How to sell books on amazon fba

Transcription

1 How to sell books on amazon fba When you sell on Amazon, your item will be displayed in either the buy box or in the other sellers section of the Amazon product detail page. Generally, there are only 3 different sellers shown in the other sellers section on the main product detail page. If there are more than 3 other sellers, which is very common, then the buyer will have to click to view all of the available offers to see every seller who is on the listing. It's also important to note that all sellers for the same item display on the same product page. If you've sold on ebay in the past, then this will be a bit of a change. When selling on Amazon, you are able to add your product offering on the same product detail page as other sellers. On ebay, you have to create your own listing. In the case of the Catan game above, there are 81 total sellers that have this item for sale at the time of the screenshot. The buy box seller and the other sellers section are the only sellers who are featured at the current time. Getting the buy box is a key part of seeing success on Amazon. The exact algorithm is not known, but 3 of the top factors you can control are your price, your feedback rating, and your fulfillment method. The fulfillment method is very important for maximizing your results on Amazon. Using Fulfillment by Amazon as your fulfillment method will be one of the best things you can do to generate sales when selling on Amazon. How to Sell on Amazon FBA. Our fulfillment centers are built with your inventory in mind, and there's no minimum for the number of products you send. We handle the details to save you time, so you can focus on your business. If you go to the Fulfillment by Amazon Revenue calculator, you will be able to search for any item that you are considering selling on Amazon. You will then enter the price (red arrow), how much it will cost you to ship to Amazon (black arrow), and how much the product costs you (green arrow). The calculator will display exactly how much you will be charged in fees, and most importantly at the bottom will display exactly how much profit you can expect to make on that item. I recommend running every single item you sell on Amazon through this calculator or a different tool that serves the same purpose. With calculators like this available, you should know exactly how much you can expect to profit on every item that you are selling on Amazon. Now that we have a tool that shows us how the fee structure works when selling on Amazon, we need some items to sell. The first potential way to find some initial items to sell is by seeing what you have around your home. A couple of the most common items that might make sense are books or any gifts that you have received and never opened. The second option is to buy items that are available at low prices at a local retail store. Generally these items will be on sale or clearance. The idea is to find items that are selling for less in the retail store than they are selling for on Amazon. This practice of buying items at low prices in retail stores and then selling them on Amazon is known as retail arbitrage. Retail arbitrage is one of the best ways to get started selling on Amazon, as the initial investment is low, it allows you to learn the process, and there is a good deal of money to be made. The experience gained through retail arbitrage also provides extensive knowledge about how selling on Amazon works, which can be applied to other inventory sourcing methods in the future. To go started with retail arbitrage, you need to set up your seller account so that you can have access to the Amazon Seller App. This will provide you with the information that you need to see if an item is worth buying to resell. After you have the app installed, go to a local big box store in your area. Wal-mart, Target, Home Depot, Toys R Us, Kmart, Walgreens, or any similar store will work. Once you are in a store, look for a clearance section or aisle similar to this: On this screen, you want to check for 2 things. The first is to make sure you are eligible to sell the product on Amazon under the selling eligibility section. The

2 second is the sales rank shown in the top left-hand corner. On this particular item, we can see that the sales rank is 60 in the toys category, which is an exceptionally good rank. The sales rank is a piece of information that Amazon provides that gives us an idea of how fast an item is currently selling on Amazon. A full discussion of sales rank is beyond the scope of this post, but it's important to know the lower the number the better. For your first few trips, I'd recommend looking for sales ranks that are lower than 250,000. As you gain more experience you can definitely tweak this, but ranks under this range are a good starting point. If the app shows that you are eligible to sell the item, and the rank is less than your threshold, then you want to check and see if the item will provide a desirable return on investment. To do that, click on the arrow on the far right of the app in the "gross proceeds" section. Once you do that you will see a screen like this: You will be able to enter the selling price, your cost per pound to ship to Amazon (I use $0.50/lb), and how