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Selling books through amazon-Best way to maximize profits?
noir_blood
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Due to an excess of books/comic trade paperbacks, I created an amazon seller account and started listing them off. Just did it yesterday and so far they been selling at a pretty steady rate.
What I want to know, is what's the best method(i.e cheapest) way to ship them? A friend of mine said he recently went through amazon and it wasn't really worth it, as adding the fee Amazon takes up, plus the shipping and envelopes, he was making about 2 dollars for every 5.
But then I see people selling books for a penny and wonder how they manage to make a profit, considering that Amazon immediately takes out .99 cents, leaving you with at best 3.00 to cover shipping costs.
I'm in the U.S in case that factors in.
What I want to know, is what's the best method(i.e cheapest) way to ship them? A friend of mine said he recently went through amazon and it wasn't really worth it, as adding the fee Amazon takes up, plus the shipping and envelopes, he was making about 2 dollars for every 5.
But then I see people selling books for a penny and wonder how they manage to make a profit, considering that Amazon immediately takes out .99 cents, leaving you with at best 3.00 to cover shipping costs.
I'm in the U.S in case that factors in.
noir_blood on
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Shouldn't cost that much to ship. First-class parcel+delivery confirmation through Paypal is going to be rather cheap. Envelopes can be bought from ebay in 100+ packs for cheap. I'm thinking less than $2 to ship, including the envelope.
EDIT: Books are heavier than they look. I just grabbed a paperback, and I could ship it first-class for 2.76+envelope cost. This is above the point where media-mail is cheaper, though, and media mail would be $2.56. You can save a few cents by skipping delivery confirmaion. They're not making much money off the penny books, but they can make money.
I've been selling for about 4 months now (not just books) and have made close to 500$, so taking the hit here and there on shipping is fine for me. Selling a dvd or a light book usually only costs about 2$ to ship, which nets you positive off of Amazon's reimbursement but still slightly negative after their cut. To help save costs I bought mailing envelopes in bulk and try and get my family members to save any boxes they get from packages so I can just reuse them.
I also have all of my items cross listed on half.com so you might want to consider that if you can get more for the item, but that will vary depending on the book.
As has been said, Amazon Marketplace is expensive once the item actually sells. The shipping credit is a joke, especially up here in Canada. They give like 5.99 to ship a game while it costs around 10-12 if you pack it in a padded envelope and want a tracking number. Don't even get me started when I was considering selling larger items.. the shipping credit is the same.
The fees are also fairly hefty, considering.
I'm not really sure how sellers make a profit when they list stuff for a penny, but I'm fairly certain they would have hookups to make shipping dirt cheap.
I also have all of the money put in a different bank account that is just strictly for the shit I sell, so it doesn't calculate into my regular monthly expenses and will be a nice little rainy day fund if I ever need to use it. Half of it is also rolling through a 6 month CD, which I'm sure Thanatos (as well as my coworkers) will yell at me for, but there's not enough in the account yet to actually put to work on investing.
But trade paperbacks is a completely different beast, I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has experience with that since I have some of my own that I haven't put up there yet.
You can, but you need to create the label manually.
Yeah, this is what I use. The shipping fee you get, even after Amazon's cut, should usually be enough to cover it.
Unless you're selling a gargantuan textbook or something.
The tipping point is 8oz. At 8oz and above, media mail is cheaper. 7oz and below, 1st class is cheaper.
The books you see selling for a penny on Amazon are probably from my brother's company, Thriftbooks. He run's an entire business with five warehouses across the US selling nothing but used books on Amazon. I'm pretty sure the profit gained with the penny books is on the shipping cost - the book sells for 0.01, the shipping costs the buyer like $3 depending on the weight of typical mass market paperback book, amazon takes their cut (0.99 in this example), take out the actual shipping cost of the book ($1.50 or something) and the company gains a small profit of $0.51 cents. Now, you won't earn a whole lot of money selling a couple books like this, but when your selling thousands of books a day every day (also selling more than just penny books) it adds up.
Total sold-196.00
Amazon's cut-78.39
Shipping costs-50.00
So my profit is around 70 dollars or so. Most of the books I have sold were only for a few dollars. I ended up taking out anything that was price for 2.00 or less, as I ended up figuring out that I would be making about .50 cents on those.
Definitely trying half.com now.
They don't, but he was selling books for a dollar or two, and I believe Amazon's cut has a "minimum" point. So, if you sell a book for a buck, they don't take their usual 15% or whatever, they take more.
When someone buys a textbook from me and they pay expedited, I ship Priority. otherwise, everything is media mail.