A couple days ago, I mentioned that I’d started making pocket money by listing old books on Amazon. I’m pleased to report that the response has been amazing. I have shipped five or six books each and every day this week.
That means I’m making between $25 and $100 a day by selling books and DVDs I had no intention of ever reading again. Nice. Since it is working so well for me, I thought I’d explain my tactics and reasoning.
Pricing
I have a "floor" price, below which it isn’t worth my time to list the book or ship it. I won’t bother for less than $2.50. Oddly enough, there are many books on Amazon listing for $.01. All I can figure is that they are light, and the people are making money from Amazon’s shipping allowance.
What’s that, a shipping allowance? Yes, Amazon charges the customer for shipping and passes it along to you. The minimum is $3.49 for standard shipping on a normal book. It is $4.99 for expedited shipping, and $7.99 for international shipping. It is your choice whether you want to offer either of the extra services. For a lot of products, the $4.99 price point is a good one, since most books will fit in a USPS flat-rate express mail envelope, which costs $4.05 to mail. So you make almost an extra dollar for basically no more work, and you don’t even have to provide the envelope.
I usually price my books to be the lowest price. You get to see the competition while you are listing, so it is easy to do that. If the competition is too steep, or is below my $2.50 line, I either don’t list, or I list at whatever I would feel comfortable with. Usually I’m perfectly fine with the lowest price, since I’m not paying anyone, I don’t have staff and I really don’t care if I keep the book.
Some of the used prices are amazingly high, and yet they still sell. For example, today I sold a copy of “24, Season 3″ for $28. That’s nearly half of new, years later. In general, I am finding that it isn’t worth the time to try to sell popular paperbacks or tradebound books. It just won’t be worth it, the price will be too low. But technical books are golden, as are old RPG books, baby books, dog training books, and biographies. Basically anything that isn’t a dime-a-dozen. DVDs are particularly valuable and go quickly.
Shipping
Shipping is a pain, no doubt. I’m finding it easiest to just use bubble-padded envelopes for the ground shipping, and flat-rate envelopes for express. It is no big deal for me to drop them off at the nearby, never busy post office. The annoying bit is actually labelling and packing them. However, since the business I am launching will also involve shipping, I am using this opportunity to develop a good process. I definitely will be buying a label printer and do my postage online using a service. When I have that down, I should be able to reduce shipping time from 3-4 minutes each to about 1 minute.
Profits
Amazon pays you directly into your checking account. You don’t have to do any billing or collections.
So far, I’ve listed 85 items, and sold 18. I have spent about two hours listing, and an hour or so packaging for shipping. I haven’t calculated my total profits after my shipping and packaging costs. My rough estimate is that I’ve made about $160 profit.
Plans
I am a slowly reforming packrat. I have – no exaggeration – dozens of boxes of good books, not just cruddy old paperbacks. They’re sitting in my shop. I’m going to sell them. It is liberating and just profitable enough that I can justify the time and attention. The fact that it is teaching me useful skills for my business is icing on the cake.
Technorati Tags: amazon, used books, used dvds, shipping
Weekly Roundup – 03/03/06…
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[...] In terms of making a little extra money, Bruce of Fearless Money has found himself an “Amazon Money Flood“ and offers up a thorough article on how he’s doing it. [...]
Great article, I always sell my books back after the semester and I use the exact same strategy. Thank goodness for the USPS flat rate envelope. :)
I recently did this but with half.com but I have not had the success that you have. It maybe that you have better products (actually this is probably exactly why), or that Amazon gets more traffic, maybe I will test it.
Dear Bruce, Nice article. I too have a ton of books that I want to sell/dispose but am torn between choosing eBay over Amazon. Have you done any analysis on where it might be more profitable?
BTW, great website. I am adding you to the list that I scan everyday.
I’m glad to hear about your Amazon market place experience. I went through this about a year back when I started to sell my old books, cds and DVDS. I’m not sure if anyone mentioned it, but I also recommend half.com, they’re somewhat similar. They have lower selling fees and you may be able to get a better price. The only trade off is site traffic, it’s not as popular as Amazon. Half also let’s you list as long as you like. Good luck!
I don’t know, I think I might want to sell books on eBay if they were over $100 or so. I’d need to do a bit of research. It is just that listing them is more effort. Amazon is three-clicks and a sentence. Even with a good helper program, eBay is a lot more fiddling around.
I do have several books worth $100-500, so possibly I should look into eBay. Thanks for the reminder.
John, I’ll take a look at Half. I’ve never used the site, so I didn’t think of it.
Your post inspired me to sign up as an Amazon marketplace seller, and so far I’ve sold one book. I was a little shocked at how much Amazon charged—2.71 for a book I listed for 3.25. With the shipping allowance, I cleared 2.44. I’m a little disappointed, actually. You said that you usually list your items for 2.50, so I’m wondering what you’ve been clearing on average per book.
Overall, it sounds like it’s working out for you, though.
SMB, actually I said $2.50 was the *least* I’d list for. I just got my first check from Amazon, so the approximate numbers work out like this:
($700 total – $100 postage)/35 books = $17 per book.
Gotcha–thanks for clearing that up. The first book I listed was a cheap little paperback, so I couldn’t list it for much more than I did, really. I have a few more I’m sure will be more profitable.