I’m going to start this off with a little confession. I am in my second year of grad school and I just sold back textbooks online for the first time last fall. I would usually rent books unless it was cheaper to buy, and then I would try to resell them to students at my school the next semester or two. If no one wanted them, I just took them to my parents house and stuck them in a pile, until this summer I had about 15 unwanted books in that pile… oops. So it was time to figure out how to sell my textbooks and it was… surprisingly easy?!
If you have used Slugbooks to buy the cheapest textbook, I found the buyback version of that. I used BookScouter and found it really easy just to put in the ISBN and have it give me the option of what website would give me the most money. After entering all my books, I discovered that Amazon, Sell Back Your Book, and Books Run would give me the most money for all my books, so I decided to sell them all to one of those three places so I wouldn’t have to ship out like 7 packages just for an extra dollar or two that another place would have given me.
All three of these places had pretty good reviews and would give me a free label to ship the books in so I didn’t even have to pay for shipping. All I had to do was find a few boxes, pack the books up, and take them in to a UPS or FedEx store.
Which one would I recommend the most?
Amazon received my package and gave me my gift card 2 days after I shipped the books in, and gave me the full amount I quoted. The only downside is they only give a gift card and do not pay with PayPal like the other two, so if you want cash, Amazon isn’t your best bet. However, since Amazon carries so many things, this wasn’t a big deal to me.
Sell Back Your Book may be my favorite because they gave me the full amount quoted and paid me within 4 days.
Books Run would be the one I recommend the least, but if they are offering the most for your book I would still go for them because my experience was not bad. However, they seem to be the pickiest and took the longest to pay me. It has been 5 days as I am writing this post, and while I do know now how much they are paying me, it will still take another 2-3 days before I see it in my PayPal. They also took off money from one of my books from what they originally quoted for “water damage,” when I am 99% sure the book did not have any water damage. However, it wasn’t a brand new book, and they only took $4 off, so it isn’t that big of a deal.
Overall, I would definitely sell more books this way if I end up having more I want to sell, and I recommend looking around to see if you have any you want to sell to make a little extra money! I sent in 11 different books and received around $120 for all of them, which was enough to cover the cost of my textbooks for last fall. Score!
Have you ever sold old textbooks online? Did you have a good experience? Tell me in the comments below!
xo, Scarlett