This is the second article in a four part series on selling books, music, electronics, and other items on Amazon.com.

I myself have been selling on Amazon.com since April 2008. You can see my account here, and order from my storefront here.

Although Amazon has a very well rounded help system, I thought I’d write these articles as I have a pretty good rating (4.9 out of 5.0) and a few good tips if you’re interested into getting into this yourself.

Last time I talked about signing up and listing your items, and how Amazon.com gives you a storefront to sell your items. Well guess what? Your apartment, house, or room in your house is now your warehouse. So it’s important that you store things properly so that their condition stays the same, and things are easily accessible.

Amazon does offer you the option of having them hold your items in their warehouse, called “Fulfillment by Amazon.” With this service, they store, package, and ship your books directly to the buyer, but the catch is that they also charge you for this service, particularly if your items don’t sell quickly. So let’s not do this.

The method in which I store my items is what I like to call “ready to ship,” meaning that if I get an order, I can probably ship it same day if I have the time, or even next day. This is important because Amazon does require you ship within two days to the buyer; and if you get very busy with other things, it can be very difficult to package items as you go.

Getting an item ready to ship is fairly straightforward, but the key to doing this right is to keep the cost per item low as well. To find out what your real profit after everything is said and done, we’ll take a look at the amortized price of storage. Here’s what you might need if you had say, 50 books; this is approximate what I have left at this point:

• $7 – 25 Pack of 10.5×15 Inch Scotch Bubble Mailers
• $7 – 25 Pack of 8.5×11 Inch Scotch Bubble Mailers
• $10 – 208 count Ziploc Gallon Storage Bags
• $3 to $12 – 3M Packing tape dispenser
• $6 to $10 – Scotch/3M 4 Pack Packing tape
• $1 – Pair of Scissors
• $4 to $12 – Pack of Sharpie “Micros”
• Free – Cardboard (any size of box or flat pieces)

These prices are based on approximates, and all items can be found at Sams Club; they tend to be the cheapest for office supplies, and is one of the only places to get Ziploc bags in bulk. You can also get pristine cardboard boxes of varying sizes for free there as well.

Things like the scissors and Sharpie Micros you might already have on hand, and you can probably find use for them beyond just selling books online so you can ignore these costs if you like. I would stay away from the standard Sharpie markers since the felt tip is too big and they tend to bleed. Depending if you have CDs with your books, you may also want to invest in some “CD/DVD Slim Jewel Cases.” Since this is not the norm though, I won’t bother going over this.

The system I use is based (somewhat) on how Amazon.com ships books from their warehouses. Whenever you order a book from Amazon, it comes shrink-wrapped in plastic, attached to cardboard, and shipped inside of a cardboard box. In this way they maintain the quality of the book, and protect from any possible water damage during shipment. I like this system, and I do my best to emulate it.

The first step after you have listed all of your books is encase each book in either one or two Ziploc bags. For textbooks, you may have to use two since they tend to almost quite fit, but are unable to close. If you’re able to seal it, then you’re good.

If not, use two bags– for instance, one covering one the bottom of the book up, and another from the top down. Then tape the bags together tightly using the packing tape.

When taping bags, I use a packing tape dispenser with a grip, though I manually pull the tape out and cut it with a pair of scissors, since the dispenser is really meant for packing boxes. I also use two pieces of tape in a cross pattern to tape the bags together. I tend to use pieces of tape twice the length of the front cover of the book.

Next, if your book is a paperback book, take a piece of cardboard and cut it to the size of the book. Then attach it to the back of the book with two pieces of tape– one top to bottom, and one side to side.

So at this point you’ve either got one of these situations:

• Textbook in a Ziploc, sealed
• Textbook in two Ziplocs, taped
• Paperback in a Ziploc, sealed, taped to a cardboard backing
• Paperback in two Ziplocs, taped, and taped to a cardboard backing

So break out the Bubble Mailers and get a Shapie Micro. 10.5×15 Inch size fits almost all textbooks, and 8.5×11 Inch fits most small paperbacks. Put each book in an envelope, but don’t seal it.

Where you see the portion of the envelope where you can seal it, write the name of the book, plus edition, below it. This will help you find the book somewhat easier when you start to get orders.

So let’s talk about the amortized cost per book- we have the envelopes, the Ziploc bags, and the tape to consider.

• The envelopes are roughly $7/25 = $0.28 per book.
• Assuming we use two Ziploc bags per book, $10/104 = $0.10 per book
• Let’s go nuts and assume we use all of the packing tape for say, 50 books (including shipment). $6/50 = $0.12 per book

So that’s $0.28 + $0.10 + $0.12 = $0.50 per book for storage costs, which is not too bad at all. In fact everything is overestimated but the envelopes– it’s the only known stable cost. So for each book, your cost is half a dollar, and you’re not only ensuring quality storage, but safe shipment as well.

Amortizing the other materials– the packing tape dispenser, scissors, sharpies, and let’s say gas and wear and tear on your car– let’s just bump it up to $1.20 per book. Going back to the “basement price” I stated in the last article, now we know we need to make at least $1.20 to break even on the storage materials. Even though $7 may seem high for the basement price, there are some hidden costs we haven’t talked about yet.

Remember as well, the other reason your storage price per book is so low is because you’re shopping for these items ahead of time, and in bulk.

Once you’re done with everything in the storage process, I suggest dedicating a (perhaps an empty or near empty bubble mailer) box to your packing materials. We’ll be using some of them during shipment, and some things are easy to lose, like the Sharpie Micros.

