It’s official, we are no longer selling books on Amazon. For those of you who didn’t know, we have been selling books on Amazon in the Amazon Marketplace (those are the used and new books you see when Amazon is sold out or when you just want to buy the same book Amazon sells for $39.99 for $.01) for years. Yesterday we sold all our remaining inventory, some 4,000 used/new books in one large bulk sale to a buyer in Texas. For Deb and I, the books had become (as Andy Stanley put it last week) the old sofa that no one wants to get rid of because it has always been there.
We started selling book on Amazon at the same time we were full time eBay sellers (eBay lost out as a viable place to sell as a business long long before Amazon) back in 2005, and sold full time on Amazon in 2006-2008, and it was some of the hardest work, most laborious, and in the end least profit making work I can ever recall doing in my life. It came at a time when Deb and I needed to work from home, needed and wanted to work together, and many blessings came our way over those years of selling books online.
Over our selling life on Amazon, we sold over 9,000 books at a retail price of $65,000 (that’s not as much as it sounds when you divide by 3 years and then start thinking profit margins), kept a high feedback rating, and learned a lot about hard work and to appreciate what we were given. Not much different than what we gained and learned from our previous businesses we started and ran together, except that this particular one took over our entire house top to bottom.
After running several small businesses over the past 10-12 years I have come to understand that each business or product has a defined life cycle, especially when you are running very small self made businesses. Products come in and out, jobs, customers, and life in general, has a lifespan or timeframe where some things work well. The key is to know when it is time to move on and get rid of the old sofa. For the books, yesterday was that day, and we were both thrilled. There were many many reasons, but knowing it was indeed the right time to let it go was a good feeling.
Anyone that wants to know the inner workings of selling on eBay or Amazon feel free to drop me an email. Combined I think we have about 12-15 years experience selling on both platforms and we lived and breathed eBay and Amazon, so we do know our way around. We certainly know how to get in trouble with big brother, and how to survive when the rules get changed (and they always do).
Our online selling life was great, and really is always something we think about no matter what we are working on or doing. In those years, we managed to:
- work together 24/7, netting 20,800 more hours spent together
- fought off fraud
- and copyright infringement issues
- fended off domain landsharks
- had $300,000 in sales without making a profit
- sold alongside corrupt competition
- continually fought customer theft
- avoided a few lawsuits
- didn’t sue a few times when we could have
- were falsely accused of anything and everything
- Witnessed to many (I hope)
- were praised and awarded
- ridiculed
- made some great friendships
- ate at a huge unknown number of restaurants
- filed for our own patents and trademarks
- never clocked in once
- travel to every state in the country
- live in a bus, apartment, house, tent, campground
- lived in Nevada, North Carolina, Florida, Texas, Alabama (and many others)
- filled approximately 250,000 orders
- counted approximately 2 million crystals
- imported products from Austria
- invented our own products
- worked for a competitor
- took 50,000 product images
- went through about 30 computers
- used miles and miles of tape, boxes, and packaging
- cried, laughed, bled, and cherished every second
Thankfully for us, now, we have both moved on to a new chapter in our lives together and it doesn’t look like there will be much online selling involved, and that’s a good thing, because I am exahusted.
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Friday was a book moving box lifting day. Today was order day and we processed and packed up all our current orders to ship out. This includes moving all the boxes to the car and then taking a visit to our book warehouse to lift more boxes of books, which is the photo shown here. We usually collect all new books, clean them up, organize, and then stock them on the shelves both here at our business and here. Today was hot, and required a lot of heavy lifting. It is quite a work out to move 50-60 pound boxes every day for a good part of the day, but it also gets very tiring physically.
I took this quick image with my phone on our way out, these will be left for another day. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this particular blog, one of our Internet businesses is dealing in books. Deborah and I have sold books on Amazon for quite a while now and part of our daily routine is a lot of heavy lifting of boxes and boxes of books. It can be quite exhausting being that both our offices are up one full flight of stairs and each and every single book has to make its way up, then down.
Everything Else
Some new music did arrive today from my trading buddies over at LaLa. On this list for today was Robbie Williams, The Ego Has Landed (which arrived broken in half), and The Bravery with their self titled album. It was an exhausting day and I am looking forward to the weekend where there should be plenty of grass to cut.