much you can purchase the item for. In this example, I'm showing that I can buy this item for $10. At this stage, there are 2 quick checks that you want to go through. The first is to see if the net profit number shown at the bottom is higher than your minimum profit threshold. Typically I recommend setting this at around $3 per unit. This means that you won't buy any items that you will make less than $3 in profit on. Having a potential net profit of less than $3 per unit does not allow for very much upside and a small drop in price can wipe out your profit. If the item meets your minimum profit threshold, then you will want to calculate a return on investment percentage. You can do this by dividing the net profit by the cost of the item. In this case, it's $7.13 divided How to Sell on Amazon for Beginners The Ultimate Guide. There are a few noteworthy items in this screenshot:. I mentioned above that there was another option when selling on Amazon that does not require you to use Fulfillment by Amazon. The other option is to "merchant fulfill" the items you sell on Amazon. This means that you will keep the items you have for sale at your location and when an order comes in you will ship the item directly to the customer. There are times when this can make sense, but 99% of the time using Fulfillment by Amazon will be a better option. Just know that "merchant fulfilling" is an option, but for the remainder of this post, we'll focus on selling on Amazon using the Fulfillment by Amazon program. Now that we have an overview of how the process works, we'll get into the details of how to set up your seller account, how to know how much you will get paid for items that sell, how to find items to sell, how to price your items, how to get your items to Amazon FBA warehouses, and what you can expect once you have items for sale on Amazon. Let Amazon pick, pack, and ship your orders. You sell it, we ship it. Amazon has one of the most advanced fulfillment networks in the world. With Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), you store your products in Amazon's fulfillment centers, and we pick, pack, ship, and provide customer service for these products. FBA can help you scale your business and reach more customers. 2018, Amazon Services LLC. All Rights Reserved. An Amazon Company. Type the characters you see in this image:. How Do I Start Selling on Amazon? Step by Step. What Are the Benefits of Using the Fulfillment by Amazon Program?. At this point, your work is just about done with the product. Here are the steps that Amazon will take once the items arrive at their warehouses: What Is the Other Option Besides Selling with Fulfillment by Amazon?. Sorry, we just need to make sure you're not a robot. For best results, please make sure your browser is accepting cookies. The question of "how to start selling on Amazon" is one that I get asked often. I have written many posts about how to sell on Amazon successfully, but never a comprehensive guide to selling on Amazon made especially for beginners. This post will start at step one and let you know exactly what it takes to make money selling on Amazon. My goal with this post is to show you the full process of what it takes to sell on Amazon. After reading this post I believe you will have enough information to decide if selling on Amazon is something that you wish to pursue. Before we get into the details, here is a quick look at my experience selling on Amazon to give you an idea of

3 what's possible. I have been selling on Amazon since 2008 when I was a freshman in college. In September of 2013, I quit my full-time job as an accountant to pursue making a full-time income selling on Amazon and have been running my own business ever since. During this time, I learned many things that have helped my business succeed beyond what I thought was possible in the beginning. Every year since 2015 we've done over $1 million in sales on Amazon alone, and this year we're on pace to do nearly $6 million! I didn't start selling on Amazon at this level though. In my first month of selling online full time (October 2013), I only did about $3,000 in sales. Back then I published monthly income reports that went into detail about exactly what I was doing to make money. I highly recommend reading some of these once you are done with this post. You'll learn a lot about what being a new seller is like and hopefully avoid some of the mistakes I made early on. You can click here to open up the income report from my first full-time month in a new tab. I recommend coming back and reading this whole post before diving into the income reports though. On that note, you'll find several important links throughout this post. To get the most out of the post, read the whole thing once and then go back through and do things like setting up your seller account and do. Help grow your business with Fulfillment by Amazon. Sorry, we just need to make sure you're not a robot. For best results, please make sure your browser is accepting cookies. 