You can turn a profit from running an online used bookstore in just your very first month—and with very little start-up costs. You just
have to know how to do it.
When my friend Phil told me about his online used bookstore business, I was skeptical. That is until I visited Phil’s in-home office and
saw the business in action.
“So where do you sell these books?” I asked.
“On ABEBooks.com,” said Phil. “I list the books on their website and when they get an order for my book, they notify me. I ship the book
and they collect the money from the customer, keep a small commission and then deposit the balance of the money into my checking
account—every week. They even gave me a free program to catalog the books on my computer.”
“So how much are you making?,” I asked.
“Well, these five books are selling for about $50 total plus shipping and handling” replied Phil. “I’m making about 40 to 45 dollars
profit here.”
“An 80-90% profit! I am impressed. Do you do this every day?”
“This is about my average day,” he replied.
I quickly deduced that he was making over $1,000 a month on a part-time basis. When I got home, I immediately went to ABEBooks.com and
signed up to be a bookseller.
ABEBooks.com charges $25 per month to list up to 500 books and provide each seller with a free program, Homebase, to list and maintain
the seller’s books. An added benefit is that Homebase allows each seller the ability to upload inventory to ABEBooks.com AND other
websites that sell used books.
That was the easy part.
Once I signed up to be a bookseller and had my computer set up, I needed books to sell. I started with the books that were gathering
dust on my own bookshelves. The first thing I did was look up the market value of the books I wanted to sell to see what price everyone
else was asking for the same books. I quickly discovered that most of my fiction books were valued at $1 or less–not worth the effort to
list them–but many of the non-fiction books I had were worth $4 or more. I listed about 50 books to begin with and sold 10 of those
books in the first week—about $80 worth.
In one week I was already making a profit! I decided to get serious.
At first I started buying books at garage sales on an individual basis for 50 cents to 1 dollar each, but soon discovered that I really
wasn’t too good at judging the value of a book. I ended up donating more books than I kept so I got bold and began offering to buy all
the books at someone’s garage sale for one price, dropping the price of the books down to 5 to 10 cents each. After sorting out the junk
books, I determined that the average cost of the keepers was 20 to 30 cents per book. In other words, I paid 30 cents for a book that
would later sell for anywhere from 4 to 100 dollars each.
After a while, garage sales became too much work so I looked for alternative buying methods. That’s when I discovered the easiest place
to buy used books was at large book sales put on by non-profit organizations, often known as “Friends of the Library”.
By the second month in business, working part-time, I made a profit of $1,000 and I’ve never looked back.
The whole process of the used book business is really very simple.
- Purchase inventory.
- Catalog your inventory.
- List your inventory on used book websites.
- Ship the books when they sell.
- Collect your money.
And to help you get started, here are some resources for each of these five steps:
- Purchase inventory:
- Book sales in your area are listed on BookSaleFinder.com.
- Check classified ads in your local paper for garage sales with books.
- Search the Internet for used books or inventory close-out sales.
- Catalog your inventory:
Keeping track of the books you have on hand, what’s sold, and what’s been shipped is vital to the success of your used book business.
- ABEBooks.com has the free Homebase program and costs $25 per month, per 500 books.
- TheArtOfBooks.com is a complete online program that charges $10 per month plus a percentage of sales.
- Booktrakker.com costs $125 to $250, but has a free to try out for a month. (I now use this service.)
- List your inventory:
There are many places to list your inventory and you should take advantage of most of them, just remember that if you sell a book on one
site, you will need to unlist it on all the other sites as soon as possible. Inventory managers in the previous section make this step
easy to do.
- Amazon.com
- ABEbooks.com
- Alibris.com
- Half.com
- Biblio.com
- ChooseBooks.com
- Valorebooks.com
- A1Books.com
- Ship sold books:
Package your books in padded envelopes in #1 #2, #4 and #5 sizes. And don’t forget to buy them in bulk to cut costs.
- eSupplyStore.com
- TheWrapPack.com
The best and cheapest way to ship books is via the US postal service. To avoid standing in line at the post office, you can print labels
with postage at home with these solutions:
- Stamps.com
- Endicia.com
- USPS.com
- Collect your money:
Open up a business checking account for direct deposit payments and don’t forget to open up a business account with PayPal.com…many
customers prefer the ease and simplicity of using their PayPal accounts.
About The Author:
Dan Case is the owner of a home-based, online used book business and the editor of Writing for DOLLARS!
WritingForDollars or Dan Case
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