Last June I took a road trip up to the northeast to see New York City and some other places. I hit several thrift stores on the way up and went to a couple library sales in NY state and Connecticut.
Here is my experience from a sale in Greenwich, CT.
Goal:
My goal is to not only profit from this book sale, but I also want to document the sales revenue over a one, two, and three month time period.
General Info:
Where: Greenwich, CN
Library: Byram Shubert Library
Advertised on: BookSaleFinder.com
Number of Books at Sale: 25,000
Dates Attended June 7th-9th
Price for the Books:
Friday: $2 Soft Cover; $3 Hard Cover + a $15 entry fee
Saturday: $1 Soft Cover; $2 Hard Cover
Sunday: Bag Sale $7 a bag
Equipment:
Dell Axim x51 PDA with a Socket Scanner attached to the top. I used Asellertool for the software. (I have two scanners; one with Asellertool and one with Neatoscan.)
Strategy:
My strategy was to “buy many and buy low”. My buying criteria was probably lower than most of the booksellers at the sale which gave me a nice competitive advantage. My minimum Amazon price requirement (non-FBA) for softcover books was $4 on Friday, $2 on Saturday, and 2 cents on Sunday.
Results:
I attended the sale for all three days, and I ended up buying 335 Books. I listed and packed them up in a nearby motel room and shipped them out via Amazon FBA.
One Thing I learned:
The one thing I learned from this sale was that children's books have value. I normally skip these books. I found many that have a non-FBA price of $5 or more. This is a double win because these are usually priced low (25-50 cents) AND other booksellers tend to ignore these books.
Purchase Numbers:
Books Purchased: 335
Cost of Books: $234
UPS Inbound Shipping: $105.11
Total Costs: $339.11
Books Purchased with a Sales Rank above One Million: 82
Sales Numbers: (Last Updated on August 2014)
Books Sold: 272
Percentage of Books Sold: 81%
Sales Revenue (after all Amazon Fees): $1549.24
Profit: $1210.13
Here are the individual transactions from the sale. These numbers were taken directly from InventoryLab.com. Get a one month free trial.
Great article! What all equipment did you have to take with you to be able to label and ship everything for Fba?
I had my computer, a listing scanner, a small printer, and my PDA/Scanner with me. I bought the labels and the boxes at a nearby WalMart.
Thanks for laying this out! It’s a useful gage you’ve very generously shared.
I’d like some estimate of the total time invested in dealing with the books aspect of this trip. I assume you did lots of activities beside the books and that the sells totals will change over time and that it may be difficult to do more then ballpark some numbers. Still I’d like to have some idea of how this works out $/hr wise figuring in some % of buying time, travel time & expenses, and other overhead costs for the books part of this trip.
Obviously you get difficult to quantify values beyond immediate $/hrs as this blog feeds into your overall game plan in ways that would be difficult to extract and you must include in order to fully evaluate a $/hr number which is just part of the book sales value to you.
Very well said! I plan to do more blog posts on this road trip and include the travel expenses as well. Including Motel, Gas, Food, and Entertainment. I’m hoping that the revenue of the book sales and thrift stores will cover the entire cost of the trip after the 3rd or 4th month.
That’s a good idea to calculate the total amount of hours worked. I will see if I can calculate the total time at book sales, thrift stores, and also the listing time…on the next road trip.
Nathan,
Very interesting info. Question for you: How many hours did you spend in actual scouting time at the sale? Was it a couple hours a day or more near full days on all 3 of the days?
I found your story intersting and I relate to it. I played for a whil on Poker Stars and could eek out perhaps $3-$6 an hour playing small tournaments. Like you, I sort of burnt out on it though.
Peace,
I would say about 3 hours a day at the sale. Yes, I used to play sit and go tournaments on Party Poker and Poker Stars. I once turned $55 into $3000 in two days! I was hooked after that…lol
Nathan, thanks for the great article! Since you have both ASellerTool and Neatoscan scanners, what goes into your decision to use one scanner service over the other at these sales? Also, why didn’t you go with the FBA label service this time?
I will usually use Neatoscan. However, at this sale I didn’t have the latest prices uploaded – so I went with Asellertool instead. I use the FBA label service when I’m pressed for time. In this case, I had plenty of time to list, so I labeled the books myself.
Hi Nathan!
Great info – thanks for sharing.
I have been doing FBA for almost a year now and it’s extremely addictive. I source inventory from multiple locations like you and am having a tough time keeping track of it all. You mentioned inventory lab which I am considering. My question is how do you break the individual book costs down on a bag sale and how do you get them all keyed in without spending hours on it? I buy a lot from grocery stores and was hoping to use the NEAT scanner to scan in my receipts, but it doesn’t break the receipts down into individual item costs.
Keep up the great work!
-Ben
I normally turbo list the books using Amazon’s Inventory Loader or using AmanPro (www.spaceware.com). Then I upload the ‘buy price’ later into Inventory Lab.
