How To Determine A Books Sale Price

August 11th, 2009 admin Posted in Articles | Comments Off

How to Determine a books sale price online. All you have to do is follow this book pricing structure for selling books online for your business. For buying books from others there are two methods:

Set a percentage price of retail - Standard is 10-15% for paperbacks, 25-30% for hard cover, and up to 50% for Rare books/textbooks and more popular titles that are easy to sell.
Determine current value of book to determine what you will pay - To do this when buying a book you can look online for that book and determine the current value of books are going in similar condition and then buy the book based upon that price. I would not recommend going above 50%, but 33% is a good value to stay under for most purchases.

We currently have software that scans a barcode and compares it to online prices, takes the average of books online, uses an algorithm that determines value based upon past sales volume, to determine the max we should pay. This has taken much of the guess work out of determine a fair purchase price and sales price for a book. It is not perfect though, and that is why it is important to have an instinct for buying and selling books which develops over time.
Other factors to consider are you going to sell the book on or offline. We sell all used books offline in our store for 50% of retail or less. Most are 50% of retail unless the value is determined to be less.

Of course with online books the value can be above retail if the book is rare, harder to find, or contains valuable information. So this must also be taken into account when buying and selling books.