Sold Books Appearing Online

When previously sold books appear as 'for sale' online, it is likely due to the records in your inventory management program being “out of sync” with the inventory we have in our online database. Below you will find an outline of reasons this happens, and tips for preventing it in the future.

Potential Causes

The following practices can result in orders for previously sold books:

• Deleting listings, rather than marking them as “sold,” in your inventory management system.

• Re-using BookIDs.

• Not sending an upload with the update, or making the update in our online inventory management system, but not mirroring it in your offline program (such as HomeBase).

•  Using the “On Hold” status, or deleting a listing, in HomeBase 2.3 rather than marking the book as 'sold'.

• Accidentally restoring the listing through the Online Listings Manager.

• If using an inventory management system other than HomeBase, accidentally using multiple quantity will cause a sold book to remain online.

Preventing Orders for Previously Sold Books

Follow these tips to prevent orders for previously sold books: 

• Make sure to mark your books as “sold.”  Deleting them won’t trigger an update on our website, resulting in sold books still appearing in the search results.

• After you sell a book, retire the BookID.  Each ID should be unique to that listing.

• Provide regular, incremental updates for your added, updated, and sold/removed listings.

• Purge and reload you online inventory two or three times a year to catch any listings that may have been missed due to transmission errors.

• Remember that the “On Hold” status in HomeBase 2.3 is for your reference only, and does not remove a listing from our search results. (This issue has been resolved with HomeBase 3.0.) If you need to temporarily remove a listing from AbeBooks, please mark it as 'sold'.  You can re-set it to “for sale” if it doesn’t sell.

• We recommend that you use only one inventory management system.  Some booksellers use both our online system (“List and maintain” from the Members Menu) and another program such as HomeBase 2.3.  These systems don’t coordinate with each other, and updates made online will be over-written by your next upload.

 Inventory Management Overview

If you receive an order for a previously sold book, you have the option to exclude up to 3 orders from your Completion Rating in a rolling 12-month period. To exclude such an order, simply follow the instructions below:

1. [Sign on] to your AbeBooks account.

2. Select [Your Sales] from the Members Menu.

3. Click [View Your Completion Rating].

4. Use the drop-down menus and order types (Unfulfilled, Returned, etc.) to drill-down to the order you'd like to exclude.

5. When you find the order you'd like to exclude, click the [Request status change] link on the right side of the page.

6. Enter your comments for the request, and click the [Submit] button.  Confirm your request on the next page.

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