I just calculate the total ‘buy price’ from all three days at the sale. So, I’ll take the total money spent at the sale and divide it by the number of books purchased.
You said “My minimum Amazon price requirement (non-FBA) for softcover books was $4 on Friday, $2 on Saturday, and 2 cents on Sunday.”. Not sure I understand that because you can’t make any money FBA if the book sells for $4 or $2. Did you mean that if NON fba people were selling for $4 you would buy and charge more for FBA?
Never mind, I saw you said NON fba after I posted. Duh! Sorry
No problem! Good question. A lot people are confused with the FBA and non-FBA price difference.
What I’d like to know is how condition plays a role in your work….. how long does it take to decide on condition. Is this done at the sale or is it done when you get back with a load of books?
If the the spread between “good” condition and “very good” condition is large – then I will buy the book. For example, if the book is worth a penny in “good” condition, but worth $2 in “very good” condition – I will buy the book. For my repricing system, I price based on sub-condition. So, if I’m listing a book that’s is very good condition, I will only price against books with a condition very good or better.
Thanks for sharing this…just now starting with this part if amazon and it all sounds foreign to me with the tools etc…gonna start with the books I have here first … Just confused with the process …do you not protect the books in the box or just put them in there and tape up…insure them???? I don’t have ups account yet!
Hello Susan,
I just make sure that I pack the books into the box tight. So, they that they don’t move around much in shipping. You do not need to insure or get a UPS account. All of the UPS stuff is done through your Amazon FBA account.
Nathan
I have an individual seller account. Want to use ScoutPal They say I need an Amazon MWS (?) Can I get this w/o the $39.95/mo ie. with the .99 c per unit cost?
You need to have a pro-merchant account to use MWS. The Pro Merchant is $40 a month, but you do get the $.99 fee waived for every item you sell.
Hi Nathan
Thanks for ALL the great info! I travel full time and buy and sell textbooks. I sell to the major online textbook buyers and have done well. I often find Great deals on non-textbooks but didn’t want to get into a ton of fulfillment and storage so FBA my be a good thing for me 🙂
Do you have any stats on what % of your inventory sells on a monthly basis?
When you do your book sale experiments I don’t see where you figure in your ongoing monthly costs 40.00 for Amazon etc . What are your monthly fixed costs?
Do you have any suggestions of how many books you need to start with in inventory?
I am really trying to get an idea on what kind of investment I should start with so that I can be at least at “break even” ASAP
Thanks Again!
Donna
Hi Donna,
Thanks for your comment! That’s pretty cool that you travel full time and buy and sell textbooks. I would imagine that you would get more money if you sold directly on Amazon FBA – since that’s where the textbook buyers sell their stuff.
Here are the answers to your questions.
1) About 35% percent of my inventory sells the first month. 15% the second month. And so on…
2) I didn’t factor in the other monthly fixed costs because the book sales are only a portion of my overall sales. For the experiments, I just wanted to give a general overview of how much you can expect to make if you follow a similar strategy.
3) I would just start selling the books that you already have sitting around at home and go from there. There’s really no minimum or maximum amount of books you need in the warehouse. I guess it depends on what your own sales goals are. It also depends on the value of the books as well. I focus on the lower priced books, so I need a higher number of sales to make it work. Having said that, I think having 2000 books in your Amazon FBA inventory would be a good goal to have.
I hope that helps,
Nathan
Hello Nathan
I am new to all of this so thank you for all you do. I have a question about your statement that one of the things you learned from the Greenwich sale was that children’s books have value. Had your previous experience been that children’s books was a poor category? Thanks
From my past experience many childrens’ books didn’t have a lot of value. But recently, I have found that the larger sized hardcover books seemed to be worth some money.
Hey Nathan,
Thanks for this great article.
Have a question for you. How do you label and pack the shipment this quickly? When I checked with amazon, what they said is that I cannot use the stickerless commingled option for Books! My listing will be done quickly since I use the Amazon’s bulk loader, but most of my time is gone to keep the books in order and in labeling. Any suggestions?
Thanks.
Hi Charles,
The stickerless commingled is different than the FBA Label Service. To enable the FBA Label Service go to your Amazon seller account. Then go to Settings —> Fulfillment by Amazon –> Label Service.
Nathan,
I really enjoy how you track your sales throughout each month. I’m wondering if you can offer any suggestions on how to keep track of inventory you purchase from book sales. I have over 200 books to process today and they came from multiple sources.
Although I could use a flat file to upload them and attach a unique SKU detailing where I purchased the book, labeling them would be a pain without my listing software which allows me to put a label on after I price each one.
Do you have a simpler way of accomplishing this task? I would greatly appreciate any advice you can offer.
Thanks in Advance,
Yolanda
I just put the name of the book sale in front of my SKU number. I do this when I use a flat file upload or when I use a 3rd Party listing software.
Then after each month, I download all my sales from InventoryLab.com and sort the SKU numbers on excel. That way I can tell how profitable each book sale (source) was.