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This question comes up quite a bit, but when you are talking about individuals businesses or blogs, not a corporation, the simple answer is, probably not as much as you think. Certainly not as much as you have put into it.
One of my favorite things to watch is Buy it Now prices on eBay and personal items people put up for sale, like their car or motorcycle. I have this GREAT thing, I paid $5,000 for it, used it for 5 years, it is in perfect, brand new condition and here it is for sale for $5,500, great deal. What we deem as precious and important to us, really only has a value of what someone else is willing to pay, and in my experience, it is not as much as we would want it to be.
There are “collectibles” and things like that of course, but I find those don’t even hold up to current prices unless it is really the hottest of hot in the latest trend or gimmick. We even had a genuine Rolex watch, with an appraisal that had a replacement value of $7,500 and it looks like its current ebay selling price is around $1,200. It comes down to this. Do you actually want to sell the item or business in question, or do you want to sell it for what you want to sell it for?
I am going to examine this question in a series of posts since it can be quite a long subject. In this post I will look at a few variables in determining value to your business, asset, blog, online property, or other digital assets and what it might be worth if you want to sell it. Should you look at selling on Sitepoint as opposed to eBay or Amazon and what other alternatives are there for you to sell your Internet assets. Other points that might come up as future topics are pricing domain names and their value (you can also see Register a Domain Name for eBay Affiliate Traffic, 10 Ways to Set Goals for Your Online Business, or GoDaddy Cash Parking Makes Little Money for some of my other related topics on this subject.
Value is Determined by Someone Else
As I mentioned above, the value of something is not really determined by you at all. How much something is worth depends on how much someone else is willing to pay for it. If you think something is worth $5,000 and someone else is willing to pay $10,000, then it is worth $10k, and of course the opposite is also true.
A good example of this is the current fire sale of blogs. At first, the money making seo blogs were said to be worth bundles. Then as a few were sold off, the value of each was shown, to be what someone else was willing to pay for it. There were, and are, several metrics that bloggers decided each blog was worth and gave it value, but most went by a price per subscriber of about $15.
All of this came to mind when I read, A Difficult Decision – BloggingExperiment.com For Sale, a nice blog which I have read for some time. All of sudden the for sale sign went out. It was up for auction, but has since been sold for an undisclosed amount, but the seller / owner (Ben) was looking for “5 figures”, which is about in line with the price per subscriber listed above. That would make the sale about $13,500 (that is according to the calculation above, I have no knowledge of what it actually sold for).
If we just stay with the guesstimate above as an example, Ben was doing a year long experiment, which he was 265 days into, when he decided to sell his blog. Since he sold it, I would assume he got a price he was willing to accept. If it was my guess above, that comes to about $51/day, or about $6/hour if you go on an 8 hour day, or approximately $18,000/year. But, it is only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it, and sometimes that is better than what we know it is worth.
Don’t self impose an over valuation of your asset. If you do, whatever you are trying to sell will sit there for a long time, perhaps months or years before you find a buyer you will agree with. If you decide you want to sell it, sell it, for what someone else is willing to buy it for, in a reasonable period of time. Ben obviously made the decision to sell his blog, and did so, in about 5 days.
Value Depends on What You Put Into It
As with most things in life, you get what you put into it. One thing that I think is a misnomer among others looking at Internet entrepreneurs is how much work is involved. Sticking with the blog theme from Blogging Experiment, I know it is a hands on, daily grind, meticulous operation to keep that blog at its current traffic level and subscriber list. If he just let it go for a week, or a month, and let it run itself, it would run right into the ground from its prime.
Blog in particular are not self sustaining businesses that you can setup and let run. They take a lot of time and effort, effort that most are not willing to put into a blog, which is what makes sites like Pro Blogger so good, they put a ton of hours into the site each day. Not all of us have the staff and resources to do what they do, but it certainly adds value to their site. What a quick tip to add value to your blog or website. Add content. Not scrapped content or stuff just pulled in from other sites, but real, well written, new, fresh content. That will add readers, advertisers, and value to your site.
Value Depends on How You Present It
One final way to put value into your online asset, presentation. You may have the worlds best thing, but if it looks bad, smells bad, and isn’t generally presented well, it won’t have the value you think it should, or probably does. This may be a clean design or new look, but most likely you have already have this in place.
