Selling secondhand books online has never been so easy… or so frustrating. Easy, because today there are dozens of platforms that allow you to upload your titles in minutes. Frustrating, because when you go from “I want to sell a few books” to “I have hundreds or thousands,” the process becomes an endless tunnel of forms, photos, and repeated descriptions.
And that's where most booksellers, collectors, and independent sellers crash and burn.
🛒 The most popular platforms for selling used books (Spain)
Each one has its own audience, style, and ecosystem. They're perfect for beginners, but they all share one problem: manual upload of products.
- Hamelin — Very geared towards used books, easy to use, but manual uploading one by one.
- Bubok — More focused on self-publishing, but also allows selling physical books.
- Todocoleccion — A classic for collectors, but its panel is not designed for large volumes.
- Wallapop — Ideal for local sales, but zero automation.
- Vinted — It has grown a lot, but it is still manual and slow for large catalogs.
These platforms work very well if you have 10, 20 or even 50 books. But if you have 300, 1,000 or 5,000, Things change.
⏳ The real problem: uploading books manually is not feasible
Each book requires:
- Qualification
- Author
- Editorial
- Year
- ISBN
- Synopsis
- Condition of the copy
- Photos
- Price
- Category
And repeat this hundreds of times It's torture. It's not just time-consuming: kills motivation and it hinders the growth of any online bookstore.
Furthermore, when you work with used books, each copy is unique. You can't duplicate catalogs like you would in a store selling new products.
🚀 The need that changed everything: automating book uploads
If you have your own website, as I do, a site created with WordPress and its WooCommerce e-commerce plugin, you can choose to import book listings from Excel or CSV spreadsheets. But of course, either these catalog spreadsheets are provided by a distributor (when dealing with new books) or you have the same task of cataloging thousands of books yourself when dealing with backlist and used books (books of which, in many cases, you only have one copy in stock).
This is the situation I found myself in, and that many second-hand book sellers find themselves in: Storage and cataloging is quite a lot of work, and sometimes it doesn't compensate for the amount of time invested in it, for the selling price that second-hand books usually have, considerably cheap (except for certain hard-to-find copies or first editions).
Considering the amount of resources and services that exist on the internet today, and without getting into the topic of AI (which, for the moment, is not so cheap when you use it as a service), Wouldn't it be possible to generate a minimally decent and structured book record simply by entering its ISBN?
The answer is YES. But, as far as I know, nobody had done it before, or it hadn't been done in an affordable way. And this is where AI and "vibe coding" come in, because to program with AI... you have to know what to ask it for and how to ask it for things.
And that's how, little by little, over the course of a few weeks, I've been shaping this tool that I want to present to you today, which I've already named... JORGE, in homage to the character from The Name of the Rose, Jorge de Burgos, the blind monk (Which was also a homage to Jorge Luis Borges).
Combined with a simple barcode reader, Jorge Books to WooCommerce has become a powerful tool that has helped me save hours of work uploading books to my online store.
Discover here the desktop application to automatically upload books to WooCommerce, JORGE – BOOKS TO WOOCOMMERCE
Scan. Upload. Product created. AND THAT'S IT!!!
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