How do I price books using the benefits of technology?

I have been the "The Book Pricer" person (in pre-internet days) and I have been the reselling "highway robber" and -- and your thinking about this is totally wrong. Your premise of "The store is losing money to these customers" could not be more off the mark. They are probably your best customers. +1 "I spent far more time weeding out books we wouldn't even bother selling than I did trying to find books that might be worth $300"... The value of a book is not simply $X. The value of a book in a store where I have to sift through dusty ex-bestsellers is not the same as the value of a book that I can have delivered to my home in a few mouse clicks. The resellers are adding value to the goods when they inventory them and make them easily available to people who do not have the inclination/ability/etc to rifle through stacks of used books until they find something they like. "This book sells for $50 on biblio.com" means that that book sells for $50 on biblio.com, not that that book is worth $50. A thrift store I go to, which is run entirely by volunteers and which funds a small rural hospital, started a thing last year where a volunteer is, unfortunately, looking up eBay prices for records. The records now have little notes stating eBay prices with shipping, and an "Our Price: $...!" somewhat lower, and the result is that the records sit there for months. Record resellers cross the place off their list, and nobody -- not the store, not the resellers, not people who like records -- is benefitting. I nearly never buy records but I enjoy browsing and it is still a strike against the store for me because same records on every visit = very boring. Cutting the odds of a "find" to zero will be obvious to all, and even the non-reselling customers will look elsewhere if you contract out cherry-picking. Make peace with your place in the retail food chain, and focus on turnover and volume -- that's where you can distinguish yourself from your competition and do a good job in your niche.

I apologize in advance because I'm about to Not Answer the Question, but: Are you sure you have to fight this? Are you really "Losing money" because these resellers are purchasing books to resell them? I mean, they get books, you (or, I assume, your nonprofit) get the money, everybody wins.... right? The big danger is if you raise your prices based on Amazon prices, you've (probably) lost sales, and you're definitely not going to sell as many as the resellers could. My childhood library has a similar setup - donated books are sold at very simple price points. Rather than fight the resellers, they're embraced/exploited - stock is sold off at extreme discount at the start of summer, and new books primarily shelved for the fall. So resellers (or anyone, really, but they're the targets) can come in and have first dibs before the "First" sale of the year - for a $50 up-front cost, plus of course all the book sales themselves. Is there anything you could do similarly, that you can use to leverage the resellers rather than treating as an enemy people who are probably very good customers?

When I originally wrote this question I thought I was asking "How do I quickly look up book prices with minimal fuss(specifically on Amazon)?" I was looking for answers in that vein and that is not what I got. Instead I got answers giving me totally different viewpoints for approaching the larger situation as well as alternate paths to solve my perceived problem. I didn't even get one answer about the Amazon API's like I was originally hoping for. Among everything else you let me think past my narrow categorization of resellers as "The Enemy". You guys are amazing. You brought me out of my little cave and showed me the greater light. Thank you so very much.

I'll cop to not having read the other answers here before adding my two cents but that's because part of my day job is actually selling books on amazon (and in store) for a non-profit. I just wanted to give you an idea of how WE do it so that maybe you could see that even though this is an organization staffed by volunteers, you can do this too. Here is our process, with a breakdown in time it takes to perform each task: -- Sort books. Once you've been at it for a while you'll get a really good feel for what's "amazon-able" and what isn't. In the beginning, I'd advise not sorting them at all. Just check everything in decent condition on amazon. When we sort it takes a volunteer about half an 8 hour day to sort through probably 2000 books. We sort once a week. -- List the suckers. This literally takes a whole of 2 seconds per book and is so easy that even someone with very little computer savvy can do it. We don't list anything that's worth less than $1.50 -- this ensures we don't lose money but you can do a little math and set your own price point. We have a volunteer that lists for me -- once a week she spends about 2 hours and lists about 300 books. She also spends some of that time repricing. -- We have a heat printer to keep costs down and shipping a single book takes about 15 seconds. That process is incredibly easy as well. I shipped about 50 books this morning an hour, I think. Honestly, if you're looking to make the most money on these donations and are concerned about the resellers stepping on your profit, then this is the way to go. We have 3 people that do this job. Each dedicates a couple / few hours a week to it. We probably sell 200 books a month and our PROFIT is usually around $2000 even in a bad month. I think once you give it a shot (and there's no harm in that -- starting slow and seeing if this is indeed a viable thing and worth your time) you'll see that when you're dealing with a non-profit with an over-abundance of books, it's the way to go if you're looking to get the most money.

I am a little confused by this statement... "The store is losing money to these customers. " You are losing money due to your pricing. Not the customers, right? I mean, would you lose less money if they didn't come in and buy these books? If you priced these books according to the market value they might just sit on the shelf forever. The reason these people are buying them is because they can resell them. So why not just charge $5 a book and everyone is a winner. You don't have to tax your staff to much with maximising profits on the books, the books will still move off the shelves. I would think the last thing you'd want is to spend umpteen bajillion hours pricing books and then having them just sit there on a shelf and in the span of a year be worth nothing when colleges stop using them as text books or whatever is driving the price up.

Why don't you just scan the bar codes and have the staff apply some very simple rule by hand, such as "if the Amazon price is over $5, write down half that price on a post-it note and stick it inside the front cover," and otherwise use your regular $1/$2 practice? Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good - the important part is getting price data, it is way-way secondary to build up an electronic database of prices or a fully automated pricing workflow. As to having problems with bar code scanning apps, sorry to hear that. Maybe try using the latest iPhone / android device in the room, and making sure you scan in a well-lighted spot? I just scanned a book with my Amazon Mobile app in less than a second; barcode scanners are not uniformly bad.

I think your premise is flawed, as previous responses have indicated. However, I will attempt to answer your question. Why not just use the reseller applications to do what you want? A common one is BookScouter, which is available for https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bookscouter&hl=en and https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bookscouter-mobile/id366508853?mt=8 - for free even! You don't even need a barcode scanner - you can use the device's camera instead. It's pre-existing, and it will give you an idea of how to price the books.

If you're ultimately just interested in turning donated books into cash, and don't want anything to do with Amazon: Powell's Books in Portland OR has http://www.powells.com/sellonline/ where you can just enter a bunch of ISBNs for the books you want to sell; they'll notify you which ones they want, and then you ship them out, and get cash for them.

I worked for a nonprofit bookstore and they sold things for what they could get for them, which was closely tied to the price of the books online. The store had an Amazon store and entire online order fulfillment department. I worked for a similar project and it was a shit-ton of work and a real nightmare. If you switch over to online sales (which you'll need to do to compete with the resellers), you will need dedicated staff. You'll be updating your items on amazon constantly, you'll be going to the post office constantly, you'll be at risk of getting bad reviews from buyers if you are not as fast as someone who runs a for-profit, non-volunteer operation. Here is what I would suggest: cull the most valuable books and sell them on Amazon. You can quickly develop an eye for this, it cuts down on how much online sales you are doing because you are not selling all of them online, and you'll still make some money while keeping at least some of the sales from resellers. Actually, I'm much more about "keeping books cheap so that poor people can afford them both because some poor folks like to read and because reselling is a job that a lot of low-income/unemployed people do", and I've been against upselling books every time I've been part of a book charity.