by Mike Gibson

Created on: June 15, 2009

There are several great venues to sell books online. There are three that rise above the rest though - each for different reasons. They are eBay, Half.com, and Amazon. All three are easy to start selling on and don't require an inventory minimum or a monthly fee.

In terms of pure profit - Half.com rises to the top. Half.com uses a flat 15 percent fee on the selling price of the book. There are no listing fees - so you can just park your books on the site until they sell. Although Half.com is owned by eBay - it doesn't use PayPal to collect payment so you are not charged PayPal fees on top of Half.com fees. Half.com also provides you with a shipping credit which will usually cover the shipping for paperbacks and even some hard covers.

The down side of Half.com is that there is a limited number of books listed in the inventory and only books with ISBN numbers are available - which means no books published prior to 1980 or so are able to be sold on the site. You also cannot add a new book listing to the inventory so it is nearly impossible to use Half.com as your only book selling resource.

Half.com is mainly advantageous as a text book selling site.

Amazon.com is overall the best place to sell books online. There are several reasons for this:

HUGE Inventory No listing fees Customer Traffic Easy to use

One downside to Amazon.com is that the fees are pretty high. There is a flat 15 percent for the selling price of your book plus $.99 per book sold (unless your part of the Merchants program - which is $39.99 per month), and an additional $1.35 fee - so it's pretty much 15% of your sales price + $2.34 per book. You are given a $3.99 shipping credit which helps outweigh some of the fees if your selling a light paperback - but if you're selling a heavy hardcover you need to make sure that your selling price is high enough for you to make a profit.

Another downside to selling on Amazon is the competition. A lot of sellers constantly try to be the lowest price seller of every book and constantly lower the market value of your book which can get quit frustrating.

eBay is another good place to sell books. The main downside with selling on eBay is that it is more work. eBay doesn't have nearly as many books in their inventory as Amazon does, so a lot of times you will need to photograph your books and create listings by hand. You also have to pay a listing fee (usually between $.05 and $1.00) depending on the starting or fixed price of your book - whether your book sells or not. You also have to pay the final value fee of 15% of what the book sells for and also a PayPal fee for collecting payment. Typically books do not sell for as high a price on eBay as they do on Amazon.

The advantage to selling on eBay is that although you probably won't sell your books for as high a price as on Amazon - you can sell them QUICKLY. You can also sell multiple books together as a "lot" if you need to get rid of some inventory.

My advice is to use 2 or all three of the places to sell your books like I do. I use Amazon as my main method - I also list my textbooks on Half.com - and then I sell books that Amazon doesn't have in their inventory or books that I am in a hurry to get rid of on eBay.

Learn more about this author, Mike Gibson.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.