Inventory Management Overview and Best Practices
Regardless of which method you choose to manage your inventory, we recommend that all booksellers adhere to the following Best Practices:
Important Note: Use only one method of inventory management and use that method consistently. Switching between multiple methods, i.e. Online Inventory Management for deleting sold books, HomeBase® 2.3 for updates to existing listings, and HomeBase® 3.0 for uploading new listings, will cause changes made by one method to be overwritten by changes made by another. This can result in discrepancies in your inventory, missing listings, orders for previously sold books, and, ultimately, poor completion.
Inventory Management Options:
1. HomeBase - Our free inventory management software for cataloguing books, maintaining a customer database, and creating invoices. Technical support included. With HomeBase you can keep a detailed list of your inventory, print your catalogs, and easily export your book data. Features exclusive to AbeBooks member booksellers: Use of ISBN Look-up and Price Comparison tools! Visit HomeBase 3.0 Online Help for addtional information. 2. Online Inventory Management - Ideal for booksellers listing less than 500 books, who would like to enter their books directly online. ISBN look-up featrure is also available. For further information, see Using Online Inventory Management. 3. Individual conversion of your book data - Should you already have a customised inventory system such as Booktrakker, Amazon, BookRouter - or use a program such as Excel, Access, or Filemaker to list your books, we can create a conversion specifically for your data format. Simply send us a copy of your first file, in tab delimited text format, together with a field description (1 = book ID, 2 = author, 3 = title, 4 = publisher, etc.). Please remember to include the type of software you are using. We will check your data and get back to you if we have any questions. For further information see Required Data Structure. 4. XML-Interface (API) - For those with a high volume of sales, we also offer a special XML-interface (API) that allows direct communication with the AbeBooks Server. The system ensures seamless integration of your AbeBooks business into your own order and inventory management system. Please contact us directly for further information on this service. 5. FillZ - If you are planning to sell across multiple marketplaces, you might also want to consider FillZ. You can try it during a 30-day trial. FillZ helps with inventory management, re-pricing and order management across multiple marketplaces. Visit FillZ.com
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