Interesting article in The Wall Street Journal about the once-mighty Barnes & Noble:

http://finance.yahoo.com/career-work/article/110381/clearance-sale-barnes-noble-didnt-evolve-enough?mod=career-leadership

This past weekend I went to a garage sale which was advertised as having “hundreds of books”.  I wasn’t disappointed when I got there! There where some great books – I grabbed 2 boxes full for about $6 and will be able to resell almost all of them.  The lady holding the sale seemed pretty knowledgeable and it turned out that she also sells books online – on eBay.

I looked up her eBay ID later on and saw several hundred books sitting idle with BIN’s and a couple auctions hovering around $1.  Her feedback was great but her sales looked very slow – why else would an online book seller sell perfectly good books at a garage sale for 25 cents each or less?  It made me realize the obvious that I had known for the past few years – eBay is DEAD for book sellers!

I used to list and sell a good number of books on eBay, recently I have just been putting some rare books on there in hopes of getting something for them fast.  I had one book on there for $99 starting bid (this book was selling on Amazon for over $900).  With 5 hours left in my auction there wasn’t any bids – over 100 hits but no bids.  I closed the listing (I hadn’t had any success selling my other rare books on eBay at deep discounts either recently).

For now, I’m done with eBay.  I will continue with my Amazon assault, where I can list books quickly and sell many of them within a few weeks of listing.  Not to mention that it is free to list!

Any easy way to add some valuable inventory to your book selling business is to add other media items such as DVDs, CDs, Audiobooks, and Video Games.  Most of the bookselling websites already have pre-filled info for these products so you could probably sell these items with whatever account you already have set up.

I’ve been using Scoutpal.com to scan books with my laser scanner – I recently downloaded their new database which includes UPC codes for games,DVDs, and CDs.  This is great for me because many of the places I look for books also sell these other media items.  Another good thing is that they are usually lighter to ship than books.

The downside is that these other media items are usually more expensive than books so you have to be careful to pick the right products to buy for resale.

I have been selling on Amazon FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) for a few months now and love it.  There was one major problem with the system though – if you set your store setting to “vacation” it would freeze not only your inventory that you fulfill, but also the FBA inventory.  With FBA, Amazon ships your inventory for you – so why would you want your inventory frozen when your not responsible for filling it?  The only way around this was to physically close the listings for every book that you fulfill by hand.

Good news – this month Amazon corrected the problem!  Here is the quote from Amazon.com:

“Account Settings: FBA Listings Remain Active:

This month we launched a new feature that has been an ongoing request to keep FBA listings active while sellers took vacation or were unable to fulfill inventory for whatever reason. FBA sellers have wanted an easy way to remove their self-fulfilled listings from Amazon.com while keeping their listings fulfilled by Amazon active. Previously, it was necessary to manually deactivate and activate self-fulfilled listings if you were taking a vacation. The alternative was to remove all listings from Amazon.com using the Seller Account Listing Status.

Now, when you change your listing status from active to inactive (or “On Vacation”), the listings you fulfill yourself will be removed from Amazon.com; however, your listings fulfilled by Amazon will remain available for sale on Amazon.com and through Multi-Channel Fulfillment. When you are ready to resume fulfilling orders, you simply reactivate your listings.”

I just completed another one of my numerous inventory acquisitions for “CHEAP” and thought I would share it on my blog.  This one came from my posting on Craigslist – as most of my cheap deals do.

There are 2 types of people who will offer to sell you books:

1. People looking to make money
2. People looking to get rid of their books

We obviously want #2.  Since on a lot of books I’m only making a few dollars profit – I need to acquire my inventory as cheap as I can.  To determine which person I’m dealing with, I ask “are you looking to sell your books or just trying to get rid of them?”.  7 times out of 10 they will admit that they are “just trying to get rid of them”.  In this case, I’ll offer $10 or $20 depending on how many they have – today I picked up about 120 and they gladly accepted my offer of $20.  The great thing about deals like this is that I can go through the books later.

If someone says they are “trying to sell their books or make money” – I will either pull out my scanner and pull out the ones I really want before I make an offer, or even just forget the deal altogether.

Of the 120 books that I bought today – I’ll probably only be able to resell about 20 or so.  Even if I only average $5 profit per book – I’ve made about $80 profit in about 2 hrs time.. not too bad.  With the excess 100 or so – I will donate them to the library and probably write them off at 25 cents each – so about $25 write-off… profit of about $105 total!

I’ve recently began moving most of my book inventory into the Fulfillment by Amazon program.  Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is a great way to sell fast selling books – not as good for scarce or rare books.  The basics of how the system works is – you convert your listings to FBA, print and label each book, put them in boxes and ship them to Amazon with a UPS special rate (about 25-30 cents per book).

