I keep hearing weird noises through the house while I'm typing this. What is that? There is a definite scratching noise and then the bags of books behind me on the floor are settling or something and making grocery sack noises. Freeeeaaaky.

ANYway -

A necessary shout-out...that no one else will appreciate except Trent. But it bears explaining, just in case someone reads on after being warned.

Trent will appreciate knowing that after all this time, that that thing, the thing we were doing..you know? Mark has finally done it. It's magnificent. It's like we just discovered electricity. Thanks for the advice.

Hard-core geeks can read on for the story - - everyone else just move along. There is nothing to see here.

One of the main focuses (focuses? Dy?) of selling books on half.com is remaining competitive. It's like the most important thing. When you bring up a book for sale on half, you get a list of the 4 sellers with the lowest price in one of 5 categories. Brand New, Like New, etc.. Only the 4 lowest priced books will appear on the first page. As a rule, people are looking for the book in the best condition for very little money. We always strive to be the lowest price in any category. Like this book. We are the lowest priced seller in any category, even the ones with books in lesser condition. Ours is "very good" at $2.20, while someone in only "good" condition has it at $2.50. But as other sellers come along, they undercut you, and you slip down the list. A buyer will likely pick the person at the top of the list, who has the lowest price.

So....the point is maintaining that place in the que is very important. We constantly have to go back manually through 8000+ listings to monitor if anyone has undercut us. If so, we -again- manually have to go in and edit the price. Several minutes and a few clicks later, we're the lowest priced again. That is till someone comes along and prices below us. Which we won't know about until the next time we check prices. It's horrible, we do it only when we notice sales go way down. I've only done it once. Ever.

Do you know how much time this takes? It's grueling. It sucks. It's the most boring part of what we do, and yet it's completely necessary to survive. We have to continually monitor, or we won't sell anything. We always notice a rush of sold books after we do a thorough sweep, because suddenly we are the lowest priced seller again.

So....(my point and I do have one) is that I talked to Trent some time ago about some databases we were trying to build. He had a lot of good suggestions, and his advice eventually led to the Books for Sale link that is always up over there.....That document was no easy task to produce, let me tell you. But after it was done we could see the potential for a program to do what we really wanted it to do, which was take the "details" info (link) on the left side of the excel document and constantly "call" half.com and monitor the 4 lowest priced sellers on every single page for us.

And after all this time, Trent...he finally cracked it. Just now. Mark Has been working hard on this for a long time, trying to write a program that does exactly what we need. And he did it!! It's amazing. It scrolls through the entire inventory list (the excel doc) and lets us know which books we have been undercut on. Going back into edit them takes less than half the time. We're so jazzed. We're excited that this could make a nice difference in time spent, and maybe make a difference in sales. (which are doing quite well anyway, but hey..) So I just have to say a big thanks to Trent for planting the seeds that eventually led to this fun tool we have to play with now.

*wink.