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To create a Product Detail page in the Amazon.com catalog, you must be a registered seller with a Pro Merchant account, which costs $39.95 a month. If you are currently selling or plan to sell at least 40 or 50 items a month on a consistent basis, this account will pay for itself with the elimination of the $.99 per item seller fee. If you are not a Pro Merchant seller, you cannot list items not already in the Amazon catalog.
Don't worry; we'll get to the Camel Management and Diseases book I currently have listed at $995.
At the request of a new bookseller with a question about this very subject, I am writing this post as a tutorial on creating a Product Detail Page in the Amazon.com online retail catalog. Every so often, a bookseller will come across a book for which there is no Product Detail Page, meaning there are no results when you are trying to find a book using the Advanced Search Feature (any book lacking an ISBN number should be found using the Advanced Search feature at the top left hand corner of any page after doing a more general book search using "Search All Departments>Books"). If the results come up empty after conducting an Advanced Search, this usually means either:
Or ideally,
If, on the other hand, you have a copy of a book like the one pictured above: Camel Management and Diseases, published in 2004 by Dar Ammar Book Publisher of Baghdad, Iraq, then you may be onto something. This 455-page reference volume, complete with plenty of photographs, is the most comprehensive and authoritative veterinary reference manual on, well, camels. Before I created a listing last week, there were no copies available via Amazon, BookFinder or Abebooks. I'm not sure what the #1 bookselling website is in Iraq, but I'm going to assume I have a relatively scarce book which I predict there to be at least a reasonable amount of demand for - among the right audience, of course. This book might sit untouched on the shelf for years at a used bookstore here in Wichita, Kansas, but I have no doubt that there is a wealthy camel herder on the outskirts of Baghdad who is just waiting to purchase this book as soon as it becomes available online. At least I'm hoping so.
Now, on to a more reasonable case study, and here I will walk you through the steps of creating your first Product Detail Page. This is something you want to learn how to do correctly from the start, as you will hopefully be doing it often, but most importantly, because Amazon's catalog is already a bit of a jumbled nightmare and you don't want to contribute to the mess. Your goal is to create a clean, properly punctuated, spell-checked and search-friendly listing, complete with photographs and bibliographical information that will ultimately lead to the sale of your book.
So here we have Kansas Farmboy, by Sidney DeVere brown and recently purchased at a local estate sale for $2. I know what you're thinking already - How is this any different from Grandpa Eugene's WWII memoirs? Well, the truth is, it's not much different. Sometimes a bookseller just gets a gut feeling about a book, and can tell a marked difference about the potential of a poorly bound memoir in stapled wrappers with text printed on a copy machine versus a well bound hardcover volume set and designed at an actual printing press with an attractive dust jacket, high quality photographs and footnotes in the text. In other words, this Kansas farmboy knew a little something about the publishing business and what it takes to make an attractive memoir.
Let's get to the steps already:
*Indicates a required field.
There, now double check all of the fields, the spelling of names, your choice of binding, and then submit the form by clicking "Continue." Any required fields you forgot to include need to be filled out before you can go on to the next step.
For the best tutorial I have read to date on photographing books, go
here.
The photographs (up to 9 per product) must be entered from a hard drive and not via a URL. A separate browser will open to complete this step and upload your JPEG or GIF file. You can choose to "Close this Window" once you have completed this step, and then add any other product information or a description (an excerpt from the dust jacket) you may wish to include. I typically save some of this information for my individual product listing to help set my descriptions apart from the crowd.
Congratulations, you have now created your first Product Detail Page! You can now complete your listing description, a step I complete later in my inventory management software. Here is my description, just in case you were wondering: "2008 Perpetua Press. 341pp, bound in blue cloth boards. Good/Fine. This hardcover copy, in an as-new dust jacket, has had the front free endpaper removed from the text block. The book appears to have never been handled apart from this, and remains in excellent reading condition. The text is clean and unmarked, and the binding is sturdy and intact. A relatively scarce account of one man's life growing up on the plains of Kansas. Contents include: Bloomington School, Oil: The Brown Gushers, Wheat Farming during the Depression, Augusta High School, Southwestern College, Truman's Washington, The University of Wisconsin and much more. Also includes many photographs in black and white. 100% customer satisfaction guaranteed. We ship orders daily and securely with delivery confirmation."
Once you have completed your item description (a process you should have been through many times by now), your item will appear available for sale in a very short time, usually within 24 hours.
I will figure out when my copy of Kansas Farmboy becomes available and will report back to everyone. I will also be glad to report back to
you on when it sells!
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