Ask HN: Review our startup, fairbooks.com

12 points·lukeqsee··8 comments

We just launched our new startup, and were hoping for some feedback. It's a textbook buy-back company.

Cool service.

You might want to be careful with the word "guarantee" however -- I entered an example book (0312185480) and your price was $3 while the going used price on Amazon is $7.75 (plus a s&h allowance). I checked the faq for the guarantee details and didn't see anything.

I personally would switch to focusing on ease instead of price since selling books one at a time via Amazon is quite painful.

I agree with the last point. The offered prices are way too low. Their price for ISBN (978-0471676003) was 11$ when the least on Amazon is 29$. So definitely focus on the ease of use

If the ISBN is entered with dashes, it is not fetching the data i guess. It says renter ISBN in the next page.

May be you would want to escape the characters in the input field or use better regex checking. (not allowing anything but ISBNs). I just googled for ISBN regex and there were many decent resources.

Also, many notable flaws with the design. The contact page/add book page/your info page overflows the base wrapper.

I like the idea. Couple of nits: 1. The TOS link refers back to the FAQ. 2. Why not allow search by title? 3. Also it would be nice if the stack of books were pictures of actual books with cover sleeves in it. 4. I know it sounds elementary, but add a picture of how an ISBN looks like.

1. They're still being written...this is an MVP. 4. You'll find that if you click 'what's an ISBN'.

Clickable: http://www.fairbooks.com

I entered an example book for which I got $0. But still I had to go through the same work flow.

what was the isbn?

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