Amazon Bookselling going great guns

I can't figure out, for the life of me, why some weeks are busier than others. Last week we sold 6 books in 7 days, which I think is a record for us. A couple of the titles I had just added on and they sold the next day. I'm running around 95 titles or so. Every now and then I'll get ruthless with my own bookcases and have a run through them, cull a few out, and put them up for sale. I'm still working through the many cases of books I acquired at the same time I bought all those teapots - but at the moment I'm actually selling more of my own collection than those I'd acquired.

And the nice thing is that I feel perfectly fine buying myself a book here and there, knowing that I can recoup some of the money back later on when I'm finished with enjoying my reading. Some books are "keepers" - I have no intention of selling them on to someone else. But others have languished for ages - I'm unwilling to pitch them into a garage sale as they're "too good" for a 50 cent pile.

The only books that are really impossible to resell at Amazon have been best sellers - there are just such high quantities of them around, and the values get driven down just by sheer volume. But last week I decided to put on a textbook about the honeybee that I'd hung on to for no good reason, except as a reminder that I'd once taken a course at an agricultural college for beekeeping (which I was absolutely dismal at, but really enjoyed doing for the short time it lasted). It sold within a day, to some guy at a genomic biology company in the midwest. Way cool. It had gone out of print.

Meanwhile, back on eCrater, I've been adding more and more items to the store. I got some feedback from another dealer about how I had some of my products categorized - so great to get constructive criticism that I can put to immediate use! I implemented those few changes, updated some of the photos at the store's home page, and have been diligently putting additional Bunnykins china items into the inventory. Oh, and I added specific language in our Terms section that we won't ship orders COD :-)

Sometimes blogging feels like a very lonely thing to do.

nm

And on to Bunnykins!

Just the name makes you giggle. But the first piece I grabbed failed to be easy to research - I've got the pattern number and name from my trusty Charlton Standard Catalogue (note the spelling, ahem) of Royal Doulton Bunnykins as the Letterbox design - but there's a drought of information about it out in the ether.

Harrumph. I guess Wedgwood was a walk in the park!

Scratching my head on this. There's the book value, that's the one that makes your eyes water and you marvel at the astounding Find you've got on your hands. But you really have to know the retail value, what it's worth in the marketplace, in order to be accurate. I'd be scaring people off to put the book values on the collection - and really, that's funny money. It's what you hope the item to be worth to a collector - but it's not usually a reflection of the current going price.

So, it looks like I've got my work cut out for me. It also doesn't help that, although there are proper names given by Royal Doulton for each of the patterns issued, many times, if you do a search for just "Bunnykins", you'll gets results that describe the shape of the piece, like plate, or two handled mug. Well, duh - they issued those shapes for virtually ALL the designs they created. So it's quite a slog through the information bog - I mean highway - just to filter out to what you're exactly looking for.

For example, a search this morning turned up a cup described as "two handled with cute bunnies scampering and getting into lots of trouble." OK, then - I don't think I can really pin that one down without having to take a much closer look. Oh, and while I'm at it, can I just mention again my pet peeve about how many poor quality photographs there are out there? It staggers the mind how people manage to sell their items from blurry or poorly lit images. I'm presuming that they're selling.

Yes, I'm frustrated. This will be a more labor intensive batch of collectibles than I'd anticipated. But I'm hoping they'll be worth the effort and the wait.

The Wedgwood just keeps on coming

(Blushing)

I guess I didn't realize how much we'd amassed over the years until I started to catalog everything for the store. I'm not done yet, though, and I'm up to 37 items. That even beats out the teapots, which I thought was spectacular. I'm almost at the end (I hope), I'm starting to dream about Jasperware, and seeing Dancing Hours every time I close my eyes.

There have been a few surprises along the way. Things like I thought I've seen items when I've searched on Google, yet when it came time for me to research the thing, I haven't been able to find any information at all. Things appear on the internet, and things drop off. (I guess as items come up for sale and then the records are deleted.) So it's made me appreciate the necessity of jotting down notes as I go, and putting them with the objects whether I'm ready to work on it at that time or not. This happened to me just the other day with a cachepot, sometimes also known as a jardiniere. When it came time for me to put it on to the website, I had the hardest time doing my research - many of my searches turned up auction sites that required a registration in order to find out any real information, like what the thing actually sold for. Persistence pays off, though, and I was able to cobble together a great description from multiple sources.

And here's a real wowee-cowabunga one: a perfume atomizer. I got this at the Wedgwood factory in Burslem, England in the late 1980's, not long after the color went into production. Perfume atomizers are highly collectible; Jasperware in rare colors is highly collectible - what this is is what's called (in the parlance of the trade), a "cross collectible", or desirable to people for multiple reasons.

I get it, now

It just dawned on me what that whole COD I-want-those-teapots-but-only-if-I-can-get-them-Cash-On-Delivery... it was a tidy little lesson in boundaries for me. So here's your first transaction being dangled in front of you, but let's violate your business terms straight out of the chute. How's them apples? I actually lost sleep over this last night, because I extrapolated the transaction out to where we actually made some kind of arrangement. And it scared me because I wondered where the next boundary infraction would come from - she wouldn't like the teapots when they arrived, or they wouldn't be shipped quickly enough - all this spouted from the emails that we had sent back and forth over the last week or so. With me repeatedly stating our policy, and the other person, just as often, trying to run it over with a steam engine.

I was relieved that the outcome ended up to be - if she can't get a hold of a credit card to do the transaction, then she'll go elsewhere to get those teapots on the terms she desires. And good luck to that.

As with any time that I've held my boundaries firm, it's felt scary and empowering at the same time. I didn't cave in, and I also didn't make a sale. I think, though, that in a case like this, it's a win-win for me :-) I not only didn't make the sale, but I also didn't have to worry about the rebound effects of having made it. And it will be easier the next time someone suggests an alternative to our clearly stated purchase terms, to say, Sorry, but No. (Which was what I said all along with this - it just wasn't heard until the third time.)

Well, I'm impressed!

The store at eCrater has been open around a week or so - and we've got our first sales transaction in progress. I've specified that we'll accept payment of money orders and bank checks in addition to being able to go through Google Checkout, and we've had an inquiry from a customer who doesn't have a credit card. There are plenty of folks out there who either choose not to have them, or don't really trust the privacy of their information on the internet, I'm thinking. We won't accept personal checks, and we'll only take money orders in US funds - I think this covers our behinds fairly completely.

So I've told her the total amount necessary to buy and ship the product - in this case, the Big Bob Goes Fishing Teapot - and, as they say, "the check is in the mail."

This is already more traffic and business than we ever had at that Other Place, so I'm tickled pink. Of course, the real satisfaction will be when the money order arrives, but I'm sure we've got a transaction in progress here.

So happy, so relieved, so - yes, I'm going to say it here - proud of what we've done in this short time!

This is what a squidoo looks like

I made a Squidoo lens about Wedgwood Jasperware. I still don't quite know what a lens is or what it is supposed to do, but I did it. Along the way I found a site for the Wedgwood museum, which was kind of cool. And I also found out that in the 19th century the company supplied a dental firm in London with the porcelain required to make artificial teeth!

Kind of a neat loop given my experience working in a dental laboratory, and then a dental practice. Synchronicity...