Selling few items on Amazon

[Orangeblossom1975]

Can you sell a few old books on Amazon as you would on Ebay or do you need to register as a business etc? Thanks

No - amazon is a lot more complicated that ebay.

As an aside, unless your books are high value there's little point in trying to sell them unless you have absolutely nothing better to do with your time. By the time you've taken off ebay fees and postage, you'd have very little return on each sale.

And if they ARE high value, you're better off going through a dedicated book sale platform.

Can I ask why it is more complicated? I used to sell some old books on there around 15 yrs ago and it was very easy. Postage costs were lower then though.

Hmm - I looked into it once and you had to register as a business.

Seems they do offer a private seller option now - quite pricey though on fees!

75p + 5.1% (£5)

On a £3.99 book with £2.99 postage, fees would be £1.82 vs 89p on eBay

I'd stick with ebay - I sell books on there and they sell well (obviously I research before listing, there's no point trying with quite a lot of fiction especially), I did try Amazon but hardly sold a thing.

That ebay calculation is wrong. EBAY fee at 10% would be 70p and paypal (30p plus 2.9%) would be another 50p so £1.20 in total. Assumes private seller.

@1987qwerty

That ebay calculation is wrong. EBAY fee at 10% would be 70p and paypal (30p plus 2.9%) would be another 50p so £1.20 in total. Assumes private seller.

Ah - you're correct - I left out the 30p fixed price.

@notrub

Hmm - I looked into it once and you had to register as a business.

Seems they do offer a private seller option now - quite pricey though on fees!

75p + 5.1% (£5)

On a £3.99 book with £2.99 postage, fees would be £1.82 vs 89p on eBay

Thanks, yes that is much higher than it used to be. I wondered if that might be the case.

Along with higher postage costs it probably won't be worth it.

We sell a lot of books on ebay. We looked into selling on Amazon but I seem to remember there was an issue with having to just have one postage rate regardless of how heavy the item was - maybe I am misremembering but worth checking. Contrary, to a previous poster we find we sell a lot more on ebay than dedicated book selling platforms which I can only think are set up for the book-barn type sellers with huge inventories.