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When I first started selling books on eBay, I not only sought to sell everything I listed, but I took genuine pride when my sell-through percentage climbed to over 90%. It was simple. I chose good books, started them at a low opening bid, and let the market forces determine a final price. After several months of maintaining a percentage at this level, I convinced myself that I'd arrived as an online bookseller. The only problem was, I wasn't making much money, especially when I calculated my hourly income and discovered that I had created what amounted to a minimum wage job.
At the time, my answer to this problem was to search for higher quality books, and to the extent I was successful at this, I gradually increased my income. Almost subconsciously, however, over a period of about a year, I also began to raise my opening bids, experiment with reserves (and later BIN's), and relist unsold items shamelessly, sometimes four or five times, until they sold. It was discouraging to see my (first-list) sell-though percentage drop, eventually to less than half of what it had been, but a funny thing happened as well. My ultimate sell-though percentage (after multiple relistings) remained over 90%, and I saw my income go up and up, eventually to a level several times what it had been.
If you think you're already overpricing your books, you might be horrified with the advice I have to offer in this area. The most typical practice on eBay, even today, is to list a book at a low starting bid and let it fly-in other words, to treat eBay as a sort of wholesale market. I strongly disagree with this approach (assuming that you have some somewhat special books to sell). It's much better for my bottom line to treat eBay as a retail marketplace, to seek the price you would pay in a living, breathing bookstore.
The fees I pay to list and relist and relist until I get my price are what I consider "rent"-the cost of waiting until the right buyer, so to speak, walks through the door. As huge a market as eBay is, it's important to remember that your buyer isn't always online.
There are all kinds of buyers on eBay, just as there are all kinds of sellers. Smart ones, downright dumb ones, dealers, bargain hunters, collectors, etc. The buyer I look for is the one who has an emotional need for the book I'm offering, the one who will give me the highest possible price. Not because they are looking at things objectively, but because they need to have the book to satisfy an appetite for nostalgia, passion for a hobby, etc. I seek the emotionally driven purchase. Conversely, I have little or no interest in attracting book dealers or bargain hunters.
I start almost everything I list at $9.99, more than half the time I use a reserve, and I nearly always offer a BIN (Buy It Now). This approach serves the three-fold purpose of attracting bids early in the auction, protecting the book from being sold at a low price, and offering a carrot-on-a-stick for the impulse buyer. Time and time again I've sold books for my BIN price on the third, fourth and fifth relist, even books that hadn't attracted a single bid in previous auctions. So much depends on who's there at the time, and I've taught myself to be patient, to gut it out. With week-to-week variations, my first-list sell-through rate now averages around 40%--pathetic, no doubt, in the eyes of many veteran eBay sellers. But when you do the math, you'll see it's much better to sell a book for $50 and pay out $5 or $10 or more in fees than it is to give it away for $10, even if it means paying less than a buck in fees. Believe me, I've tried it both ways, and there's no compariso!
n. It simply makes more sense to lift the buyer to your price than it does to let him drag you down to his.
When I finally convinced myself that this approach was the key to higher profits and began to use it exclusively, my weekly net jumped from several hundred dollars to well over a thousand. And it keeps rising. It makes THAT much difference.
One important word of warning: this advice applies only if your books have some special quality, and if your books aren't in great supply. Also, this assumes that you've put together a nice auction with clear, multiple pictures, used a hook in your title, listed it in the right category, etc.-in other words, done all the other things that go into the mix of a good presentation.
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