Why You Should Sell on Multiple Marketplaces
I encounter many booksellers who exclusively sell on one marketplace, usually either Amazon, AbeBooks, or eBay. I understand where they are coming from, as my own company, True Oak Books, was an Amazon-only business for its first few years, doing a mix of MF and FBA.
I can break down the reasons why we never wanted to branch out and sell on more websites:
1) Lack of awareness of other marketplaces and overthinking the learning curve.
2) Comfort zone.
3) Desire to avoid additional work or worrying about expenses.
4) Fear of complications (double sales).
5) Undue confidence in one marketplace's ethics and competence.
I will tackle each and every one of these later and show why they are false objections with the right toolkit and knowledge. Especially when a bookseller is armed with a software like BookTrakker, all 5 of these become emotional worries rather than rational.
Before going deeper into that, however, let me tell you how delaying diversification practically affected my business and life. Amazon, as you may know, can be a treacherous partner.
It is worth noting that FBA comprised 80% of our business when we first started. (The FBA program and its pros and cons are beyond the scope of this post but will be tackled in a subsequent post.) While FBA certainly exacerbated some of the below issues, please understand that the principles of the need for diversification stay true regardless of what marketplace or fulfillment model you may be using.
By selling on one marketplace only, you are creating an unhealthy dependence for your business. Something nonsensical and completely outside your control can set you back by MONTHS, out of the blue. Getting suspended can be a major issue which completely kills your business. Additionally, you are missing out on different buyer profiles who do not shop on the marketplace you are on. Buyers on AbeBooks are very different than buyers on Amazon, who are very different than buyers on eBay, etc.
To sum it all up: By selling on multiple marketplaces, not only do you become detached enough to treat problems with a particular marketplace like an unpleasant blip, but you also increase your sales exponentially by making your stock available to different customer profiles.
I had to learn all of this by trial and error. Our first couple of years in business were a rollercoaster of highs and lows. We sold a lot of books and were aggressive, but we also lost a lot of money, and this was at least partly due to Amazon's mismanagement of its own warehouse space and the consequences thereof. 2021 was a particularly bad year for that, since Amazon was not able to manage the unprecendented demand and growth it was experiencing as a company during the Covid-19 era.
Storage policies and fee structures changed overnight, resulting in us having to throw out thousands of our books, i.e. tens of thousands of dollars in cost of goods and labor. And this happened to us multiple times in a span of 2 years before we decided to move away from FBA, being extremely bitter about how Amazon handled the issues. They essentially made the sellers pay for their mistakes and mismanagement.
The perils of selling on Amazon were not limited to the FBA program. Buyer behavior completely outside of our control disrupted operations and threatened the business regularly. I always followed the seller forums closely, and thus knew that really minor issues with buyers could explode into suspension causing situations. Amazon holds a "guilty unless proven innocent" philosophy when it comes to sellers who receive buyer complaints, even if the claims are completely unfounded. We knew that if we got suspended from selling on Amazon, we would lose our livelihood and years of work.
We were hit with an unfounded copyright claim from an author in China once! Due to a language barrier, she thought we were selling her books in New condition without her approval.
We only sell used books, so the claim did not have anything to stand on, however it was enough on Amazon for one buyer to raise their voice for our seller account to get into trouble and risk suspension. She threatened to sue us, and our account health plumetted.
It was extremely difficult to get anyone competent from Seller Support to tackle the issue, and this made us lose a fair amount of sleep for WEEKS until we finally got it taken care of. We were worried we were going to get suspended over something silly and lose our Amazon income until who knew when. Even after the issue was addressed and successfully removed, our account health did not recover to good standing for a long time, for no apparent reason.
Luckily, we were never actually suspended, but I followed the seller forums closely and witnessed many businesses having major problems due to undue suspensions or overnight changes in policy. Eventually, right around the end of our second year, we received a second immense financial blow to our business from Amazon's FBA mismanagement which set our progress back by months once again, and I became very serious about selling elsewhere and establishing independence. I was also growing more and more frustrated with Amazon rejecting my listings for a variety of silly reasons, not giving me an ISBN exemption to list books without ISBNs, and the price "errors" prohibiting me from setting my own prices (all of which were solved by selling on other marketplaces).
After researching for a tool which would help me make my books available on multiple marketplaces and trying out a variety of competitors, I finally settled on the BookTrakker Ecosystem. The software was critical for the reinvention of our business. The team was welcoming and offered great support throughout the learning curve, and in no time, I was making sales on Biblio, AbeBooks, eBay, and Alibris!
