Alibris Review

Alibris is an okay site for buying books.  I bought a text-book for my husband to use in a college class from them a couple of weeks ago.  I shopped long and hard in both brick and mortar stores and online sites for the best deal on the book and found a GREAT deal on Alibris.com.  The book was just under 50 dollars, when it was over 100 dollars in the campus store and on many other sites.  At the same time I was shopping for the entire series of Indiana Jones paperback books as a gift for my sister, and while I was able to find them on Alibris, and the books themselves were cheap (a few of them were even available used for only a couple of dollars a piece), the shipping would have REALLY added up. 

Alibris isn't just a big company with a huge stock of their own books for sale like Barnes&noble.com, it's more like Amazon or Half.com.  It's a site where a lot of different booksellers can list their products and the products ship directly from each different seller to your door.  I wasn't crazy about that. 

While I does make for a great selection, it means if you order multiple items from multiple sellers, your order will likely come in a bunch of separate shipments and there's no opportunity for cheap shipping.  Most sites that are a single company's site have a cheap or free shipping option if you buy a certain amount.  Alibris offers cheaper shipping if the items all come from one seller.  Shipping was 3 something for the first item, then less (like a dollar and a half or two bucks) for each item after that from the same seller.   If you happened to find what you wanted all coming from the same seller, it might work out, but my order of 13 books was going to come from 11 sellers. When I added it all up, with the shipping and all, even with buying over half of the books used, it was going to cost me more than buying all new at other sites except for the text book.  Even though some of the books were priced  several dollars cheaper than some sites,  at sites where I could combine the shipping for a discount (I got it free at barnes&noble!), the difference was more than offset.  If you were only going to buy a single inexpensive book, it might be the way to go.  If you were going to have to pay full price shipping no matter where you go, Alibris might be the best deal.  It was on the text book.  It's definitely worth checking, but be sure to do the math.   

The site was fairly easy to navigate if you used the quick buy button.  It just automatically chooses you the cheapest book and lets you hit a button and add it to your cart.  When I tried to surf around and find the titles I was looking for from the same sellers to try and save on shipping it got really complicated in a real hurry. 

I hated that I had to enter my entire shipping information and even my credit card information before the site would let me total my cart in a way that would show me my total with shipping included.  Your card isn't charged until you authorize it to be, but I don't having to give it to them before I have a total.  Lots of sites make it really easy to see your sub-total and your whole total in your basket before you check out.  Either Alibris accidently makes it much harder to shop,or they are deliberately trying to get you farther into the check-out process before you see how much the shipping will add up. 

I looked and looked all over the site to see if my credit card info is made available to each and every merchant an order would be coming from or just to alibris and never could see which the case is.  I wish they made that clear.  I don't really want my info being made available to individual merchants I don't know or have any reason to trust.  I'm willing to take a chance with big, trusted, company sites.  I'm a little more wary of individual sellers.  Ideally, the site would let customers have the option to use Paypal, so no one but Paypal would see the credit card info.   It would make me feel a lot more confident using the site.

The text book shipped very quickly.  Less than a week.  It was in perfect new condition just as it was described and was carefully packaged.

I recommend looking at Alibris if you're shopping for a book, it may be a great deal.  But I don't recommend using it as the only site you check.  Shop around and compare deals at other sites with the shipping factored in before you order at Alibris.