draggar - 10:43 pm on Jul 28, 2008 (gmt 0)

I've started to sell my friend's books (meaning two books that he has written and had published) on Amazon.com for him. Since he has 100% control over the legal new inventory, we are the only people who can sell them as "new" on Amazon - everyone else had to get their books though him.

There are two books for sale, one is $59 and the other is $79 (I won't go into details) and are more expensive than most of the other books (but all of the others are being sold as "used").

Amazon makes me put a quantity in our "inventory" with our sales page. Which do you think would be better for sales:

A low quantity - this would show that we don't have many left so we would get the impulse buyers plus it would go more along with the other sellers who generally have 1-2 in stock. My friend is worried that people may think that these are older books just collecting dust and we are trying to push out old inventory (books have a published date of 1999 and 2005).

A high inventory - this would show that we do have a large number on hand to sell (which we do) and are serious sellers plus it would give the impression that we have a fresh supply of new books that haven't been poked around, read, played with, on some shelf. My fear is that people would think that we are exaggerating our inventory, trying to flood the market, or wonder why we're charging so much (if you have so many, you'd sell more with lower prices when in reality his profit margin on the books is pretty low to begin with so).

A low inventory would be between 1 and 10 books, maybe not a round number (2-4?) and just update the inventory as they sold.

A higher number would be in the hundreds (200-300).

Which do you think would get more buyers?