I got my first Biblio sale a couple days after I opened my Biblio account, and Biblio was the first marketplace I ever tried outside of Amazon. I sold a book I had in inventory for over a year, and it went for $100! I was hooked! (I had listed some odd items on eBay in the past because Amazon would not accept them, but we never got serious about selling on eBay until BookTrakker allowed us to post everything seamlessly. eBay has now become our highest selling marketplace, often surpassing Amazon.)
Having sold on multiple marketplaces for over 2 years now, I wholeheartedly recommend it to any bookseller out there. I have never been so relaxed and confident in my business. We literally doubled our Merchant Fulfilled sales within a few months and were amazed at the different buyer profiles we were serving through different channels. Books we thought would never sell on Amazon were selling like hotcakes on other marketplaces! We eventually stopped doing FBA and committed to selling Merchant Fulfilled on multiple marketplaces instead.
Let me now address the various reservations I had towards diversification and why I was wrong in not expanding earlier. If you are someone who sells on one marketplace exclusively, please consider why the following 5 are not good reasons to stay complacent and keep things as they are.
1) Lack of awareness of other marketplaces and overthinking the learning curve.
If this is an issue for you as it was for me, please have faith in my words: Setting up accounts and selling on other marketplaces is extremely easy! They all more or less function on the same principles, and the differences are marginal. Education and information is readily available online, and I will give you a summary right here. I recommend you at least try selling on Amazon, AbeBooks, eBay, Biblio, and Alibris. In my experience, this is where most book buying happens, and a vast variety of buyers, from people looking for a beach read to elite collectors, frequent these marketplaces.
After setting up the accounts, all you need is BookTrakker to upload all of your listings across your sales channels, at the click of a button. If a book sells, BookTrakker will take it down from the other marketplaces. This is essentially how simple it is!
2) Comfort zone.
You may be set in your ways and may not want to risk anything or learn something new. When it is so dangerous to have all of your eggs in one basket and the potential of being on multiple marketplaces is doubling your sales, you simply MUST get out of your comfort zone. There will be a learning curve, but it will not take long before you are confident in your new, higher sales and safety model. You will simply be frustrated for not having switched over earlier.
3) Desire to avoid additional work or worrying about expenses.
If you are worried about wasting time, listing the same book again and again on other marketplaces by going to each and every one of them one by one, BookTrakker has you covered! The software makes this worry a complete non-issue by uploading all of your listings everywhere, at the click of a button. Actually, BookTrakker's industry standard listing and management tools will only make you work LESS. You will get done more, faster.
Listing softwares are notoriously faster to list with (compared to listing directly on a marketplace website), and BookTrakker, being the best software in the market, will not only give you the most efficient tools but also upload your books to ALL of the major marketplaces, and even your own website if you create one.
For a marginal monthly fee, BookTrakker will not only increase your sales exponentially but also make your life easier. And while marketplaces are not free to list on (with the exception of Biblio), any of the 5 marketplaces I've mentioned in this post should yield a high return on investment, even if you are relatively small. The marketplace subscription fees are also often tiered, allowing you to pay relative to the amount of books you have in stock.
The effort to learn and operate BookTrakker and navigate the new marketplaces will actually be some of your highest dollars earned per hour in your business, as this project will multiply all of your previous work by the opportunity of the potential sales you can now get from the marketplaces you did not sell on before. Not using BookTrakker to sell on multiple marketplaces is extremely expensive in time and opportunity, the highest costs for any serious business person.
4) Fear of complications (double sales).
Before I realized BookTrakker could manage the orders for me, I was worried that having my books up on multiple marketplaces would result in double sales, i.e. selling the same copy to two different customers because of mismanagement. I imagined a world where I had to go on each and every one of the websites every day and take down whatever sold, and I did not want to have to figure any of that out. Well, luckily, I never had to! BookTrakker was chiefly developped to solve this problem, and it solves it very well.
With a relatively minor learning curve, I had a robust toolkit handling most of this for me, automatically! When a sale happens on one of my marketplaces, BookTrakker detects it and removes the book from all sales channels. While there is a learning curve in managing this and setting up some fail-safe routines, if BookTrakker is used correctly, over 99% of your transactions should successfully avoid any double sale situation.
5) Undue confidence in one marketplace's ethics or competence.
I can't believe I was ever naive enough to entertain the idea that a robot-run conglomerate like Amazon cared about its sellers and followed its own policies. Every single marketplace has its problems and frustrations, as I learned later. If you think the website you sell on would never cause you problems and would only reward your loyalty, think again. I recommend you spend some time on various seller forums to see how a suspension or mismanagement of policy can end up causing people their business because of factors outside of their control. When the alternative of diversifying by using BookTrakker is so easy, it is simply unwise to be dependent on one marketplace.