Which Is The Best Marketplace Between Amazon And eBay For Selling Books

Are you facing decision making challenges about which platform to sell your used books? It can be a challenging decision to make especially if you have not had much experience with both platforms and you are about to start brand new.

Amazon and eBay are two great online platforms with millions of ready buyers constantly ready and available to make a purchase and satisfy their needs. Both platforms are very popular today and with their popularity, many sellers a leveraging the advantages they bring to the online space.

In this post, I will try to give you which platform is convenient and best for selling books. How each of the platforms can be used for the best outcomes and experience.

Many booksellers are making a great deal of money selling books in either of the platforms but from my experience sellers who sell on eBay turn to give Amazon a try end up focusing more on Amazon as it meets every book seller’s needs.

Maybe the reason many booksellers prefer Amazon is due to the foundation of Amazon which all started with selling books during the early stages of the company. With such a foundation, the platform has always been developed without compromising the system which has always been in place for selling books.

Let’s look at some reasons and deliberate on which platform is much better for the purpose of selling books.

Longevity On Platform

To begin with, eBay is known to give priority to their old seller’s which means there more you have been selling on the platform the more exposure your books will get and appear on the first pages of every search of the keyword you are selling.

This is a very big barrier for anyone who is willing to start selling books on the platform for the first time. This means competing at the early stages is out of the question and you will be always missing sales to the other sellers who have been using the platforms for a longer period of time.

On Amazon, you can make a sale the same day you list your book or as soon as your books hit the Amazon warehouse. The reason is Amazon gives you the priority to appear on the front pages if you have the best price or lowest price.

Also, if you have the best price and with a great feedback score, you can even win the “buy box” spot. The buy box is very crucial for making more sales as your listing will be listed on the very first page of a book search. This implies if a buyer does not want to go through the list of other sellers, you can be making a sale right there.

Identifying Best Selling Books

Secondly, eBay makes it very difficult and time-consuming to identify best-selling books or fast-selling books. With eBay, you can only look at items “recently sold” and you will then have to go investigate a little further to understand the time interval an item was sold to get a clue on how fast an item can sell.

Knowing how fast an item can sell is important or very key information to know if you are willing to sell a book and turn the profits. Without this information, you can blindly list items and wait for as long as they can take before a sale is made. But wouldn’t it be a great way to know how soon you can get your money back?

With Amazon, you have the information just by looking at the sales rank. A sales rank close to 1 is considered a high ranking book which means the said book sells very fast.  A low ranking book implies the book sells very slowly and indicated with a high numerical value of over millions.

For example, books with sales rank around the neighborhood of hundreds to thousands are fast movers. Books around the sales rank of millions will sell very slowly. All this information is available at first sight.

Amazon also goes a long way to provide historical sales rank. You can also find out the sales rank of a book for 90 days and even 180 days which is a key information to know if a book can sell all year round and not just in recent times.

Fulfillment Services

Furthermore, Amazon offers a service to fulfill the orders for their sellers known as FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon). In this case, Amazon will store your books, pack them and process delivery once you make a sale and take care of customer service for you. This means you can run an Amazon business from anywhere in the world without worrying about anything. All you need to do is to source your inventory and ship it over to Amazon. With this system in place, you can automate your Amazon business and never touch a book especially if you are a graduate student tired of looking at books or with no intention of handling books again.

Amazon can make this very possible for you and all you need is just look for a prep center to use and employ an assistant to source for you both online and offline.

On the other hand, eBay does not provide such an opportunity for their sellers. You can only keep your books either in your living room or rent a storage facility and ship them by yourself once you make a sale. You can’t enjoy any freedom or take a vacation without fear of your business crashing down, with you miles away from home with no idea on how to process and ship orders placed by your sellers.

Customers

If we have to look at the customer base, Amazon customers are far more loyal and make-up over 44% of America’s households. Whereas other traditional warehouse companies like Sam’s Club and Costco are dropping remarkably since the introduction of Amazon Prime.

With Amazon Prime, customers take advantage of the 2 days delivery, A-Z guarantee, and free shipping. How more loyal a customer can be, paying extra for a subscription and added services?

Over 44% of shoppers start their buying experience by running a search on the Amazon marketplace to get a price check. Which means Amazon is now considered to offer the best prices.

Meanwhile, eBay is known to have an estimated 170 million users. These customers will only depend on a seller’s name or brand, their customer service which is not much as compared to what Amazon is offering to their Prime members.

Now let us take a look at some advantages on selling books on eBay

Brand Creation

Firstly, it is very easy to build a brand on eBay that will stand out compared to Amazon. Amazon is known to be a place to be for huge brands and with their aggressive pricing strategy, it makes it even harder to compete with the huge brands and mega-sellers crushing and making small size sellers invisible.

In some cases, small size sellers on Amazon will give in, and only have to wait for mega-sellers to sell out before they can get an opportunity for a profitable sale.

Amazon, on its part, turns to favor these big brands due to the dollar amount they bring to the table. Even in cases whereby, you find them going against Amazons’ rules, they still don’t face the kind of consequences a small size seller can face.

But when it comes to eBay, many sellers believe their brand stands out better on the eBay platform than on Amazon. The most important benefit of selling on eBay is the ease with which one can easily develop a brand and design your own storefront to better interact with buyers.

Selling Collectible Books

Secondly, If you are a bookseller with much interest in selling collectible books, then eBay is your go-to platform. With eBay auctions, you can sell collectibles or books that are placed in the spotlight at a very high price. This is due to the power of auction as sellers can rush up the price with their bids while you can sit back relax and just wishing the bids should just keep going up and up.

On the Amazon marketplace, collectible books can’t fetch you the amount you can get from auctioning a book on eBay. Sellers of collectible books are better off selling and taking the huge profit advantage from eBay rather than swinging low on the Amazon platform.

The Fees Involved

When it comes to fees for selling on the platforms, eBay fees are kind of lower than the fees charged on Amazon. When Amazon launched the new selling fees, many sellers threaten to move over to eBay as the new fees were kind of discouraging for many sellers to stick with Amazon.

The fees for the Amazon platform, greatly depend on the account you control. It may either be a professional or an individual account.

With a professional account, you need to pay a monthly subscription fee of $39.99USD, including a 15% referral fee and a variable closing fee of $1.80USD

With an individual account, you are charged $0.99 for every item sold and the variable closing fee of $1.80USD. With the individual account, you are entitled to just 40 sales a month.

The only issue with eBay fees is, you have to pay upfront whereas, with Amazon you get to pay once you make a sale. With eBay insertion fees, you are already making a loss until a sale is made to recoup the insertion fees incurred.

For eBay fees,

$0.35 (for 50 free listings)

A 12% final value fee

For complete eBay fees (Click Here)

EndNote

We must understand eBay and Amazon are two separate online entities with possibilities of selling our items on both platforms. Many sellers turn to look at each platform as a substitute for one another but rather it should be looked at as two platforms whereby you can adopt different strategies and still be successful.

Why not take advantage of both platforms? and set up strategies that will best work on each marketplace separately? In this way, you have a better chance of succeeding as you can stand to benefit from both sides.

It is very important to know that using both platforms will require more work as your orders will increase. It is advisable to make sure you are ready to accommodate more orders before trying to use both marketplaces. Why not even go beyond eBay and Amazon?

If you are currently using both marketplaces and even more, you can let us know how it is working for you and your experience so far. We can learn not to make drastic mistakes as we prepare to scale.