Over the past 40 hours BookScouter.com has experienced some pricing discrepancies for specific vendors, causing the price shown on BookScouter to not reflect the actual price the vendor was offering. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused, and we’re happy to say these issues have been resolved. We take pride in BookScouter being the best resource to sell books and because of this, we want to let you know why this happened. There has been a longtime misconception that BookScouter buys books. In actuality, BookScouter.com is merely a price comparison site. We have no say in the prices offered for books. We use information given to us [not scraped] by each vendor and display that price on our price comparison page in real-time. As a result, when there is a price discrepancy on BookScouter.com, chances are it’s the vendor providing misinformation and not BookScouter attempting to bait and switch users.
When we were first informed of a pricing discrepancy we quickly confirmed the source of the problem and informed the appropriate vendors of our findings. It was then the task of each vendor to find and resolve the issues from their end. Of course, they’ll always have our full cooperation in conducting any tests needed in order to more quickly identify and resolve the problem.
Through this hiccup [of which there will be more], we always appreciate our vigilant users who identify and detail the problem thoroughly. Of course, there are lessons to be learned for everyone, so I’d like to take this opportunity to remind users of an important disclaimer when using BookScouter.com.
“Reasonable attempts are made to make sure that the displayed pricing is accurate. However, you should confirm the price with each site before making any decisions.”
We always encourage users to trust the price on our vendors’ sites over that of the data seen on BookScouter.com. BookScouter requires a lot of moving parts involving data feeds, integrations, authentication, third-party services, and more. As such, it is a very fragile system that can and will experience an occasional problem. While we make every reasonable attempt to ensure things run smoothly all the time, it is inevitable that they will not.
In the event of an outage, hiccup, or something that just seems odd, please continue to report these problems through our contact page, Facebook, Twitter, or directly at support@bookscouter.com.
We apologize for any misinformation that may have flooded our users’ inboxes (BookScouter Deals Notifications), arbitrage buyers who hoped to turn a quick profit, and for sellers who were shocked to find the vendor prices much lower than anticipated. To the few of you who actually saw a price increase, you’re the silver lining in all this.
BookScouter has and always will be a price comparison site to help users make more educated book buying and selling decisions. The final decision, however, belongs to each user. We encourage all users to buy and sell responsibly and, when something doesn’t quite add up, consult the buying or selling vendor directly before making a decision.
Regards,
Dustin Checketts
President
I was quite disappointed to discover the huge discrepancy between the price quoted on you site for a textbooks. com and the price actually offered particularly when other vendors are in fact paying about what the original quote was. While, I see today that price quotes have been changed on your site, that does me no good.
I also see that textbooks.com is making over $125 dollar on the book I am selling them.
Hi Ann! Thank you for the feedback. Know that the data we show on our site is data provided to us by the vendor themselves. While we make every effort to watch for when prices don’t match, the volume of lookups we process daily does not allow us to catch this immediately. If you find a vendor with consistently mis-matched prices, please contact us via our support page and we’ll jump right on it. I appreciate your support!