It’s easy to find the best places to sell your old used books, because there are so few places online where large numbers of people who have money to spend are actually looking to buy. Amazon Marketplace – Easily the highest traffic of consumer a course in miracles buyers. Easy to list. Free listings, only pay when your item sells. You get paid every two weeks. Their tools are pretty limited unless you pay $39.99 a month for a Pro Merchant subscription, which gives you a wide range of extra tools to sell your items. You’ll need to be selling 40 books a month to make this worthwhile, however, so you should start with the free selling option and upgrade when you’ve expanded your inventory enough to make Pro merchant work for you.
Ebay.com – Best place to sell rare and collectible books to the average consumer, and also a great way to sell a “Lot” of books — that is, a group of books. This is something you cannot do on Amazon Marketplace. Since shipping 5-6 books is fairly inexpensive, you can give the buyer a great perceived value and you can move bunches of books quickly. One trick that seems to work well is to make one of the books a high-value book and surround it with lesser-value books. Of course, all books should relate to one type or theme that an individual is looking for. For example, a group of woodworking books, or a group of dog training books, or a group of fitness books.
Half.com – This website is part of the eBay Empire. You list books by ISBN and it’s pretty simple to use and get paid. They send you the order of where to ship the book and give you your cut. Their user interface for sellers has a neat multiple item listing form, allowing you to list 10 items at a time before you hit the submit button.
Abebooks.com – High-traffic website for discerning book buyers. Often you can sell collectible and rare books and reach the right audience. Lots of used bookstores have gravitated to this site. You might forge some good face-to-face meetings with store owners willing to buy books from you. Typically, though, they will offer wholesale pricing since they need to turn a profit on the books they sell. But it could be a way to move a large number of books at once.
CraigsList.org – Selling locally should be easy. For me, it’s not. I think because each city book selling listings are free, people are willing to ask crazy high prices, and the audience skips even searching for books. I have noticed that quite a few college textbooks do get listed, and probably do sell well at certain times of the year. Having no listing fees, final value fees or even shipping fees make it a cheap option. But, unlike the international audience of the previous four websites, you’ll only be offering to locals.
EbayClassifieds.com – Free place to list books (and hundreds of other items you want to get rid of) in your local neighborhood. You type in the city you are in and you’re taken to that section on their website. My local webpage covers an area about 100 miles across from one side to the other, so you might find it a hassle to hook up with buyers after the deal is done. But it’s free. On my local region, only two pages of books appears, so it doesn’t look like it’s a really popular destination yet.
You can’t judge a book by its cover. True. But with a couple of mouse-clicks and a fast Internet connection, you can judge if it’s worth enough to take up your time buying and reselling a used book online.
