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:
- People looking to make money
- 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!
Authors bio is coming up shortly.
I still find the books from “getting rid” profitable as these people would accept “fair” amount just to take their “garbage” out – and they are really cheap. However as you have mentioned, excessive inventory is at stake.
Great idea on how to make money on excess inventory – write-off through donation.
I bumped to this blog post – a very unconventional and really cheap inventory source – estate sales! http://www.sellyourbooksonline.com/index/
What scanner do you recommend using?
Hi Cheryl, I made my own scanner with a Dell PDA and a class 1 laser scanner. This way, it doesn’t cost me much to assemble and I can use whatever service I want to (I currently use Scoutpal.com at only $10/mo.). If you buy a scanner from Neatoscan or other services you are going to spend a lot of money and be locked into their more expensive memberships. Let me know if you would like me to show you how to piece together a scanner or have me make one for you.
Yes, I would appreciate that very much.
After looking through my bookshelf, many of the books with rankings of 500,000 or higher are being sold at $.01, which makes my average selling price for them around $4.00. I am afraid to list them and then suffer a loss. Hopefully with a book scanner I will be able to find more valuable books at book sales.
Thank you for writing this blog.