New online used bookstore, need your feedbacks

Hi guys,

I am new to the community and slowly building my library but can already say that LibraryThing seems like a good way to find great new books. Its always hard to find the next great novel ;-)

I am about to launch a new online used bookstore and I would love to have your feedbacks on what should be done to make things better with online booksellers. Example: for me, shipping fees are awful right now at Amazon and let's not even talk about book condition ("condition: good" is not what it used to be; missing pages, pen mark, etc.)

My first idea was to make all used books 4.95$ with free shipping and condition: above good (we include detailed description of the book condition). No matter the size of the book or where your are, they are all 4.95$.

What are the feature you would like Amazon, Abebook, etc.. to have that they don't right now?

The bookseller: http://495books.launchrock.com

Thanks
Simon
495books

Good luck. I've often thought I'd like to do this too. Work keeps getting in the way, maybe when I retire.

I wish you all the best! You will need to limit your sales to Canada or the US; you wouldn't want to provide free shipping to Australia, for example. And you would need to find a steady supply of good books at a low price. If you can do that, you'll do fine.

Hope you'll do well .. Some things that make me nervous about ordering on line books are the often vague descriptions of conditions and words like "may contain " etc either a book does or does not. However when I have ordered books from Alibris I have been well satisfied. I note that some books are v cheap but postage seems to be where there is a profit strange as it may seem . How though will you handle postage to remote parts of world ? Returns are not possible from the far reaches of the globe. So if you offer accurate condition descriptions, a fair price and as you build a customer base to alert clients to new finds, plus offer a discount of postage for say purchases of over $25, I am sure you will find a demand.

Did this ever get off the ground? The website still says to leave your email address to be informed when the store is launched.

Given that it's now over nine months later with no response, and no change in its website, I'm guess this endeavor either never got started or quickly failed, which is a shame.