How to sell textbooks online

How to sell used textbooks online

by Sanjay (Share your useful tips with 50,000+ students in Malaysia!)

We end up storing our text books in big heaps and forget about them after it. Most of us have purchased tons of text books in the past years of school and college. This article will tell you how to sell textbooks online and make money out of it.

If we do the maths right, we buy at least 200 books before getting through with our education. Some of these books:

• Get transferred to our peers. 
• Are stored in the garage. 
• Are sold off for very cheap prices based on their weight.
• Get lost.

People love to read biographies, short stories in the form of Novels, Magazines and Comics. It’s very common to find Dan Brown, Charles Dickens or other classic Novels with almost everybody today. These books are often stored in cup boards and occupy unnecessary space.

Benefits of selling used books online

I’ve sold over 30-40 text books and 7 Novels online. It didn’t really make me thousands of Dollars, but it did fill my pocket with some cash. Apart from the money part, selling them off online did help me in a lot of ways:

• It helped me clear my cupboard and store room. 
• It helped me pay off for the next set of books that I wanted to purchase. 
• I didn’t have to open a retail store to sell them off.
• It didn’t incur any cost to me. 

Moreover, it did help the buyers to get books for half the original prices. The notes that I made within the chapters would have been of great help to the readers too.

How to sell books online

First of all, I’d like you to know that selling textbooks online is very simple and takes no time. In order to sell a textbook online, you’d require the following:

1. A textbook
2. A good quality camera
3. An Internet Connection

There are tons of websites wherein you can sell of your textbooks by posting on them for free. I’ve included the best ones in here after testing and using them myself:

Amazon.com

Amazon is the most visited e-commerce website in the world. There’s no doubt in the fact that a product gets the most visibility and marketing on Amazon if it is posted in the right way. Amazon is running a well flourished online business in almost every big country which makes it very easy for local customers to buy products from them.

When it comes to selling Textbooks, Amazon is one of the best platforms to do it. In order to sell a textbook on Amazon, you need to search for the book you want to sell. After clicking on ‘Trade In’, you are required to enter the shipping address and things are taken forward after that.

The only drawback of using Amazon is that they don’t offer cash in-hand. You can only earn Gift Cards that can be redeemed further to do some online shopping. But, don’t you think that’s a good deal?

ebay.com

eBay is the great platform to sell textbooks online. EBay gets a huge amount of visitors everyday as well. Once you register yourself on eBay, you are required to specify the mode of payment. Once you’d click on the ‘selling’ option, you’d be asked if you want to continue selling the book yourself or make someone from their team do it for you.

In order to verify the name of the book and other details, you’d be asked to provide the ISBN number of the book. The International Standard Book Number is a unique 10 or 13 Digit number that helps you identify a book. You can either set a fixed price for the book or put it on auction.

Once your book gets listed, you’d be all set to sell it off and make money.

BetterWorldBooks.com

Better World Books is one of the best platforms in the world that are dedicated to make people accessible to books at low prices. Apart from having an option to sell and buy books online, you can even donate books for the needy.

Better World Books makes use of the platform Book Byte to sell books online. Once you demand a quote for your book after specifying its name or ISBN Number. You can sell your books off once the total quote crosses $10 in total.

Barnesandnoble.com

Barnes and Noble is the biggest online book seller with a collection of over 1 Million books listed onsite. After entering the ISBN Number of the book, you’d be directed to the steps wherein you’d enter your payment and shipping details.

Your used books should have a minimum worth of $10 to upload the listing on the website. The shipments are taken care by B&N itself.

cash4books.net

Cash4Books follows a easy 3 step process as well:

• Get a quote for the books that you want to sell.
• Get them shipped.
• Get paid after successful shipping and payment receive. 

They offer android and IOS applications for mobile phones. So you can simply post offers through your cell phones as well.

bookscouter.com

I personally find this website very unique and effective. Once you enter the ISBN numbers of the books you want to sell, book scouter searches over 40 websites and finds the websites that offer the highest prices online for those set of books.

The best feature of this website is the one that lets the seller compare the prices of the books online and sell it off at the best possible rates.

You can make use of the websites mentioned above to sell off your textbooks for free. I haven’t included the ones that charge a fee to upload a listing on them.

How to get paid higher

In order to get a higher quote for your books, you should do the following:

• Seal the edges of your textbook with painter’s tape. It saves the edges of your books from getting curved or distorted. Textbooks with neat and clean edges look better and newer. I personally make use of Painter’s tape from Scoth
• Avoid writing on the pages of the books. It might reduce the selling price of it. You can make use of sticky notes for the same. I personally use post-its that I got from Amazon a few weeks bank
• Keep them away from food and drinks
• Keep them away from heat and moisture.
• Keep them in cupboards or shelves.
• If possible, store them in boxes. 
• Clean your library of books regularly

My personal take

If you’re somebody who wants to make some cash money while studying, then selling books online can be of great help to you. The only problem with this method is that once our book stock gets over, we would not be able to make any more sales.

Making money online is one of the best things that have ever happened to me. Selling books online is one good way to do that. I hope you enjoyed reading this post.

I’d really appreciate it if you’d leave a comment below and share this post on Social Media so that other people get benefited from it too. After all, what is the point leaving our books for worms and termites? Liked this post? Subscribe now to read more post like this one! Tweet