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!

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!