60% of my sales dollars would be profit after factoring in all of Amazon's fees. Hi Peter. I'm using Zen Arbitrage to find textbooks. Does this strategy of listing new books as used also apply to the textbook market? Please advise if different. If you're reading this and its anywhere close to Christmas, here's something you can profit from. I think we can agree on a couple things:. (note: every third month above contains 5 weeks, which is why there are sales spikes in months 3, 6, 9, and 12). Used books sell more than new, why this is, and tricks to exploit this for profits. Amazon notifies you when customers place an order. Use Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) and let Amazon do the shipping or handle shipping yourself. If I have a New book in my possession, I will actually list it as Used if both of these conditions apply:. t o source, list, and ship 100 books each week to Amazon's warehouses. I had a full-time marketing job where I traveled roughly 30% of the time, so I had to carve out time in the evenings and on the weekends to accomplish this goal. My initial experience with books indicated that it would take some time to build a sizable business, since books are more long-tail in nature. For example, if I listed 100 books in the first week, I may only sell 2 or 3 of them by the next week. As I built up a larger inventory of books over time, the sales would steadily increase to the point where I could be making some decent income. It's an incremental, cumulative business model that rewards you for persevering. Before starting out, I created a simple spreadsheet to help me estimate what my sales might look like a few months down the road. Here were those initial assumptions: Great article, Peter. Why do you recommend against listing books as like new? I suspect that a reason that Amazon won't give the buy box to 3rd party New, and why customers don't buy 3rd party new, is that there are too many sellers who list used books with flaws as New. The probabilty of receiving a book which is actually new from a 3rd party seller is actually very low. It is almost certainly a used book which the 3rd party seller has listed as new because they think they can get away with it, and many of those sellers have low standards and think they can get away with some pretty major flaws listed as new. Thus, the reputation of 3rd party sellers, as a group, is low and lacks trust from both Amazon and customers with regards to the New category of books. Why used books sell more than new. Using this to your profitable advantage by listing New books as Used. A cool profit hack you can implement right now. Open an Amazon Seller account. This process is straightforward especially if you already have a regular Amazon account. You may choose a Professional Seller Account, which costs $39.99 per month with no per-sale closing fee, or an Individual Seller Account, which has no monthly fee but charges $0.99/sale. Since I planned to start out small, I opened an Individual Seller Account. Download

4 the Amazon Seller app, which is separate from the regular Amazon app. Use the Amazon Seller app to scan barcodes and identify sales rank and current prices of books on Amazon. Create a listing of each book you want to sell. You can take pictures of the books and upload them through the app, describe the condition, and set the price. Super helpful, Caleb! This is so useful for newbs. Please do a series on pricing, the interwebs needs it, lol! Totally disagree, but only because of the margins. We do the opposite. We take a brand new looking book, wipe it down, clean it up, shrink wrap it and sell it as new. It might take longer to sell (to your point about the buy box) but the margins are much greater when we do sell and that is worth it to us. As far as numbers about buy box, etc. Nobody knows anything and its all guesses. A journey of a thousand followers begins with a single post. I don't understand what kind of books you can sell on Amazon for $20 used besides textbooks which I have no idea how to find now that I've posted all of mine. Awesome! Whether you are looking to replace an income or just make a little spending cash, I'm confident you will learn lots along the way. Welcome aboard! I will share about where I find books soon. Got it. I wish there was a more efficient way, but I do Control+F and search for the word "New.". Traci, welcome to the bookselling world! As you scale your business, you may want to look into using a listing software that can help you figure out if you already have the book in your inventory. InventoryLab has this option, but is $49 per month. AccelerList is $19.99 per month, and I believe they are working on this feature as well. As far as cleaning up old inventory after it sells, I don't know if that's even necessary. Best wishes on growing your business! Sorry. I didn't express my question clearly. What I meant was how to find New books currently in inventory other than scrolling through pages in Amazon Seller Central and watching the "Condition" column. I could do that but hope there is an more efficient way. If you would like to receive updates, please enter your address in the toolbar at the bottom of the page. There are a few noteworthy items in this screenshot:. If you go to the Fulfillment by Amazon Revenue calculator, you will be able to search for any item that you are considering selling on Amazon. You will then enter the price (red arrow), how much it will cost you to ship to Amazon (black arrow), and how much the product costs