It’s been a while since I’ve done a library book sale experiment. I decided to do another one with a focus on the Amazon sales rank. How long does it take a high-ranking book to sell? More specifically, how long does it take a book with a sales rank above 1 million to sell?
Last February, I went to a book sale about a half hour from my home. The sale consisted of two days, Tuesday and Saturday. On Saturday, the children’s books were selling for 20 cents each. I would say that about half of the books that I purchased were the children’s books. When it was all said and done, I ended up buying 503 books!
Setting
Place: Library
Date: Tuesday 5-8, Saturday 9:30-2
Price
Tuesday: Hardcover and Softcover Books were $1 each.
Saturday: Children’s Books were 5 for a $1
Purchase Stats
Total Books Purchased: 503
Average Merchant Fulfilled Price: $4.04 + shipping
Average Sales Rank 1.7 million*
Books Purchased with a sales rank above 1 million: 281
*The sales rank was documented at the time of listing the book on Amazon
Investment
Books: $215
UPS Inbound Shipping: $110
FBA Label Fee: $93
UPS Pick Up: $7
Total Costs: $425
Sales Results (After 5 months)
Books Sold: 184
Total Sales to Date: $1176.79
Total Profit to Date: $751.79
Sales Rank Results
Here are the number of books that sold along with the sales rank
Sales Rank between 1 – 1 million: 129 books sold
Sales Rank between 1 million and 2 million: 37 books sold
Sales Rank between 2 million and 3 million: 10 books sold
Sales Rank between 3 million and 4 million: 5 books sold
Sales Rank between 4 million and 5 million: 1 book sold
Sales Rank between 5 million and 6 million: 1 book sold
Sales Rank higher than 6 million: 1 book sold
Conclusion
Books with a high sales rank definitely sell. So far, 55 of the 184 books that sold had a sales rank above one million. That's almost 30% of the books. In addition, two of the books had a sales rank higher than 5 million.
You can view the individual transactions by clicking on the image below. This time, I’ve added the Amazon sales rank (at the time of purchase) on the spreadsheet as well. Most of the data was obtained from InventoryLab.com.
Thanks for being so detailed! It’s such a simple concept, but once you start sifting through books it becomes a bit daunting.
Thanks for your comment!
Nathan,
I’ve been a constant reader of your information for quite a few years now. Thank you for all you do/share.
Do you think the high ranked books sell successfully for us FBA sellers because the casual browser that stumbled upon the book with the high rank is eased into a quicker decision by the confidence/reliability of buying with Prime? In other words, if we were to NOT send that 4 million ranked book in to Amazon and be just another 3rd Party seller, perhaps the book would have been passed by.
I think with high ranks it also is important to discuss SUBJECT. I have a sealed text book (shrink wrapped) with a 5 million rank. When I bought it, it was just under 1 million. Still hasn’t sold all these years later. It is something about Zoology. Probably some obscure class in one college in the US asked students to get this book. I don’t think it will ever sell.
Also, while I’m commenting…have you noticed the amount of sellers who come in at $3.99 and $4.00? They seem to have every book I buy used and always be the low sellers. I still come in at my minimum of $7.95, but find these sellers stunt my sales. They tend to not have the higher ranked books, which is what attracts me to them.
Hi William,
Yes, I’ve heard that theory before about FBA and high-ranked books. I have never really thought about it, but there could be some truth that. However, I just assumed that if a buyer really wants a book and there are no FBA sellers, then they would just buy the merchant fulfilled book.
Yes, there are lot of FBA sellers selling books at $4 and under. I try to avoid those books as much as possible.
I do not sell FBA, I ship myself and sell high ranking books all the time. Most of the books I sell are well over 1 million.
Nathan, This is an interesting and detailed experiment.
I’m new to selling online and have only sold toys on Amazon so far. So I have lots to learn.
Do you do not mention selling price in your experiment. Are you able to place high prices on high ranking books? I would guess that people looking for an obscured book might not be as concerned about price.
Thanks for your info.
Nathan may have a different formula, but I base it on the NEW price. If the new price is $49.99, I may come in at 29.99 if I am the only FBA seller. If there are other FBA sellers, I am a bit more strategic.
Yes, you are correct. Normally you can price higher with higher ranking books.
Thanks for sharing this. What condition were these books in?
Good condition – Former Library Books.
I don’t see the Amazon fees deducted from your $1176.79 gross sales figure.
Your average sale appears to be $6.39. However the Amazon fees are going to eat into this average sale by around 50%.
Gross sales-$1176.79-(book and inbound cost of $425) -(Amazon commissions and FBA fees of $588)=$163.79 net to you thus far.
Does this make sense?
Hi Joe,
The Gross Sales were $2060.38 for this book sale. In the blog post, the $1176.79 sales figure is the amount after all of Amazon fees were deducted. The average sale price is $11.20 for each book. You can view the detailed numbers in the spreadsheet on the bottom of the blog post.
Question:
The books to send to Amazon requires to place new ISBN to be place over the original one? What’s the purpose? and how do I create it (Them, if different for
each book? or just one ISBN for all books?) Me not understand. Also, I have a
registration in Amazon to sell my eBooks; is this good to sell used physical books?
and how about other physical products?
I would certainly appreciate all these answers.
Thank you Nathan.
Javier A Ortiz
BTW…all your experiments are great, I will always recur to your advises given.
Thank you again.
Javier, I am just starting, bur I think that you are not adding another ISBN. It is actually a number that you create for your accountability and something that Amazon scans to for record keeping. They are all different unless you have more than one of the same title/UPC/ISBN and those will be the same.
Javier,
Sandy is right. You don’t need to create a new ISBN number for each book. You just need to print an FBA label and place that over the barcode. That way Amazon can track your sales and pay you.
I notice that you send these books to Amazon FBA and have Amazon do the labeling. Can you explain your process for pricing each individual book? That’s been a very time-consuming process for me as I’m still having to examine each one as well as call up each one in Amazon to look at rank, # of competitors, comp. pricing. Is there a more efficient method of processing into FBA? Thanks.
Please see my video on the ScanLister website. This is how I process large amounts of books. http://www.ScanLister.com
Nathan, why do you mf your books? Do you ever send any in fba?
Hi Denise,
I’m a 100% FBA seller. All the books in this blog post were sent to FBA.
Hi, Nathan-
I’m getting ready to send in my first shipment of books. Naturally, I’ve got lots of questions but the immediate one is about repricing books. What company do you use-or maybe that is something that you don’t want to share for competitive reasons? I think that repricing is something that is very important and would like to make sure my books are competitive. Thanks for your help on this.
Hi Mike,
I started out with Repriceit.com. Now I’m using Sellery.
Hey Nathan,
Thanks for sharing your results! It’s nice to see the detailed spreadsheet. One question I had was how do you get your sales reports? I have searched through Amazon’s reports but cannot find a good one that is similar to your spreadsheet. Do you use third-party software for that? Any tips you have would be appreciated – I want to export my sales data so I can match up the selling price with Amazon’s FBA fees so I can see my net income.
Best,
-Caleb
Hi Caleb,
I use InventoryLab to get most of my data.
Regards,
Nathan
Thanks for all the great info! How do you know the rank of the books when they sell? I use Inventory Lab and they told me they don’t track the rank.