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Selling books on Amazon
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Hello all! 🙂
Argh, I just spent about 30 minutes trying to type out a post about this and then clicked on the wrong tab to google something and it is all gone! 🙂
Well, I would love to help anyone who is interested in this. Please let me know and I will call you or you can call me, it would be easier on the phone.
Basically what I do is use a special app on my cell phone that utilizes my barcode scanner to get info on books at thrift stores to let me know which books are profitable. I spent about 30 minutes at goodwill last week, bought 40 books for about $1 each and none of them will profit me less than $6, some as much as $50 when the right buyer comes along.
Amazon is absolutely the best place to sell books, it is free to list, the fees once they sell are comparable to eBay. Amazon has a program called FBA (fulfillment by Amazon) where you mail about 50 lbs of books to them at a time and they take care of it from there. No hassling with mailing them yourself, no customer service nightmares with unreasonable customers, no time restraints, it’s all on your time schedule.
Here is a free eBook that will do a better job of explaining it.
Seriously, I would absolutely love to help someone with this. It is maybe one of the best ways a homeschooling mom can help with the income.
Grace and peace,
Jenn in KS
I am VERY interested in this!!! I am about to download the ebook. This sounds like it is right up my alley!! We have several Goodwill stores in our area (one Goodwill Bookstore) and I already spend hours looking in these places!! LOL Wow, this could be fun and profitable too! We are in desperate need of extra income. I may need more input later on after I research this more…I’ll be in touch for sure!
Thank you for posting this!
Amanda
This looks like a great possibility for me. Thanks so much for sharing about it. I will be looking at it further this week. Have to run now, though.
Melissa
I just wanted to add that this forum has taught me a lot. It is not a beginner’s forum for bookselling, but you can learn about the FBA(Fulfillment by Amazon) part of it. You don’t have to do FBA to sell on Amazon, but I honestly can’t figure out why someone would want to do it any other way. Read through the messages before posting beginner’s questions. I made the mistake of asking beginner type questions and after being there a while and seeing people come and ask the same beginner type questions, I can see how that would get very old to the people on there. But please feel free to ask me a million questions. I’ve done a ton of reading on the subject and would love to share what I know! 🙂
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/BookSellersFBA/
Happy Independence Day! 🙂
Jenn
Thanks for posting, Jenn! I’ve downloaded the ebook. I have hundreds of duplicate living books from my lending library that I’d like to get rid of and exchange my dups for ones I don’t have. I’ve sent out lists before and will sell anywhere from a couple to a couple of dozen but they’re starting to pile up.
If I have questions, I’ll be sure to ask.
Hi, Jenn:
I guess my first question, while I’m just considering this, is how much would you say your start-up costs were? I don’t know how much 50 lbs. of books amounts to nor how much that poundage of books would cost up front from places like Goodwill. Also, I don’t have a fancy phone with a barcode app (I actually don’t have any cell phone right now, but I’m getting a “no-frills” one soon
), so I’m wondering how else you can figure out what books would be profitable.Thanks,
Sue
I don’t have a smartphone either just a tracphone, never seen the need for one really – we live pretty simply. So I am interested in Sue Moms question as well. Linda
Yes. Jen, thank you so much for all of your trouble posting this info. I know how frustrating it can be to type, type, type then lose it all! Ugh.
I am looking forward to finding out more as well. Can’t wait till you post again!
I was just thinking the other day how I’d love to Proverbs 31 it and add some income to our family.
~Helen
Yay, so glad to maybe bless someone by helping, it seems that I’m always on the receiving side. 🙂
Start up costs…well, you can start out doing this by self-fulfilling if you want (mailing the books when they sell, rather than preparing them and mailing them to Amazon so that they can handle that side of it). If you do that, it doesn’t cost you anything at all, assuming you start by selling some of your own books. It is free to list the book to sell, Amazon takes their portion after the sale. But for me, I wanted to jump in and invest a bit of money because I am convinced it is going to work if I do my part (which doesn’t seem like a whole lot, honestly!)
So you could invest in a cell phone, we paid a little over $100 for a smartphone 4G and it comes with a barcode app. If you are going to go out of your house to look for books, you must have some way of knowing which books are good. Otherwise you’re wasting money guessing. So there are free apps you can put on your phone to get this info, there are some that you pay a monthly fee for, I chose to get the monthly fee one- it is called FBA Scout. You get 250 free scans with it before you decide to buy it, though. Costs $40/month. If you don’t get a cell phone, there are PDAs you can buy, I honestly don’t know how much there, except it is more expensive than getting a cell phone to do it. I feel great about getting the cell phone, it also has a GPS on it so it helped me find estate sales, very efficient!! Time is money, remember. And very precious as a homeschooling mom, yes?
Since I have decided to do FBA rather than self-fulfill, I invested in the $40/month rather than paying $1 per sale to Amazon. If you’re going to sell more than 40 items a month, this is the thing to do. If you’re not or don’t know, again, Amazon takes the $1 fee off *after* the sale.
Ok, I have to finish dinner now, I’m not done explaining, though, but I’ll post what I have so far and maybe get back to it tonight, but tomorrow for sure!