you (green arrow). The calculator will display exactly how much you will be charged in fees, and most importantly at the bottom will display exactly how much profit you can expect to make on that item. I recommend running every single item you sell on Amazon through this calculator or a different tool that serves the same purpose. With calculators like this available, you should know exactly how much you can expect to profit on every item that you are selling on Amazon. Now that we have a tool that shows us how the fee structure works when selling on Amazon, we need some items to sell. I will first provide an overview of how selling on Amazon works. Amazon is the largest online retailer in the world, and you can have products you sell listed for sale on Amazon. In return for some fees that you pay to Amazon, your items can be displayed to millions of customers. We will get into what products to sell later in this post. For now, let's take a look at what it looks like when you have an item for sale that you are selling on Amazon. Note: Click on the image to enlarge for a better view. Verify that you have sent the correct items in the proper condition. Upon verifying the items are correct, Amazon will activate your listings. This means that your seller name will appear on the applicable product detail page, and your item will be available for sale. Amazon will store the item in their warehouses until a customer orders it. When a customer orders the item, an Amazon team member will ship the item to the customer. Once the item has shipped, Amazon will deposit your share of the sale into your seller account. Your share is the selling price less Amazon's fees. You will receive an from Amazon every time they ship an order for you. Every 2 weeks you will receive a deposit to your bank account for items that have sold for the prior 2 weeks. You will be able to enter the selling price, your cost per pound to ship to Amazon (I use $0.50/lb), and how much you can purchase the item for. In this example, I'm

5 showing that I can buy this item for $10. At this stage, there are 2 quick checks that you want to go through. The first is to see if the net profit number shown at the bottom is higher than your minimum profit threshold. Typically I recommend setting this at around $3 per unit. This means that you won't buy any items that you will make less than $3 in profit on. Having a potential net profit of less than $3 per unit does not allow for very much upside and a small drop in price can wipe out your profit. If the item meets your minimum profit threshold, then you will want to calculate a return on investment percentage. You can do this by dividing the net profit by the cost of the item. In this case, it's $7.13 divided You sell it, we ship it. Amazon has one of the most advanced fulfillment networks in the world. With Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), you store your products in Amazon's fulfillment centers, and we pick, pack, ship, and provide customer service for these products. FBA can help you scale your business and reach more customers. This example shows a Walmart clearance aisle. Once you are in this aisle you want to open the Amazon Seller App, and use your phone's camera to scan the barcode of the products in the clearance aisle. After scanning a product, you should see a screen like this: Help grow your business with Fulfillment by Amazon. There are a few key benefits to selling on Amazon using the Fulfillment by Amazon program. The biggest one that impacts Fulfillment by Amazon sellers is the free shipping benefits offered to customers: Your products are eligible for Amazon Prime free Two-Day Shipping, FREE Shipping, and other benefits. Let Amazon pick, pack, and ship your orders. Pay as you go you are charged for storage space and the orders we fulfill. The cost of shipping is included in your fees, with no extra charge for Amazon Prime free Two-Day Shipping and free shipping on eligible orders. Fees for Selling on Amazon and optional services may apply. At this point, your work is just about done with the product. Here are the steps that Amazon will take once the items arrive at their warehouses: How to Sell on Amazon for Beginners The Ultimate Guide. On this screen, you want to check for 2 things. The first is to make sure you are eligible to sell the product on Amazon under the selling eligibility section. The second is the sales rank shown in the top left-hand corner. On this particular item, we can see that the sales rank is 60 in the toys category, which is an exceptionally good rank. The sales rank is a piece of information that Amazon provides that gives us an idea of how fast an item is currently selling on Amazon. A full discussion of sales rank is beyond the scope of this post, but it's important to know the lower the number the better. For your first few trips, I'd recommend looking for sales ranks that are lower than 250,000. As you gain more experience you can definitely tweak this, but ranks under this range are a good starting point. If the app shows that you are eligible to sell the item, and the rank is less than your threshold, then you want to check and see if the item will provide a desirable return on investment. To do that, click on the arrow on the far right of