

Ask HN: Review our startup, fairbooks.com - lukeqsee

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

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sandipagr
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

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ramanujam
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.

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learner4life
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.

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

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lukeqsee
Clickable: <http://www.fairbooks.com>

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

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sethwartak
what was the isbn?

