Manage Your Textbook Inventory Proactively

Managing your inventory proactively is one of the smartest things you can do during textbook season. Good inventory management can save you the hassle of cancelled listings and returned orders.

Here are some tried-and-true suggestions from experienced sellers:

• Determine which books may be popular and make sure you have enough stock available at all times. Our Amazon.com Textbook team posted an announcement this November to help sellers prepare for the Winter/Spring Textbook Season. The post provides insight into common issues in the textbook market, gives a list of the Top 100 bestselling textbooks from the Fall 2009 season, and includes information about which books have recently been replaced with newer editions. Read the Seller Success post!

• Students need their books fast! Don't list textbooks that you can't ship right away, and update your inventory daily to avoid cancelled orders.

• To avoid misrepresenting your items, match each textbook by ISBN to the correct Amazon.com catalog page. Sellers must match their book to the ISBN, title, author, edition, binding, publisher and publication date on the catalog detail page exactly. Even if the title and author appear on the page you're viewing, if the ISBN of your book is not the same as the one on the detail page, you will be listing the wrong edition or binding. Mismatched listings can result in a poor customer experience, which can lower your Customer Metrics.

  A good way to find the right detail pages for your textbooks is by using the handy searches on the main Textbooks store page on Amazon.com. Here's what to look for:

  

  If you enter your book's ISBN into our system and don't find an exact match, it means that there is currently no page for that book in the catalog and you can't list it on Amazon.com. If you are a Pro Merchant subscriber, you may be able to create a new catalog page for your book. See our Seller Help pages for details.

• Don't list prohibited editions of textbooks. Most book sellers have different editions of textbooks in their inventory. Most editions are fine to sell if the detail page is in the Amazon.com catalog for them, but some types of editions may not be sold on Amazon.com at all. For instance, you probably know that you can't list scanned copies of books, but remember that teacher's editions and international editions of textbooks are also prohibited. Listings for prohibited textbook editions will be cancelled by Amazon and can result in action against your account. See our Textbook Selling Policies.

• Describe your textbook accurately and list with the right condition. Take a look through your copy and see if there are notes in the margin, highlighting or underlining (or even doodles) on any of the pages. Is the binding intact? Is there residue from stickers on the cover? Review our Condition Guidelines for Books and follow them to the letter to avoid unnecessary A-to-z Guarantee claims from buyers who receive textbooks that are materially different than described.

• Keep your listing details up to date. When you need to, use the tools in your Seller Account to edit the item description, item price, or the shipping methods you offer. Up-to-date listing details mean fewer potential order problems.

• If you use inventory uploads, remember that all items in a feed must be processed before any of the changes appear on Amazon.com. If you have time-sensitive changes, upload those first in a separate feed, and upload changes that are not time-sensitive in a later feed. See our Inventory Management FAQs for more tips.