I can relate this to an eBay listing (or ad if you prefer). You can have the exact same product as someone else on eBay, sell it for the same price, same shipping, and delivery time, but yours will not sell if the presentation it not better than the competition. This may just be nicely worded descriptions of what you are trying to sell or site metrics, visitors, stats, all the things people really want to know about the item for sale.
Give a lot of information. I think people generally read about 10% of what is presented to them, so make the important points stand out. Highlight your strengths, but don’t hide your weaknesses, and give a lot of information about the item for sale. The more questions you get about the item for sale, the worse you did in explaining the sale to potential buyers, especially if you get 10 people asking the same exact question.
What are your best tips to showing the value of an item?
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If you work or sell anything on the Internet long enough you will come into contact with all kinds of people and personalities you may never run across in the course of your daily routine. This of course is not always a bad thing, most of the time you can meet and interact with so many more people than you ever could in person, but every once in a while you will come across that individual that makes you think how far can they actually take this. And the answer can quickly become very obvious, about as far as they want to, and usually way farther than you would want them to as well.
I have sold different products and services on the Internet now since about 1993, so I have run into my share of not so pleased customers or buyers that no matter what you do or say they are pre-determined to be displeased. I think I could write a book on it, but another article that comes to mind that I will write soon is called The Customer is NOT Always Right, but I will leave that for another post.
The Customer is Not Always Right… Really
Well, this is an old saying, but buyers can go to far. The Internet allows people to say and do things they would never do face to face, even though there really is a real human behind the screen, sometimes buyers (customers) can use the Internet to take advantage of the systems in place. There is a difference between good customer service and common sense, and you have to weigh the effects of each situation. I really don’t think the customer is always right, but a company should still live by that adage as best they can. When you can’t, minimize any negative effects that might occur and move on.
Recently I came across one of those buyers on Amazon that just would not be happy no matter what we did. He ordered a book from us, we shipped it to him within 24 hours, and he received it very quickly. It was then he determined that he wanted the book to be a hardcover (even though a printing in the same edition and publication year did not exist). It was not a gift or anything, just for personal reading, same words, same everything, just a paperback copy. After explaining that a hardcover didn’t exist he demanded a full refund, and wanted to keep the book.
That is the point at which I should have just said, ok, keep my book, here is your money back, can I do anything else for you?
- The customer is always right
- Re-read my step 1
I Guess the Customer is Always Right After All
If I took my own advice here I wouldn’t have anything to write about, so if you don’t do step 1 above, learn something from the mistake. In the end, because of the way Amazon is setup to deal with their Marketplace sellers, I had to refund the book price and the shipping anyway, and had no means to get the book back other than just to ask the buyer to return it, which he refused.
This buyer did threaten me with the standard I will file a claim and leave negative feedback thing, neither of which I wanted over a sale like this, but it did cause me to dig into this customer service cause and effect a little deeper than I had in the past. When pushed by a dumb seller, how far could a bad or unethical buyer take it to an Amazon Marketplace seller if they so desired? As far as they want.
Is Being Right Worth Your Amazon Marketplace Account
I guess you could win the battle and loose the war pretty easily here. After knowing how far a buyer could go, I might re-evaluate how right I really was here. If I had to choose between my single book and my seller account, I would probably have refunded the guy twice what he paid for the book. In a recent blog post, 10 Steps to a 7 Figure Income From Your Site, number 5 on the list is of course, The customer IS always right. If you are in business for any length of time you will soon learn that the liability all rests on the business, and whatever the problem is, it probably isn’t worth it in the long run. The screen shot below was from a canceled account from just 4 feedbacks, it doesn’t take much sometimes.
The steps I will outline below did not happen in this case, of course, it is just the scenario I found with not to much trouble, and I know I can learn something from it. After I tried to explain to him that he was indeed wrong, I promptly emailed him back to say how unprofessional I was and if I could do anything else to let me know. As of this writing that is as far as it went.
How an Unethical Person Can Get Your Account Canceled
Noticed I have now changed to person and not customer or buyer. I really think that there is a line, usually that is the line of law, that once crossed, the individual is no longer considered a customer or buyer, and should not be treated as such. It is nothing more than simplistic fraud, and not even very smart, but, who ever said common sense prevails. If you have someone that has it in for you, especially over the Internet, they may not stop until you are down and out.
