetry, coffee table books and reference books may fall on separate main categories. Again, this will be an easy task if you know your books but you can always find help online. You can check how Amazon organizes their book catalogues. Better yet, you can always turn to the copyright page of the book where you can find its ISBN information and how the Library of Congress recommends writing the book’s title/subject card.
Most customers who know exactly what they’re looking for will benefit if you choose to organize your used books inventory by author’s name. That way, they can skip the titles they don’t really need and go directly to a particular book. If the customers don’t find the exact title, chances are, they are interested in reading books of the same author. If your online book catalogue is sorted out alphabetically by the author’s last name, you might still land a sale on that book that you have and can probably ask the customers to put the particular book they are looking for on their wishlist.
Just like in other online businesses, the trick in selling used books online is in knowing what the customers need. This doesn’t only apply in choosing what books to sell but in helping the customers find what they’re looking for. Try to sell used books online with full attention to such details.