The The Trading Assistant's Assistant provides readers with a lot of good information in a few pages. The tone of the book is upbeat and supportive, and because it is written in plain-speak rather than ‘Net-speak, it will appeal to a wider audience of readers. While not every question on the topic of building income as an eBay consignment shop is answered, the author has laid a good foundation. The Hillary DePiano's views, both pros and cons, will help potential resellers make a more informed decision. And, as is the mark of any good piece of writing, her book raises questions for further research.

The section on selecting clients who have large numbers of items for resale, particularly interesting, and it raised the following questions for me. In this day and age, where burglary is an ever-increasing problem, how can a reseller be sure they are not receiving stolen goods for resale and unknowingly setting themselves up as fences for those stolen goods? What steps can or should a reseller take to protect themselves against becoming a pawn?

This book to be informative, engaging, and upbeat in content. Its bones, however, need resetting. First, it should be edited again for capitalization, hyphenation, spelling, and proper word usage. Second, parenthesized segments undermine the flow of the work. Over the course of several pages, these can become an annoyance to readers, who are forced to stop in mid-sentence and consider something new. These parenthesized items can be integrated into the body of work. Third, a glossary defining acronyms and terminology would be beneficial to those readers not already familiar with them. Fourth, footnotes should be confined to very brief snippets of information. There are several lengthy footnotes; again, they should be integrated into the body of the work. Too many footnotes become tiresome for readers, who are forced to stop mid-paragraph, go to the bottom of the page to read, and then find their place again and regain their train of thought.

Finally, it should be noted that web pages are not static over time and do get moved, renamed, or removed all together. Far too many books today contain web address that are outdated and therefore useless to their readers. My recommendation is that the author refrain from using lengthy web addresses and instead refer her readers to a site's main page, perhaps recommending the subsection under which the desired page link may be found.

Overall, I would recommend the book to anyone seeking a starting point in their research with respect to becoming a trading assistant on eBay. It is a basic and useful foundation upon which to build.