the app in the "gross proceeds" section. Once you do that you will see a screen like this: What Is the Other Option Besides Selling with Fulfillment by Amazon?. What Are the Benefits of Using the Fulfillment by Amazon Program?. When you sell on Amazon, your item will be displayed in either the buy box or in the other sellers section of the Amazon product detail page. Generally, there are only 3 different sellers shown in the other sellers section on the main product detail page. If there are more than 3 other sellers, which is very common, then the buyer will have to click to view all of the available offers to see every seller who is on the listing. It's also important to note that all sellers for the same item display on the same product page. If you've sold on ebay in the past, then this will be a bit of a change. When selling on Amazon, you are able to add your product offering on the same product detail page as other sellers. On ebay, you have to create your own listing. In the case of the Catan game above, there are 81 total sellers that have this item for sale at the time of the screenshot. The buy box seller and the other sellers section are the only sellers who are featured at the current time. Getting the buy box is a key part of seeing success on Amazon. The exact algorithm is not known, but 3 of the top factors you can

6 control are your price, your feedback rating, and your fulfillment method. The fulfillment method is very important for maximizing your results on Amazon. Using Fulfillment by Amazon as your fulfillment method will be one of the best things you can do to generate sales when selling on Amazon. How to Sell on Amazon FBA. The first potential way to find some initial items to sell is by seeing what you have around your home. A couple of the most common items that might make sense are books or any gifts that you have received and never opened. The second option is to buy items that are available at low prices at a local retail store. Generally these items will be on sale or clearance. The idea is to find items that are selling for less in the retail store than they are selling for on Amazon. This practice of buying items at low prices in retail stores and then selling them on Amazon is known as retail arbitrage. Retail arbitrage is one of the best ways to get started selling on Amazon, as the initial investment is low, it allows you to learn the process, and there is a good deal of money to be made. The experience gained through retail arbitrage also provides extensive knowledge about how selling on Amazon works, which can be applied to other inventory sourcing methods in the future. To go started with retail arbitrage, you need to set up your seller account so that you can have access to the Amazon Seller App. This will provide you with the information that you need to see if an item is worth buying to resell. After you have the app installed, go to a local big box store in your area. Wal-mart, Target, Home Depot, Toys R Us, Kmart, Walgreens, or any similar store will work. Once you are in a store, look for a clearance section or aisle similar to this: Save time and grow your business with these benefits. 2018, Amazon Services LLC. All Rights Reserved. An Amazon Company. The question of "how to start selling on Amazon" is one that I get asked often. I have written many posts about how to sell on Amazon successfully, but never a comprehensive guide to selling on Amazon made especially for beginners. This post will start at step one and let you know exactly what it takes to make money selling on Amazon. My goal with this post is to show you the full process of what it takes to sell on Amazon. After reading this post I believe you will have enough information to decide if selling on Amazon is something that you wish to pursue. Before we get into the details, here is a quick look at my experience selling on Amazon to give you an idea of what's possible. I have been selling on Amazon since 2008 when I was a freshman in college. In September of 2013, I quit my full-time job as an accountant to pursue making a full-time income selling on Amazon and have been running my own business ever since. During this time, I learned many things that have helped my business succeed beyond what I thought was possible in the beginning. Every year since 2015 we've done over $1 million in sales on Amazon alone, and this year we're on pace to do nearly $6 million! I didn't start selling on Amazon at this level though. In my first month of selling online full time (October 2013), I only did about $3,000 in sales. Back then I published monthly income reports that went into detail about exactly what I was doing to make money. I highly recommend reading some of these once you are done with this post. You'll learn a lot about what being a new seller is like and hopefully avoid some of the mistakes I made early on. You can click here to open up the income report from my first full-time month in a new tab. I recommend coming back and reading this whole post before diving into the income reports though. On that note, you'll find several important links throughout this post. To get the most out of the post, read the whole thing once and then go back through and do things like setting up your seller account and do. --