Terrible business practices Terrible business practices. I recognize that in order to make money selling used books you need to get them for a decent price. However, this place is a gold mine. It's not just that they pay insultingly low prices for your books, it's that they're rude to you while they're doing it. They truly act like they're doing you a favor, and forget that without you selling back your books, they would be out of business. What's worse is that they have aggressively put every other mom-and-pop bookstore in the area out of business. Portland used to have a thriving used bookstore presence but Powell's has driven their competition completely out of existence. And they ripped off their customers with a contemptuous eye-roll while doing it. There are alternatives, albeit mostly online (Thanks in part to the business practices of companies like Powell's). I get that there is a thrill in hunting through thousands of books in order to find a diamond in the rough, but for ethical reasons, I will be going elsewhere in the future. Don't waste your time.

Their website absolutely sucks for booksellers Their website absolutely sucks. After about 2 minutes of entering ISBNs of books to sell, it times out so that you have to start all over. If you don't completely finish your transaction in about 5 minutes, you have to start over. It's ridiculous.

Dishonest merchant -- keeps making… Dishonest merchant -- keeps making promises they don't keep with regards to book conditions, buying of used books, etc. Constantly change their own polices and then fail to follow said policies. We can no longer trust them, and their book selection seems to get worse and worse (they rarely if ever have books I'm looking for in stock, when nearly every other seller DOES have them in stock). Not worth the hassle with the slowwwwwwwww website either. Powells used to be ok to good; now they can't be trusted -- but aren't (yet) as sketchy as most Amazon 3rd party sellers. And Powells was smart enough to stop selling on Amazon, so maybe there is a very very faint hope they will finally improve their company, stop telling lies to customers, and make a genuine comeback... but sadly we've had to move on to more honest sellers who don't tell lies. We refuse to put up with blatant lies, so we will never use or visit Powells again.

Not great for Canadians My order shipped on july 16 and did not received yet, wrote them a message and told me to wait another two months. They did not want to give me a refund ( i would of sent the books back when i got them ) i live in canada. Just a bit disappointing.

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