Sell Your College Textbooks on Ebay!

Many people emphasize buying your textbooks for less to save money. You probably don't want to keep your textbooks forever though. So why not get as much as you can when you sell them back too?

If you sell your books back to the school bookstore, they often boast that you can receive up to 50% of the purchase price back. But the key words there are "up to". You probably won't get 50% back. Even if you do, is 50% really the best you can do?

I often sell my textbooks to friends or other students on campus. At the beginning of this quarter, I decided I wanted to try and sell a bunch of textbooks on Ebay to get more money. So I started off my experiment by listing 10 books for sale (8 textbooks and 2 paperbacks that are often required reading in college). I was no stranger to Ebay. I have purchased many items on Ebay, including a few textbooks. I have also sold quite a few items on Ebay, including a calculus textbook that I was able to get back roughly 80% of the purchase price for. So I knew that Ebay could work, I had just been lazy before.

A lot of people seem to think listing things on Ebay is really difficult. They think you'll need to spend all day listing just a few items, take a bunch of photos, pay huge fees, and then check your email constantly as soon as your items are up. This is not the case, it's actually really easy to sell your textbooks on Ebay. You just need to set up an Ebay account and start selling. For textbooks, you can get the entire description by typing in the ISBN number of the book. That even gives you a stock photo of the textbook to use in your listing. It tells your buyers what edition the book is and can even generate the title for you.

You'll still need to say if the book is new or used, but other than that, you're pretty much all set. Then you decide how to ship the item (I'd recommend something at least as fast as UPS Ground, because college students often think of buying their books at the last minute), the price you'll charge for shipping (you can calculate it for different areas or just use a standard fee), and what type of payments you'll accept (for speedy transactions, I'd suggest setting up a PayPal account).