During a period of time, you allow buyers and sellers to trade the books between themselves in a room. Because students don’t like to wait all day for a buyer to come, you work with a sticker system. The seller leaves its books in the room with a sticker on it, where you specify the price of the book, the bank account number and the mail address of the seller. Later that day or week buyers can come to the room, if any of the books they are looking for is available, they can buy it. To make sure everything gets paid properly, a person of the student association supervises everything.
All the books which are not sold by the end of the trade period can be picked up by the sellers again. We’ve learned from previous tryouts at Groep T, that, as the demand for second hand books is rather large, the amount of remaining books is rather small.
Little hassle for students
Price flexibility
No storage or financial risk
Little work
Short hand-in period
Short buy period
Limited communication opportunities
We discuss each factor applied to this system.
Deciding the length of this trading period is up to the Cudi. It can vary between a few hours to several days. Obviously, the longer you make this period, the more accessible for students to hand in, and buy books using this system. The tradeoff is that you need a longer supervising period.
Same here, the longer the trading period the better.
Apart from the period, this system can be convenient for the students, if the amount of available books is sufficiently large. If, for example, a student can come to campus and buy three out of its five books second hand, he/she did a great deal, without spending too much time on it. The remaining books he/she can buy using the first hand system, while he/she is still on campus.
Communication about the second hand system is the key to success. For this system, everything happens during the first week of the semester. This week is occupied with a lot of activities, arranging ISP and your residence, and few people check their mails or go to campus these days. This reduces the possibilities of communicating about the system, and is therefore the main drawback of this system.
In order to have a successful second hand system, you need a sort of campaign of several days prior to collecting books. Unfortunately, this is not possible during the first week.
The basic laws of offer and demand apply here, as the students can set the prices of books themselves, the Cudi’s don’t have to bother about this.
No filtering is required. All books can be handed in. Books in a bad state will simply be worth less. Because of the price flexibility, students can compensate for this by selling it at a lower price.
There is no storage required. All books are kept in the room until the trade period is over. If your period is longer than one day and the room cannot be locked, a small storage room is required.
The buyer transfers the money to the IBAN of the seller. The Cudi is not a financial intermediary, so no transaction hassle involved in this system.
As the Cudi is not the financial intermediary, no commission can be charged.
The Cudi does not buy any books from the students, so no financial risks involved.
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