Unless an online bookseller is very specialized in the types of books they are selling or they are dealing in rare and/or antiquarian books, there are only a few marketplaces for them to choose from to maximize their sales. These include Amazon, Alibris, Abebooks, and eBay.

Each of these marketplaces have pros and cons, and there are definite advantages to each as well. Some of the issues you should consider are commissions, listing fees, postage reimbursements, return policies, affiliate programs, does the marketplace have a feedback system whereby the buyers can evaluate the reputation of the sellers, what kind of transaction notices and records does the marketplace provide, is listing and maintaining your inventory easy, what formats are accepted for inventory updates, how often does the marketplace pay you for the books you sell, how do online customers perceive the marketplace itself, what is their customer base, what do other online booksellers have to say about a particular marketplace, etc.

There is not sufficient room in the context of an article like this to address all of these issues, so I will limit this article to only a few items, and discuss others in future articles.

Amazon has by far the largest base of potential customers, and sales through Amazon exceed all the other online marketplaces combined. However, if you choose to market your books through Amazon, you have absolutely no control over the shipping rates that are paid by the customer and Amazon is not very quick to adjust their shipping charges when the postage rates increase. To date there has not been any adjustment to the Amazon charges for postage since the last postage increase and as a bookseller this means you will need to absorb the added postage costs to you while Amazon continues to take the same cut of what they charge the customers. Stated bluntly, it is not in Amazon's best interest to adjust shipping charges to the customers because increases in postage costs have no impact on how much Amazon gets, while an increase passed on to the customer could have an adverse impact on Amazon because some customers might choose another marketplace or decide not to buy the book at all.

One robust feature of Amazon is their feedback system which I have not seen rivaled by any other marketplace. While it is great if you maintain a feedback score of better than 95%, it can put you out of business quickly if you do not do what is necessary to maintain customer satisfaction.

Alibris has a few features that compete well with Amazon. One of the greatest feature of Alibris is their return policy. If you sell a book for less than $100 and a customer changes their mind and decides to return the book, you do not need to give a refund, Alibris takes the book into their inventory. This is true for any reason a customer might want to return a book except for books shipped that do not meet the grading you assigned when you listed them. Another great feature of Alibris is their marketing to libraries that results in additional sales for the online bookseller. When Alibris sells a book to a library from your inventory, you simply package the book and affix an Alibris postage due sticker and send the book to Alibris. As with Amazon, you do not have any control over the shipping rates charged to the customers, but in the case of library sales it doesn't matter anyway. If it weren't for the fact that the Alibris' customer base is so much smaller than that of Amazon, there could easily be an argument made for exclusively listing through Alibris.

Abebooks is an altogether different marketplace. At one time I listed exclusively through Abebooks and had affiliate arrangements through my Abebooks account that allowed me to sell my books through Abebooks, Amazon, Half, Barnes and Noble, as well as a host of many small online marketplaces. When Amazon ceased to allow affiliate programs, and other affiliate programs were also dropped for Abebooks members, sales through Abebooks dropped dramatically. In fact they continued to drop to a point where I was only selling enough books through Abebooks to pay my listing fee. At the same time, there are many booksellers that still only list through Abebooks and do quite well. One of the greatest features of Abebooks is the ability to set your own shipping rates (domestic and international) within their guidelines.

Ebay has recently been making a number of changes directed toward recapturing the online bookselling market, but unless you are selling collections by specific authors, book series, collectible, rare, or niche market books, ebay selling is still a hassle for most booksellers. If you do sell books through ebay, you cannot simply provide an ISBN and have the rest of your book's information and cover displayed, and personally I have not found it worth my time to take digital pictures of every $10 book in my inventory, create a separate auction for each of them, and then renew the auctions each 10 days if the book doesn't sell.

Ultimately, there is no one marketplace that outperforms all the others with respect to the desires of the online bookseller and each bookseller must weigh the pros and cons of each marketplace to make their own choice. Alternatively, you could choose to do like some booksellers, myself included, and list your inventory through a couple of the available marketplaces and let all the cons of each average out over the long run while capitalizing on the better points offered by the different marketplaces.

If you would like to read more about online bookselling, please visit: http://www.online-bookselling.com.

If you have questions about online bookselling or the various online marketplaces, ask Mike by sending an email to:

mike@online-bookselling.com