The beauty of the system is that you can actually make a little money selling penny books ($1+) and some money selling books that are worth under $10 that otherwise probably wouldn’t be worth selling… here are my FBA #s from the past 30 days:

• 120 books sold
• Amazon payouts $540 (includes fees and UPS charges)
• cost of inventory $76
• total profit = $464

$464 isn’t bad considering that I only invest a couple hours a week into the program (I try to send in at least 50 books a week).  The key is that you need high quantities of books – I average about $3.87 profit per book (many of these are mass-market fiction).

I will be blogging about FBA extensively in future posts – if you would like to learn more, there is a great ebook available by Nathan Holmquist Selling on Amazon’s FBA Program – I learned everything I needed to get started from this info, check it out!

If you are looking for a way to speed up the process of listing books – here is a video about Scan-Lister.  It’s a simple and fairly cheap tool that you can use to scan ISBN #s right into Amazon/Half.com – it also has software that enables you to list your books all at one time in “bulk”.

This video is a few months old and the tool is being demonstrated to use with Half.com.  It has since been updated to work with Amazon as well.  If you would like to purchase or get more info, just click this link – SCANLISTER – or the banner to the right–>

Just a quick entry to share a simple technique that has worked wonders for me for obtaining book inventory.  I originally printed up a simple business card to hand to auction company owners to see if they had any books that they wanted to sell me.  Before long, I was handing out these cards everywhere and have gotten some awesome inventory from it – and CHEAP!

I printed 250 basic business cards at Staples for about $25 (you can get some made for much less at Vistaprint.com)  I kept it simple: my name, phone #, email address, the slogan “I Buy Books – any age, any genre”.  You can get more specific if you wish but I am pretty much buying everything right now.  I ran into another book seller who had a card – she elected to put her Amazon & eBay links on hers – I prefer to keep mine more simple but it’s up to you.

I’ve been leaving them around town anywhere that displays cards and handing them to people I buy books off of.  I even hand them to people working at thrift shops and tell them to call me if they ever get too many books to handle and just want to sell a bunch at one time in bulk.

Hope you find this tip useful – please let me know if you have any success with handing out business cards!

The key to online book selling is obviously having a large inventory.  What happens when your favorite thrift stores are dry, yard sales are slow, and there are no library sales coming nearby anytime soon?  You still need to get inventory somehow.  It’s time to get creative.  There are people out there who will literally give their books away – It’s time to find them!

First step – print up some fliers and business cards… keep them simple… your name, phone #, email, with the heading “I Buy Books”.  You might want to list what kind you buy – I pretty much buy anything so this is easy for me. 

Second step – post your fliers anywhere you can.  If you live near a college, post one in the student union.  College students are great people to buy books off of – they are usually trying to get whatever they can for their books and may have recent textbooks which can be valuable.  If you sell on FBA or sell paperbacks, they will have recent books since they usually don’t haul old books from their homes to their dorms.

Third step – get on Craigslist.  If you don’t currently have an ad running on “books” or “items wanted”, post one now!  You will get tons of response and may be able to buy loads of books of off people cheap!

Fourth step – hit the streets.  Stop into storage unit facilities, auction companies, and any other business that deals with used goods.  Introduce yourself and hand them a card, you never know where that could lead.

The purpose of this article and this blog in general is to inspire others to not only sell books online, but also to look at creative ways to do so.  Please leave a comment if you have any other creative methods of acquiring inventory for your used book selling business!

If your like most book sellers you probably scour the Craigslist ads fairly often looking for deals on books.  You probably sell the books you find on Amazon, Abebooks, eBay, or Half.com.  What about the site right under your nose? Craigslist?

I’ve been experimenting with selling books on CL the past month or so and have had some great results.  The most obvious benefit of selling on Craigslist?  NO FEES! While selling on other online venues you are probably charged roughly 15 percent of your book price.  Of course, you probably will have to sell the book for less on CL, if you can sell it at all.

One great way to sell books on CL is in lots.  Group together a bunch of books of similar genre and you may get people interested in buying them.  The cool thing is you will get book sellers like yourself who are looking to get a good deal on a bunch of books.  This is also a great way to get rid of your excess books without donating them to the library and actually getting a little cash to invest in other books.

I’ve had some success just listing books in a “lot” and then asking for a best offer, rather than list the price.  A few times, my “best offer” was much higher than I would have listed the books for anyway – and the buyer feels like they are getting a deal!

Another benefit of selling on CL is NO SHIPPING. You don’t have to worry about packaging the books up and finding out later that the customer wants to return them.  Of course you will have to meet with the customer in person but the trade off could be worth the inconvenience.