Textbook consignment?

[ttw22]

I want to start a business at my college where I take people's old textbooks and list them on half.com (etc), then taking a percentage of the profit if they sell. Does anyone here have experience with anything like this (general eBay consignment?) that would be able to help me? Is there anything in particular I should watch out for?

[Sniper]

A few questions...

1. What incentive do people have to give you their textbooks, rather than selling them themselves?

2. Are you going to guarantee minimum value?

3. What percentage will you be your cut?

4. Will you be making enough to make it worth your time?

5. Who is your competition, doesn't your college bookstore offer a used book buy back service?

6. Or do the fraternities/sororities sell (or loan) books down from one year to the next?

7. Which brings up another point, if you know there is a market for the books at your college, why sell them to a broader market and have to worry about shipping, why not keep the business local?

[latefordinner]

there is virtually no overhead to this business.

people are lazy and don't want to list the books themselves or worry about shipping them.

initial time investment is minimal. (putting up flyers, listing a book takes all of ten seconds)

since listing books doesn't take much time or money it makes sense to go ahead and list them on half, amazon, etc - but those do charge a significant cut. but it might also make sense to make a website for local use.

--

with a business like this, it seems better to go ahead and start doing it and see how it develops then worry about too much in advance. it's night like you're sinking 10k in in startup costs.

[ttw22]

Thanks for helping me think through this with the questions.
[ QUOTE ]
1. What incentive do people have to give you their textbooks, rather than selling them themselves?

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Most people seem to sell their books back to the local stores (who pay them roughly 25% of original price or less), so apparently they're either too lazy or unaware to sell them online.

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2. Are you going to guarantee minimum value?

[/ QUOTE ] My plan was to allow each seller to set their own price, after which they could lower it if they wanted or just change thier mind and take the book back. I would give suggested prices, possibly with consideration of how impatient the seller was.

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3. What percentage will you be your cut?

[/ QUOTE ]For the first few books, probably none, until I get the hang of things. After that, I'm thinking 20%, but I'll hopefully have a better feel for what's appropriate then.

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4. Will you be making enough to make it worth your time?

[/ QUOTE ]I believe so. At 20% comission, I'd be looking at an average profit of ~$10-15 per book. Sounds worthwhile to me.

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5. Who is your competition, doesn't your college bookstore offer a used book buy back service?

[/ QUOTE ]They do, but the prices are really low. I believe I could offer students better value for the same or slightly more effort.

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6. Or do the fraternities/sororities sell (or loan) books down from one year to the next?

[/ QUOTE ]I don't know. If they do, there is still an open market because most students here aren't in frats/sororities, and the book stores seem to have long lines of kids selling back their books at the end of the semester.

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7. Which brings up another point, if you know there is a market for the books at your college, why sell them to a broader market and have to worry about shipping, why not keep the business local?

[/ QUOTE ]
That is another consideration I had. I would like to (eventually) store all my inventory in a database for my own access and so that the sellers could automatically check on the status of their books. If I did this, it shouldn't be much harder to list all of the books on hand. Selling online seems like it would be best to do first mostly because of the higher liquidity of that market.

Does anyone have any experience with on-campus advertising? I see fliers for credit cards and movies on bulletin boards in university-owned buildings all the time. I wonder if these companies had to pay the school (seems likely).