BookScouter was mentioned today on the MSN Money Personal Finance Site. The BookScouter mention was on tip 5 and related to decluttering your home and selling your used books back online. Welcome to you new visitors! We hope that you’re able to reduce some clutter around your home and make some money while doing so.

We’ve just finished making some changes to the Preferred merchants listed on the site. With the number of buyback sites growing every month, we introduced the Preferred Vendor concept two years ago, and it has worked out really well. It makes the site faster for everybody, and it sends more users to those sites that can handle the higher volume and consistently have good user ratings. They also provide BookScouter a commission so that the site can continue to be used by anyone for free.

Preferred vendors on the site receive about 10x more requests than the others. As such, there are a lot of companies that would like to obtain that designation. Ultimately this also helps you, as a user on the site. One of the requirements to become a preferred vendor include keeping an excellent feedback rating, which means that companies should work with you to resolve any issues to avoid receiving negative feedback.

With these recent changes we’ve added a few new preferred vendors who have demonstrated that they can provide an excellent customer experience and handle the increased order volume. We’ve also removed a couple of vendors who didn’t meet our requirements or who weren’t interested in featuring the buyback side of their business. I feel like we have a really good mix of companies now, many of which specialize in different areas, so that we can display the best prices by default.

As always, if you’d like to customize the list of vendors that show up by default, you can sign up for a free account and select the vendors that you’d like to see every time.

Amazon sellers are able to obtain product and pricing information through something called a product price API. This is basically a way for computers to talk to each other over the Internet. All scouting tools, listing tools, repricing tools, use Amazon Price API in order to obtain information about their products.

It’s time for me to make some modifications to the BookScouter Android and iOS applications, and I’m looking for some skilled programmers that are interested in working on these. If you are a developer, or know of one, please Let me know. I’m hoping to get started on some changes pretty soon to add some new functionality to the apps in the next month or two.

I’ve just completed moving the site over to the newer, faster servers, and everything appears to be working fine. There was no downtime that I was aware of, and everything went really smoothly. I’ve not done any concrete testing of the speed yet, but the site seems to be functioning a lot faster now. I’ve still got a few optimizations to make in the code to take advantage of some new features. The site is fairly complicated, so there is a chance that I missed something. I’ll be keeping a close eye on some log files over the next couple days, but if you see anything strange, please let me know about it so that I can make sure that it is running correctly.

For anybody that is interested in the technical details, the new servers run CentOS 6 which includes updates to many applications. I was specifically looking for some of the latest MySQL and PHP features that weren’t available in the CentOS 5 standard repository. The physical servers are also much more powerful and have more memory and faster/bigger disks as well. They are hosted with RimuHosting.com in a very well-connected data center in Dallas TX.

I know the site has been having some issues lately and for the past week or more have been working on installing some new servers. I’m ready to move the site over to the new servers this evening. I’ll begin working on it around 9pm EST, and it will probably take a few hours. I don’t expect there to be any down time but wanted to give a heads-up just in case their becomes any issues. After the upgrades have been completed, I’ll be able to optimize a few more processes. It may take me another day or two to get that completed, so hopefully everything is running perfectly on Monday. I’ve specifically chosen to make the changes on a Friday night and over the weekend to try and minimize the possible disruption.