If you’re searching Zen Arbitrage, and find a good book you don’t want to buy yourself, you can list it for sale in the Zen Arbitrage ISBN Marketplace. If other members like what they see, they will pay you directly (via PayPal) for access to the ISBN.
We have many members who are only selling ISBNs. This is a viable way to monetize Zen Arbitrage, and do it without ever touching a book.
The fastest way to list is via the “Sell” icon in the right-hand column of the search results. This opens the “Sell” page in a new tab, pre-loaded with the ISBN. Just enter the FBA price and sales rank info, and your listing is live in just a few seconds.
You can also list via the “Sell” link at the top of the Marketplace page.
The only answer is: “Whatever you want.”
There’s no magic figure, but peering at the behind-the-scenes statistics here, it looks like on average buyers in the Marketplace purchase ISBNs for 1/12 of their expected net profit.
That doesn’t mean you can’t get more, but that figure can serve as a starting point.
We have a checkbox for that, letting buyers know you have found the rare and coveted book with no FBA offers.
There’s a couple:
Low demand / bad sales rank: Every member is different, but your chances of attracting a buyer decreases significantly when the current sales rank gets too much worse than 1 million. Don’t expect listings with poor sales ranks to sell, because they just aren’t suited for online book arbitrage.
Priced too high: Pretty obvious, but if the net profit is good, the sales rank is good, you’ve entered all the right data, and you’re still not getting sales, its time to lower your prices.
This is important: You should edit all of your listings with the current lowest FBA offer, and condition/price of lowest merchant fulfilled offer, daily (or more). We provide an edit feature to do this.
It’s bound to happen now and then: The lowest FBA offer or lowest MF offer changes since you made your last edit, the buyer doesn’t get what they thought they were paying for, and they ask for a refund.
The best response is to issue the buyer the refund. The more quickly and painlessly an issue is resolved , the more confidence buyers will have in the Marketplace, and the more sales you’ll generate.
Generally we auto-load the MF price for you. But sometimes you’ll want to list a specific offer that is not the lowest priced (generally because the lowest is Acceptable condition). In that instance, we offer a field to manually enter the MF price to override the auto-load function and list the higher-priced offer.
The lowest.
Don’t match the lowest for the specific condition of the merchant fulfilled offer, just enter the lowest priced offer overall (whether new or used). Very simple.
You can list an ISBN once every 30 days.
All listings that go 7 days without being updated will expire.