Steve Weber Answers in interesting question…
QUESTION: I’m new to bookselling, but have been collecting for years. I need to start clearing some space. I’ve been selling in an antiques mall booth, and researching the different online venues.
My calculations show Amazon is one of the more expensive sites. I used a benchmark of selling 50 books a month for $10 each:
Amazon fees (non Pro-Merchant) = 50 x .99 = 49.50
Amazon commissions = .15 x 500 = 75.00
Amazon total = 124.50eBay fees = 50 x .60 = 30.00
eBay commissions = .0525 x 500 = 26.25
eBay total = 56.25
As to Amazon versus eBay, I concede that eBay today is a superior selling venue for certain types of books — particularly collectibles that require pictures of the actual book and a detailed description of the condition, faults, etc.But I’d argue that for most booksellers with general stock, Amazon allows you to sell at a higher volume, at a higher velocity, and with less customer-service issues than eBay. The time you spend hand-selling each commodity book on eBay costs you time, and time is money too.
To be sure, Amazon produces problems customers, but on a per-capita basis I got three times as many headaches from eBay sales — and non-sales. So I didn’t think that the slight savings in fees on eBay justified the extra time and aggravation. I probably could have fined-tuned my eBay selling to get the costs down a bit, but just didn’t have the motivation.
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