Get those sold books out of your listings!
Archive: Online bookselling
About three weeks ago I bought 20 or so boxes of books from a nearby online bookseller.
As of today everything that I bought from them is still listed on ABE. Now there's neither rhyme nor reason for leaving up inventory that you've already sold. It just created customer frustration and distrust. C'mon guys, remove those books from your listings already.
I always hate it when some seemingly trivial book we've cataloged gets orders via three different listings sites and we have to turn two of them away. And it hurts our performance stats and rating on sites that offer them.
We got a warning email from ABE that our fulfillment on their Amazon Canada program was too low last month. We had two orders. One of the books had already been sold. 50% performance is really low. But you'd think they could factor in quantity as well as proportion wouldn't you?
When I suspect a book is going to be heavily sought after I manually delete it from some of the listings site as soon as we sell it. Another detail they could track to see if we are lazy, incompetent or doing our best to prevent customers from orders books that aren't available anymore.
2 · Posted by: Richard on May 23, 2004 12:13 AM
If we are having trouble finding a book that as far as we know should still be on the shelves we may not reply for a day. But that is because as time permits all three of will look and sometimes we'll keep trying to think of where the book might be mishelved.
If we know the book is gone we send the note as soon as we see the email. But we're fulltime booksellers with a shop that is open every day. Some of the people who sell books as a hobby may not even check their email every day.
Some dealers may just wait until a promised check actually arrives before letting someone who ordered a book know that it is gone. We use software provided by ABE but it shows books that are on hold as being for sale. We let people know that we have the book set aside waiting for payment to arrive.
Removing a book from ABE is easy whether through their web interface or using bookseller database software. Though the deletion may not be processed for several hours. Sometimes we mark the book as sold and the listing persists. I've noticed that some of the small book listings services don't process dealer inventory changes for three days.
Having myself ordered books that I'm told are no longer available but remain listed for months afterward I can only assume some dealers are simply lazy.
3 · Posted by: litlnemo on May 23, 2004 06:24 AM
Yup. I am not so much bothered by the 2 or 3 days, because I understand there may be reasons for it. But the high rate of already sold books… ugh.
As far as the books on hold go, as long as a bookstore communicates with me and lets me know what's going on, I'm OK with that. In general, good communication keeps me happy, even if the book turns out to be unavailable. ;)
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My thanks,
Richard
1 · Posted by: litlnemo on May 22, 2004 08:20 PM
I estimate that about 60% of the orders I make through ABE are replied to with the “Oops, sorry, we sold that already” e-mail. Often two or three days later, which is even more frustrating. That is just way too high.
And when I continue to look for the book, I see the original listing staying up for days… and weeks… and who knows how long after that? It seems that a lot of stores don't really make this a priority.
Since I don't operate a bookstore I don't know how difficult it is to update ABE, but it is definitely a frustrating situation for the customer.