The app is so easy to use and the process of sending the books and getting paid is so simple! I was expecting a hitch at some point (you know like with ‘we buy any car’ when you get a price for your car online and when you take it to them they offer you half of what they said originally), but this was nothing like that! The app is particularly good if you have a lot of books to get rid of - the reason being that not all books are wanted (I imagine because of mass publication/no demand), so if you have a lot of books it doesn’t matter if every other book is rejected. The ones I scanned that were rejected I’ll just give away, but it’s great to get paid for a big chunk of them when having a clear out! What I really appreciated was getting paid the exact amount I was offered. I’ve still got a lot of books to get through and can’t wait to get scanning again! The only negative aspect was receiving an email from them when they were checking through my books: they told me that some of the books I’d sent them were not ones that I’d scanned and offered to send them back to me for a fee of £5; they included 7 of the ISBN numbers of the books on question in the email. I knew they had made a mistake, but fortunately the ISBN numbers are included in the list of the scanned books in your pending offer, so after a quick cross-reference and emailing them back with screenshots showing them the books they were questioning were actually scanned, all was resolved. They didn’t actually email me back acknowledging their mistake, I just got an email a couple of days later saying that my offer had been processed and completed, and that they’d sent me my full payment. Overall, a good experience. Maybe just a few teething issues at their end. But I got paid what I was offered, so I was very pleased.

As a family of 3, we all read for work and for pleasure, which means we end up with quite a number of books passing through our house each year. We don’t keep them all once we’ve read them, so I used to pass them on to charity shops. However, they’re often profession-related books that are useful and wanted by others, but which are unlikely to be found when they’re in our local charity shop rather than online. And so we switched to WeBuyBooks, and we LOVE it. We keep a box hidden away in our storage area and whenever we finish a book we aren’t planning to keep, we just chuck it in the box. Whenever the box is full, I use the app to scan all the books, and simply seal the box up, stick on the label provided and leave them by the door for courier collection. It’s SO simple, and great to know the books are more likely to find their next home easily, plus we get a little pocket money as a nice surprise. Occasionally we have one or two books that aren’t wanted on the app, in which case they can go back in the box to see if they’re wanted when I next have a full box, or they go to the charity shop instead. But honestly, WeBuyBooks makes it all so easy and we love using it and regularly recommend it to friends and family.

This app is probably the best of all of the re-cycle buyers. The scans are read quickly and the bottom half of the screen turns green behind the offer price to help keep your eye on acceptance of the item. A small icon/image of the item, its name and price offered are instantly available in your basket. Small drawback is this offer disappears very quickly from the scan frame and you have to be quick to spot this. Also the reader is very quick after scanning and is very sensitive so frequently it scans again telling you that WBB does not accept more than one entry per item- even though that is not what you intended. Another small issue is that the red background rejection message becomes stuck if you have presented a string of non-accepted items so you are not sure if it has correctly registered your current scan. It would be better if the message changed each time or re-presented itself to confirm that it has noted your current scan. One final observation is that it is easy to miss the box for inputting a code/voucher so that when the offer is totalled your order may have missed out the extra benefit. Still the best though.

Whilst the selling experience was good I did find a few little niggling issues which prevented me from leaving a five star rating: the issues were: 1) The scanner seemed to beep and produce a ‘result’ before I’d even scanned the whole barcode - just starting to show it the back of a book with a tiny bit of barcode would set it off! 2) More importantly, the scanner seemed to produce less than consistent messages. If the item being scanned was accepted it would produce a value figure which would show on the basket - all good there! But on many other things it would either produce a red x or a message stating that the particular item could not be accepted- but this bit was inconsistent. I sometimes scanned the same item to see if it gave me the same result and it didn’t always do that - the x might change for a message or the message for an x. 3) Finally, the shipping label was missing the postcode! I wrote that on by hand. In conclusion, I would recommend the app as I did get some slightly better prices, but these little niggles need to ironed out if you want to provide the same user experience as with some of your competitors apps.