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’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!

Amazon announced the launch of their Rare & Collectible Books Store yesterday.  One nice thing about the launch is that any book you had listed as “collectible” correctly is automatically listed in it.  Time will tell if the store is going to help sellers sell more collectible books, but there are already 2 things that I like about the concept.

1. Sellers who randomly list books in the Collectible category without it meeting the guidelines will not be listed in the new store.
2. When a buyer searches for a book – the Collectible copy(s) show up first in the listings… I think sometimes buyers don’t notice the Collectible tab in normal searches if there are plenty of Used copies available.

I’m going to check and see if all of my Collectible books are listed in the stores and I will keep you updated on any trends I notice with the store.

If you’ve been selling books on Amazon for any period of time there is no doubt that you’ve seen some of your high value books spiral down in price because of DUMB sellers fighting to have the lowest price.

My question is WHY would you want to have the lowest price on Amazon?  What these sellers obviously don’t realize is that there are 2 major factors to consider when pricing a book -

1. Sales ranking
2. Book supply

Without giving  a lesson in Sales ranking – basically if you are selling a book with a low sales ranking (1,000,000 or higher as a rule of thumb), only so many copies of that book are going to sell per year regardless of price… if a book’s value is around $100 and about 1 person is looking for that book every 2 months… it doesn’t matter if you price the book at $10 – NO ONE is looking for it.  You are just lowering your profit when you do sell it.

Book supply – if there are 50 copies of the book you are selling, then yes, you may have to lower your price to get it sold at some point… if there are 2 or 3 copies, you may be able to stand pat.

I read an interesting article recently about something that I’ve always known but never thought about…. condition description.  If you look around at your competition, most of those books have no or very poor description about the book’s condition.  Most say something like “standard used condition” or “thousands of satisfied buyers”.  These descriptions don’t mean jack to the buyer but could be a tremendous advantage for you.  When listing a book I scroll down through the prices and past all of the generic descriptions and place my price and description where a buyer might actually buy because I’ve described the condition.

Just a couple things to consider if you are a DUMB Amazon seller diluting the prices of books for no good reason.