Abebooks Sucks
Abebooks Sucks ! for booksellers.
As the company has expanded they have become ever more greedy. Continually
raising fees or introducing new fees.
All of this is probably of little or no interest to buyers, however .. If you
are a buyer it could well be worth your while to contact the seller directly
rather than buying through the abebooks system.
Why ? Well, you saddle the seller with various commission, fees and inflated
credit card charges.
Contact the seller and discuss your purchase, help maintain that personal edge
which makes all the difference
Also help yourself, most dealers will be happy to reduce shipping costs if they
can, rather than locking you into the sites standard shipping rates.
Many sellers have decided to raise prices to allow for the recent hike in
fees.
You may find the same book listed on the biblio website for less money - check
it out
Remember, whenever possible help the professional dealers to help you
We shall be expanding this post in due course
You can find out about the star rating system in our post here ABE Rating System
Peter Jones said,
April 6, 2006 @ 5:21 am
ABE’s exhorbitant charges has forced me to stop selling books via ABE. While I have been a member I estimate my profits from selling books were only marginally higher that what I have been charged by ABE. Profit margins have been cut to a bare minimum. I am now in the process of reducing the prices of all my books and now only advertise my book stock with Ukbookworld or Rarelist who both have reasonable charges. I do wish someone in the book trade would come up as a serious competitor to ABE. In my opinion bookselling via the internet can only grow and the opportunity to launch another UK based website could never be better than at the current time.
Rod said,
April 6, 2006 @ 5:59 am
Peter, it is indeed a problem. Whilst I myself left for the principal of being unable to process my own sales, abe was still viable though nothing like what it was some years ago.
You may also want to consider biblio
Personally, I believe the future for booksellers to be their own websites
Rod said,
July 6, 2006 @ 5:00 pm
A report from a leading dealer who has been on abebooks for many years has come in.
He has not sold a single book on abe for 3 monhts now!
It is too early to start sounding the death knell - but for those not selling crap or text books things are looking all but terminal.
If know different, or concur, let us know and post a comment
Jack Greunfeld said,
December 15, 2007 @ 4:49 am
I agree and the jokers they have in customer service either 1. are rude and want to get you off the phone in a hurry or 2. such robots that they send you a form reply to your carefully crafted questions. I’d go with alibiris.com or amazon.com or even barnesandnoble.com
Rod said,
December 15, 2007 @ 9:32 am
Hi Jack
thanks for the comment and welcome to the site.
I agree with you and things apear to be getting worse what with this farcical nonsense of the so called Rare Book Room for example !
Regards
Rod
Jack said,
February 18, 2008 @ 9:09 am
They’ve launched this low-cost discount service now called GoJaba to do the initial new market penetration at a lower cost to acquire each customer. The theory, I guess is once they’ve established themselves with this cheap low cost service, then they’ll bring in the full-service site. I heard from one of their reps that the high US dollar really hurt them.
Rod said,
February 18, 2008 @ 9:25 am
Hi Jack
thanks for the info and welcome to the site.
I don’t understand why they keep messing around. All they really need to do is clean up the listings on the main site, get rid of the sellers who give the site a bad name and drive more traffic to the site via advertising etc.
Regards
Rod