Below is a run-down of what the site does as it’s been a while since you have had to work with it…
Currently at www.BookItBuyback.com
You enter ISBNs for books or UPCs for DVDs, VHS Tapes, CDs, Video Games, or Software and click ‘Get Prices’. You get an instant quote on the next page. These prices come from Amazon and are based on the rules we have set up in the admin section at www.BookItBuyback.com/admin (log is admin, password is aaron). It looks at the lowest 1, 2, or 3 prices on Amazon (based on the ‘# to consider’ column) and then the rank of the item on Amazon (if it’s a DVD with a 48000 rank then it looks at the ‘up to 50000’ row) so it knows to consider the bottom 2 prices. Call for further explanation. It would be much easier to understand over the phone.
Currently, there are several problems. Firstly, VHS Tapes, CDs, Video Games, and Software are all being quoted as DVDs for some reason (DVDs are quoted as DVDs and Books are quoted as Books… all other categories just think they are DVDs). Amazon has a separate catalog for each product category and when our site checks the UPC on there it sees what product catalog it’s in so that it knows what set of rules to use for pricing. You can see how the site is creating the quote in detail by entering an ISBN or UPC into the ‘Debug Pricing’ field in the admin area (see login info above). Doing this you can see that all of these categories are coming back as DVD. This worked at some point in the past but clearly isn’t now and I have no idea why; I don’t know of anything that could have been changed that would affect this.
The other issue I mentioned over the phone. Part of the pricing rules is that it says, based on the sales rank, how many of each particular item we are willing to buy. If you look at the book pricing rules, for example, you’ll see that if the sales rank is under 10000, then we are willing to buy a ‘Max Quantity’ of 12. I would like that setup changed to the following:
We need a set of columns that lets us multiply the original quote amount by a percentage to get a discounted amount that we pay for increasing quantities, namely: 31, 26, 21, 16, 11, 6, 3, and 2. So if the ‘Max Quantity’ is set to 20 and someone types in 25 for their available quantity on the site it will say, “We are currently only buying 20 copies of this title from any individual/family/group/business in a 60-day period” and we will show what we are paying for the 20 copies we are willing to buy. That’s pretty much how it works now except that we will need it to show the decreasing amounts that we are paying for the copies, based on the percentages in the columns for 2, 3, 6, 11, 16, and 21. So if we have .9 in the column for a quantity of 2, .85 in the column for 3, .8 in the column for 6, .75 in the column for 11, .7 in the column for 16, and .6 in the column for 21, then it will pay the original quoted price on the 1st copy ($35, for example). Then it will show that we are paying $31.50 for the 2nd copy ($35 x .9), $29.75 for the 3rd, 4th, and 5th copies ($35 x .85), $28 for the 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, an 10th copies ($35 x .8), $26.25 for the 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, and 15th copies ($35 x .75), $24.50 for the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th copies.
We also need a way to link up our current inventory with our buyback site. I’d love to have a separate part of the site that has all of our inventory listed and available for sale with a cart system, etc., and full integration into Monsoon. Andrew, I know you have done something like this in the past. However, I would like the buyback part of the site to check our current inventory when getting a quote so that it can consider that when giving the price. Basically, if we have 10 copies of a book in stock someone tries to get a quote on that same book I would like the buyback quote to reflect that by offering less or not buying the title at all. This can be added later. I really want the BuybackExpress.com site live before getting into this… but I thought you might want to know about it anyway in case it affects any other programming.
