Ordered a book by James Fenimore Cooper… Ordered a book by James Fenimore Cooper and 5 days later the said they "discovered" that they do not have the book after all and the order is now closed. I suspect they realized they may have listed the book too cheaply and it will mysteriously as appear later ar a much higher price. I will not do business with this company ever again.

Well known indie bookchain Well known indie bookchain, now located in the Pacific Northwest. I've never had any difficulties ordering items from the web from them. They were early pioneers of e-commerce, before the 'big gorrila'. Their strength is new and used books, especially academic and scientific publications. This family owned company is a well known collector of used books in North America.

I sell A LOT of books....I mean… I sell A LOT of books....I mean literally TONS of books! Until about 8 months ago Powell's was great to work with. Then, something changed and now their website is pure crap....and they're not doing a thing about it. Input books to sell, accept the offer....and the site "times out". Re-input the same books and now the site will only take about 2/3 of them...accept anyways (just to salvage your time) and the site times out. Re-input for the third time (same reason as before) and ANOTHER 1/3 is rejected.........and it times out. Until Powell's gets out of the stone ages and upgrades/fixes their site......I'm not working with them. I'd advise anybody not to waste their time here!

Their shopping cart stalls on Paypal Their on line shopping cart is not accepting Paypal, after I meticulously filled in every box of info, I clicked paypal button and blank page appears stateing "missing token" nothing else..dead..stuck So I set up an account, put in all my address info in have everything in my shopping cart (1 new and 4 used books) select paypal then press continue and nothing happens except continue button turns grey.. no useful help options or FAQS about this either, extremely lame! Using a Dell PC, Windows 10 and current Firefox -no problems with any other on line vendors accepting Paypal

Just another book seller Instead of rating the quality of their books (acceptable, good, very good, like new) they just use the term 'standard' to cover everything. Previously, you could depend upon Powell books to do a superb job of packaging your books so that they'd arrive in pristine condition. The purchase I just got from them lacked sufficient protective material to keep the books from sliding and tumbling about, during their journey to me. There's nothing special about Powell books anymore. They're just another seller of books.