Frequently Asked Questions

Welcome book buyer and seller, here you will find answers to the most commonly asked questions about Dualj.

Jump to:

1. About Dualj
2. How the Dualj.com Book Price Comparison Engine works
3. How to buy a book on the Price Comparison Engine
4. About the Dualj.com Bookseller and "Sell a Book" features
5. How to sell a book on Dualj.com
6. How to buy a book on Dualj.com
7. About the Dualj.com book search feature
8. About the Dualj.com book browsing feature

About Dualj
Dualj.com was launched sometime around October 2007 as a online bookstore featuring thousands of books. Over the months following, the number of books quickly increased, up to around 3 million books by 2008. On the 10th of September of 2008, Rob was born, who quickly grew up and became the primary customer support agent for Dualj.com. In February of 2009, work began to turn Dualj.com into a bookseller's marketplace, so that anyone could sell books on Dualj.com. This work continued till the release of the Dualj.com bookseller's area in April of 2009. In June of 2009 the "Dualj.com Book Price Comparison Engine" was released, which quickly became a very popular reference for book prices. In June of 2009 Dualj.com unveiled the "Historical Book Price Graph", a patent-pending chart designed to help people see the long-term price trend of any book.

How the Dualj.com Book Price Comparison Engine works
When you visit any of the "full" product pages (See an example here) on Dualj.com, you will see the price comparison for the book you are viewing. This comparison engine will check the prices automatically while the page is loading, and typically takes about 6 seconds to scan dozens of stores. Our website actually "visits" each store, in the same way you would direct your browser to each store, and "extracts" the price, book condition, and other information for each stores' page. Wondering how we visit so many stores in only 6 seconds? Well, it's pretty amazing! We use an array of computers that are linked together in order to accomplish this task, and all the stores are scanned simultaneously! Once we have extracted all the prices from each store, we display those prices to you, sorted by the lowest price + shipping first.

How to buy a book on the Price Comparison Engine
To order a book from any store on our comparison engine, just click the store name or the book price that you want. You will immediately be presented with a safety message, which will basically tell you what we know about the store you are about to visit, such as any warnings regarding the reliability of the sellers who sell on the store you are visiting, to help ensure that we don't send you to any store where you might get ripped off. Once you close the safety message box, you will be directed to the store, where you will have to work through their unique checkout process to place your order. Each store has a different checkout procedure, but most of them are fairly straight-forward and user-friendly.

About the Dualj.com Bookseller and "Sell a Book" features
Selling a book on Dualj.com is inexpensive and easy. One of the unique benefits of selling your book on Dualj.com is that you get your money immediately. Other bookseller websites will often hold onto your money for weeks before you get it, and therefore if you list a lot of books for sale, you may be expected to pay shipping costs out of your own pocket for several weeks before you get your first payment. But on Dualj.com, the money for your sale goes straight to your paypal account - we never touch it. And if you have a paypal debit card (recommended), you can pay your shipping costs right out of your paypal account, using the same money that you received for the book sale!

How to sell a book on Dualj.com
To sell your book on Dualj.com, you must create a Dualj.com account and activate it to bookseller status. This means you must properly fill out all of your contact information, set up your paypal account to receive payments from Dualj, set up your shipping options, and agree to the Dualj.com seller terms. The whole process from start to finish may take you around 15 minutes, but the best part is, your account is approved immediately - no waiting for days like some bookseller marketplace websites make you wait. Once your account is activated, you can start to list your books for sale immediately by clicking the "sell your copy" link on any product page, or by going directly to the Sell a Book page.

How to buy a book on Dualj.com
Buying a book on Dualj.com is easy! You can pay with your PayPal account, or by credit or debit card, or bank account. Simply visit any product details page and click the order button at the top-right side of the page to begin the checkout process. We recommend using a paypal account (or setting one up after you place your order) so that we can offer you better customer support and follow-up in the event that there are any problems with your order.

About the Dualj.com book search feature
The Dualj.com book search feature is perhaps the most unique book search engine in the world. We not only search our own inventory, but we also search pretty much every book inventory in the world, looking in all kinds of places for the words that you entered in your search query. This means that, depending on what you type, you never know what you might find. We search book titles, book descriptions, book contents, book reviews, and pretty much all information about a book that exists online on any website in the whole world. This means that if someone, somewhere, on any website in the whole world, wrote about a book and they happened to have said that it has "fish on the cover", you can type "fish on the cover" into our search box and, bingo, there is a good chance we might find it. Of course, we're not perfect and we won't find everything. But give it a try and we think you'll be impressed.

About the Dualj.com book browsing feature
Our book browsing feature is designed to help you find popular books by subject. We feature over 40 categories, including Mathematics, Children's books, Home & Garden, and many others. Each category also features multiple subcategories, enabling you to further refine your search. We place books into these categories based on their popularity in our book search engine. If you don't find the book you are looking for in our browsing feature, then you can always try our book search page.