I hesitated to list these steps in the first place but did so because I found them (1) readily available on the forums, (2) something anyone could really figure out anyway, and (3) something I (we) can learn from the next time there is an unruly customer. Good customer service should be the key.
There Are Three Ratings So There are Three Steps
A little background on Amazon’s policies. Amazon has a Seller Performance Measurement plan that shows what they expect from their sellers. For the most part there are three different areas Amazon looks at, the seller’s Feedback, A-to-z Guarantee Claim Rate, and Media Refund Rate. Each of these figures need to be below a certain rate to remain in good standing. Knowing these, it is just a matter of doing the math.
1. Look at Seller’s Feedback, Times 10%
If a seller has a feedback rating that is 100% and 100 feedbacks in the last 30 days, 10% of that is 10 feedbacks. The total negative feedbacks allowed by Amazon is 5%, or in this case 5 negative feedbacks over the 30 day period. A buyer only needs to buy 10 books or 10 products and then they can immediately leave 10 negative feedbacks, well above the limit.
2. File A-to-Z Guarantee Claims
The number of claims against the seller can only be 0.5% of the orders received. The above 10 purchases would all need to be filed as a claim against the seller. This can’t be done immediately, there is a minimum time limit allowed to receive the item before they can file a claim against the seller, and if the next step is taken first then it doesn’t come to the A-to-Z claim.
3. Request Refunds Through Media Refund
A buyer can do one of the two last steps to be effective. If the buyer doesn’t want to wait to file the claim they could bully the seller into issuing the refunds. If the seller refunds all 10 products in the example above it would far exceed the 5% allowed by Amazon. Of course the seller doesn’t have to refund the orders, they can wait until the claims are filed.
The seller may also find out what the person is doing and refuse to ship the product, and in this case, the seller will need to refund the orders as well. Amazon gives you 24-48 hours to ship or refund the order in question, all of which will not be good for the seller.
Seller’s Can Take Standard Precautions
There are of course a lot of variables here. One being that Amazon will actually take action against the buyer and actually look at the situation and understand a good seller from a bad one. Another would be that the seller could follow some standard practices that might help their case and protect them from this kind of fraud.
- Sellers should always ship their orders with a tracking number
- Ship orders within the alloted time
- Respond to all emails as quickly as possible
- Keep in mind, you never know who you are talking to or where it could lead, good or bad
- Make professional acquaintances that you can talk to about problem customers
- Do your research first. Groups and forums are a great asset, your problem is most likely not unique
- Remember step 1 above and bite your tongue
This situation outlined above would be a perfect storm situation in reality. I did find a few sellers that had some of these problems but not many. It takes a buyer that is willing to go to these extremes and actually spend their own money, Amazon would have to be totally oblivious to the buyers activities (which I doubt they are), and you would have to have some pre-existing issue or issues with one of your ratings.
My experience selling on eBay and some other channels tells me this isn’t really exclusive to Amazon. Usually when a seller account is suspended or canceled there are at least some underlying reasons that the seller or company usually omits or slants, it is just natural, and we can never really know what information the Trust and Saftey or Alliance teams have gathered to make their decision.
It does happen though, and any selling channel company that tells you it can never happen doesn’t know what they are talking about, in my opinion. A recent post about Google, Get ANY Adsense Account Banned, spelled out a similar scenario, and eBay is probably the biggest and easiest target of all. Each sales channel has its own weaknesses that customers can abuse and exploit. What is important to remember as a company or seller is that we can probably stop most problems before they become something bigger ourselves by just good old customer service.
Update, April 4th
Ironically, that is how it ended for us on Amazon as Amazon Marketplace Sellers. The email screenshot at the top was the actual email we received after a quick string of bad buyers (click the image to see the entire email). We were able to give no explanation, no time was allowed to correct what the “buyer” complained about, and no grace period or way to get back in as Amazon Marketplace Sellers. One email and we were out and our business was gone. I knew it would eventually happen, and it did take a few years for something like that to catch up to us, but in the end I knew it was only a matter of time. We spent many good years on eBay and many good years selling on Amazon and learned a lot about selling online (see We are No Longer Amazon Marketplace Sellers).
