Site interface updates, Bookscouting Guide, upcoming goals, and exciting news for our dedicated Pro users!
Hello and Happy New Year! Alright, so we’re a little late on our New Year’s greetings, but we wanted to make sure all of our ducks were in a row before letting you know what’s in store for the coming year.
We’d love for BookScouter users to support a charity we have been contributing to for many years now. The charity helps elementary school children in the local area receive books during the summer to improve their reading level.
Great news everyone! For a limited time Sell-Textbook.com is offering customers the opportunity to earn 6% bonus cash on buybacks until September 13th, 2015. Use the code “Summer6” at the checkout to claim your bonus.
Here is the path to follow to snag that bonus!
1. Search your ISBN on BookScouter.com.
2. Locate Sell-Textbook and click “Sell.”
3. Continue adding books by following steps 1-2 (new books will automatically be added to your Sell-Textbook cart).
4. When you’re ready to checkout, login to Sell-Textbook, create an account, or proceed via Guest checkout.
5. Type “Summer6″ (without quotes) into the box next to the “Apply Coupon” button.
6. Click “Apply Coupon” and watch your total increase by 6% (Make sure the coupon worked by verifying the price increase in the “Bonus” section right above the total).
That’s all! Just finish up the payment, shipping, and tracking options, and you’ll receive an extra 6% on your buyback order. Head back to BookScouter to rate your experience and share this great offer!
Over the past 40 hours BookScouter.com has experienced some pricing discrepancies for specific vendors, causing the price shown on BookScouter to not reflect the actual price the vendor was offering. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused, and we’re happy to say these issues have been resolved. We take pride in BookScouter being the best resource to sell books and because of this, we want to let you know why this happened. There has been a longtime misconception that BookScouter buys books. In actuality, BookScouter.com is merely a price comparison site. We have no say in the prices offered for books. We use information given to us [not scraped] by each vendor and display that price on our price comparison page in real-time. As a result, when there is a price discrepancy on BookScouter.com, chances are it’s the vendor providing misinformation and not BookScouter attempting to bait and switch users.
When we were first informed of a pricing discrepancy we quickly confirmed the source of the problem and informed the appropriate vendors of our findings. It was then the task of each vendor to find and resolve the issues from their end. Of course, they’ll always have our full cooperation in conducting any tests needed in order to more quickly identify and resolve the problem.
Through this hiccup [of which there will be more], we always appreciate our vigilant users who identify and detail the problem thoroughly. Of course, there are lessons to be learned for everyone, so I’d like to take this opportunity to remind users of an important disclaimer when using BookScouter.com.
“Reasonable attempts are made to make sure that the displayed pricing is accurate. However, you should confirm the price with each site before making any decisions.”
We always encourage users to trust the price on our vendors’ sites over that of the data seen on BookScouter.com. BookScouter requires a lot of moving parts involving data feeds, integrations, authentication, third-party services, and more. As such, it is a very fragile system that can and will experience an occasional problem. While we make every reasonable attempt to ensure things run smoothly all the time, it is inevitable that they will not.
In the event of an outage, hiccup, or something that just seems odd, please continue to report these problems through our contact page, Facebook, Twitter, or directly at support@bookscouter.com.
We apologize for any misinformation that may have flooded our users’ inboxes (BookScouter Deals Notifications), arbitrage buyers who hoped to turn a quick profit, and for sellers who were shocked to find the vendor prices much lower than anticipated. To the few of you who actually saw a price increase, you’re the silver lining in all this.
BookScouter has and always will be a price comparison site to help users make more educated book buying and selling decisions. The final decision, however, belongs to each user. We encourage all users to buy and sell responsibly and, when something doesn’t quite add up, consult the buying or selling vendor directly before making a decision.
Regards,
Dustin Checketts
President
BookScouter continues to grow in traffic every season. With this growth comes increased customer service inquiries. One of the more frequent inquiries we receive asks us for our recommendation to whom they should sell a specific book. Despite BookScouter user reviews and price comparisons, it became clear that users wanted a vendor recommendation from BookScouter.
This proves challenging when our recommendation might change based on the book you might have searched; so in true BookScouter fashion, we’re allowing data to tell you who we are most likely to recommend. Therefore, we conceptualized what we’re calling the “Featured Vendor Box”. This box is BookScouter.com’s recommended vendor for a particular book and will adjust dynamically for each individual book based on a key set of criteria.
The BookScouter Featured Vendor Box takes into account the following criteria to determine which vendor we show as our recommendation to sellers:
- Status – Only vendors with Preferred status are eligible to appear in the Featured Vendor Box. If no preferred vendors qualify, the box will not appear.
- Price – Price is often the first and most important factor to a seller; thus it is the most heavily weighed data point in our current revision.
- Feedback** – We take into account a vendor’s BookScouter.com feedback score as means of quantifying the quality of service, as determined by BookScouter users.
- Speed* – Speed favors vendors who pay sellers more promptly as an average measure of time from when the book shipped to when payment was disbursed.
- Payment* – Vendors with more ways to pay sellers will appear more often than those with fewer ways of paying sellers, all other criteria being equal.
- Shipping* – Vendors offering free shipping with more carriers will appear more often than those with fewer carriers, all other criteria being equal.
* Not yet implemented. ** Partially implemented using placeholder data.
There are many other criteria we could add to make a very complex and comprehensive algorithm, but we would like to to keep things simple and transparent. Because this is a fairly new feature, expect the Featured Vendor Box to undergo further tweaking and adjusting over the next several months. However, we’ll post updates here when changes are made so that 1) users can know we’re performing the same due diligence they would (or should) do before selling their books to a vendor, and 2) that vendors know what criteria they’re being ranked upon and have a clear plan of action to improve their chances at appearing in the BookScouter Featured Vendor Box.
NOTE: Registered users are able to hide the Featured Vendor Box so that the ISBN pricing table shows higher on the page, limiting or even eliminating the need to scroll to easily compare vendor prices. To do this, simply visit the “My Profile” page and opt to “hide” the Featured Vendor.
Happy scouting,
Dustin Checketts
President