Managing Sold Books

Efficient management of sold books is a key component in maintaining a high completion rate and in providing a positive buyer experience. Ensuring sold books are delisted promptly ensures fewer rejected orders, a higher completion rate, and fewer disappointed buyers.

Books sold through AbeBooks are automatically removed from your inventory. However, it is still important that you either mark the book as ‘sold’ or decrement the quantity to ‘0’ in your inventory management system and upload the changes to us.

Books sold through another online marketplace or in your physical store will remain in your AbeBooks inventory until you update the status and upload the changes to us.

Marking Books as Sold:

HomeBase® 2.3:

Listings in HomeBase 2.3 must be marked as ‘Sold’ and the change uploaded to AbeBooks. Using the ‘On hold’ status or deleting the listing completely will not remove the book from your online inventory.

HomeBase® 3.0:

There are two options for marking books as ‘Sold’ in HomeBase 3.0:

1. Update the quantity to ‘0’ and upload the changes.

2. Delete the listing completely and upload the changes.

Online Listings Manager:

1. Locate the sold listing. You can search by title, author, or your Book ID Number.

2. Click [Delete Listing].

3. Review the screen that shows the books to be deleted.

4. If the selection is correct, click the [Yes, Delete] button.

Custom Conversions:

If you are using an inventory management system not listed above, there are three options for marking books as ‘sold’:

1. Include a status field when you set up your database or spreadsheet, for example – For Sale or Sold. You could name the field “Status” and use S for Sold and F for For Sale;  A for add and D for delete; or Y for available and N for not available.
 
2. If you do not want to include a status field in your database or spreadsheet, you could send a file that you have named ‘delete.txt’ and include exactly the same fields as you do when you upload a regular (for sale) file. 
 
3. Send a file containing a list of the book numbers you want to have deleted. Each book number must be on a line by itself. The file should be named delnum.txt or delnum.tab. (The extension should match the custom conversion we have set up for you, if there is one).

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