Hope everyone’s having a great Independence Day! 🙂
Grace and peace,
Jenn
I was literally just looking into this the other day – before I shipped all the books off to the thrift store in town….
But as I was comparing prices on Amazon for sellers, if I did the “pro” one (which is what you’re doing, I believe), I’d barely make any money if I sold a book for $2 even if I only paid a dime for it to begin with. Like $.30 or $.40. If I do it the non-pro way, again paying a dime for a book and selling it for $2, I’m in the hole more than $1! So I am curious how in the world you’re going to make any money if it costs you $1 to buy a book. I would LOVE, LOVE, LOVE to do this, I just have no idea how it could possibly be worth my time and effort.Sara- what books are you looking up? Do you have ISBNs? Here’s an example of one I found at the thrift store-
ISBN 9780442010980 (look it up on Amazon’s website by the ISBN so you can see what I’m about to talk about)(I haven’t sent my copy in yet, so mine’s not on there)
I paid 75 cents for this one. Amazon is not offering it which is very good, you want books like that. The person offering it new at $287.45, I have no idea about that, but that seller has been around for a while, has sold over 500K items with 95% rating, he must know something I’m guessing. The used ones start at 16.99 and go to 98.24, but all those people have to pay shipping. If I’m an FBA seller it greatly increases my chance of someone buying it because who wants to pay shipping if they don’t have to? So already I’m ahead of the game. So anyway, I could price it low and make a quick $20 or something or I could price it competitively somewhere half down the page and eventually someone will buy it. Textbooks are hot sellers- if you can find an addition from the past 1-3ish years. The thrift store I found it at of course has no idea.
Take this book- it’s very unlikely that someone going into the thrift store in my town is going to find this book valuable, you couldn’t even pay me to read it, but someone in the world wants it and when I can list it on Amazon, that makes it available to a different market and makes it very valuable.
Obscure non-fiction, very specific topics are the type of books that you would want to look for. The ones you would never guess, they are hard to find and only valuable to a select few, but those select few know to look on Amazon for what they want and they will pay the going rate.
Have to go for now, let me know what books you looked up. Go around your house and look up the ISBN for some of your obscure specific non-fiction, you’ll be surprised. 🙂
The seller of that book listed at $287 is a “drop-shipper.” I wondered about the unusually high prices that sometimes appear in Amazon listings, so I did a little searching recently and asked the question, “Why are some prices on Amazon so ridiculously high?” or some question like that. What I found is that some sellers are “drop-shippers,” people who list books they don’t actually have in stock, then they buy them from other suppliers once they make a sale–that’s okay, when I sold Tupperware, I didn’t stock the items at my house–except some of these drop-shippers post them at crazy prices hoping to make one sale to someone who thinks there must be a reason it’s so high-priced. I also found it interesting that some drop-shippers will actually purchase the book from another Amazon listing to fill the order they have received.
I also read a report online that said: “They have a software program that automatically posts books for most of the ISBN’s available on Amazon at a price much higher than market. If they cannot find a cheaper copy available on the net, they’ll refund the order.” I won’t post the link to this report (on the Rip-Off Report website) because some of the ads alongside their reports are just….horrible.
Obviously, a majority of the sellers on Amazon offer competitively prices books and are making a legitimate profit. I have bought a number of books on Amazon and have been quite happy with them.
Jenn, I think you should be more up front about the costs of doing this. For many of us, even a $100 smartphone is completely out of reach, and service plans for smartphones are much, much more expensive than for basic cell phones. Even if I managed to scrape up the money for the phone, where am I going to get the money for the minimum $240 a year more that the service plan costs?
You also have to realize that many, many books LISTED for high prices on Amazon have been there literally for years. Stores with big overheads can hang onto a book for 3 years waiting for someone who will pay $70 for it. Some of those people are NEVER going to get for their book what they are asking. When I decide what to ask for a book, I’ve usually been watching the price for a while, looking at ACTUAL prices paid for items on places like Ebay. Half.com, Alibris and more. If one begins doing this, one should realize that there are no guarantees that the book will sell. I personally don’t have the space to keep large numbers of books around for years. If you really want to know what a book is worth, you need to look not just at asking prices, but at actual selling prices.
Even if I could afford a smart phone, I have no desire to have one, so I will not be doing the Amazon thing, except maybe the odd book I have here or there to sell. I do not think that it would as simple as it sounds – you may have had success with it Jenn, but it is like everything else – one person’s success does not mean everyone will be successful. I think I prefer to keep my money in my pocket and sell what I have through other means. Don’t want to rain on anyones parade, but it sounds a little too good to be true and I don’t go in for those things – but that is just me – others may want to take the chance.
), so I’m wondering how else you can figure out what books would be profitable.
But as I was comparing prices on Amazon for sellers, if I did the “pro” one (which is what you’re doing, I believe), I’d barely make any money if I sold a book for $2 even if I only paid a dime for it to begin with. Like $.30 or $.40. If I do it the non-pro way, again paying a dime for a book and selling it for $2, I’m in the hole more than $1! So I am curious how in the world you’re going to make any money if it costs you $1 to buy a book. I would LOVE, LOVE, LOVE to do this, I just have no idea how it could possibly be worth my time and effort.
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