So where to store your books exactly? Well, this is up to you. I like to keep them compartmentalized in boxes, and I often keep them out in the open, however I do like to keep them in a closet when I can as well. One reason to use boxes is that the books, once in plastic, tend to slip around, so they’re not that great to just stack on their own… they tend to fall if you do that.

Well, that’s it for now. Next time we’ll talk about the shipment process, what you need to know, and the additional costs you’ll incur during shipping.

This is the first article in a four part series on selling books, music, electronics, and other items on Amazon.com.

I myself have been selling on Amazon.com since April 2008. You can see my account here, and order from my storefront here.

Although Amazon has a very well rounded help system, I thought I’d write these articles as I have a pretty good rating (4.9 out of 5.0) and a few good tips if you’re interested into getting into this yourself.

Selling on Amazon.com is a nice way to not only earn some spare cash on the side, but to give your books (and other items like video games and music) some re-use in others’ hands as well.

If you’ve ever bought books through Amazon.com, you’ve likely seen (or perhaps ordered from) third party vendors. Some are what are called Pro Merchants, who are sellers that pay $39.95 a month and sell large numbers of items. Others, like myself, are Individual Sellers, who pay a small fee, but are only charged per sale.

Similar to eBay, with Amazon, you are dealing with customers directly. However, there are two big differences.

First, buyers have the option of buying new from Amazon directly, which means they don’t have to buy used at all. More importantly though, order payments are processed through Amazon.com, meaning that not only does Amazon pay you directly, but you don’t have to worry about trying to collect from the buyer whatsoever. This takes PayPal and direct charge-backs completely out of the equation.

Amazon has made selling your books incredibly easy; any item on Amazon.com has a button called “sell yours here” which steps you through the process of listing your own items, but rather than go that route, I’ll show you how I utilize their system.

Amazon has a website dedicated directly to individual sellers and pro merchants to handle their accounts. The site is called “Seller Center,” and is the main hub you’ll using to sell your books and manage your orders. Additionally, you can sign up via this site as well. The URL for this site is http://sellercentral.amazon.com/ , and it looks like this once you’ve set up your account:

Signing up is fairly simple, though it does require you to enter in, at a minimum, your credit card information so that you can get paid (and pay any outstanding fees.) If you’re like me and are looking to only sell books from your personal collection, I would recommend signing up as an Individual Seller rather than a Pro Merchant, as again the fees are minimal as an individual.

Once you’re done signing up, then it becomes time to list your books. What I would suggest, if they’re not already in one place, is first finding and organizing your books.

Since I sell mostly books, we’ll just go through the process as if you’re selling mostly books as well.

Listing your items is simple for books. Go to the seller central hub, click “List Single Item,” and you’ll be brought to the product search page.

Simply find the ISBN bar code on the back of the book, and most likely, you’ll find the book you’re looking to sell as well. Now you can also search to sell by name, but keep in mind that books (particularly textbooks) come in editions, and you don’t want to list a book for sale with the wrong edition, as you’ll likely rack up negative feedback and have to refund the buyer.

For other, non-book items, you can try to look up the item by UPC number, however quite often you’ll have to resort to the name of the item. Once again, be careful that the name, description, and type match the type of item you’re trying to sell. Often, especially for video games, you’ll find the strategy guide will be one of the first hits, and will be indistinguishable from the actual video game at first glance.

Items other than books are a little trickier to sell, but not impossible. Remember that Amazon is primarily a bookseller, so you’re more likely to sell a book on there than anything else.

Once you find the product, you’ll select the condition the item is in.

My advice, in addition to being truthful, is to get to the point– short and sweet. You don’t really have a lot of space in the description when buyers browse for books, so of course it’s best to make the impression where you can. For example, if you’re selling a book that’s in pristine condition that you’ve never really had a chance to read, “Brand new book” would be fine. A textbook that shows very little internal wear, but slight cover damage, and you still have the CD for it might be “CD: Yes; book in excellent condition with slight cover damage.” Again it depends on the actual wear of the book.

One note I will say though with respect to video games– the condition “New” is taken by most buyers to mean “never opened, still in its original shrink-wrap.” Even if you have a pristine copy of a video game, no scratches on the surface or damage otherwise, buyers don’t consider it “New” if it’s not in the shrink-wrap, and you’ll likely get returns. I’d imagine it’s similar for music as well, but I’ve never had the opportunity to sell music on the site.

Once you’ve entered the condition, it’s time to pick the price.

The nice thing about this step is that you can see what not only Amazon charges for the item (on the right hand side of the screen), but also what other sellers like yourself are charging. This also gives you a general idea of the going rate for an item. A few things I’ll touch on here briefly–

First, take a note of the standard shipping amount at the bottom of the page. (It differs per item type, but is the same throughout an item category.) At this writing, used books shipments add an additional $3.99 to the buyer. However, Amazon has something for buyers called “super saver shipping,” which means that products shipped directly from Amazon totaling over $25 don’t need to pay any shipping. What this means to you is that (theoretically) for you to compete with Amazon, you’ll need to price your item at least $3.99 less than the “new from Amazon” price, thus beating the “super saver shipping” price.

Second, and somewhat contradictory to the first note, you’ll want to set yourself a “basement” price that you don’t go under. This is the lowest price you’ll charge for a book, while still making a profit. The reason for this is that the amortized cost of shipping and shipping materials (in my experience), runs slightly over the lowest $3.99 shipping charge you can get for an item. So the goal is to at least break even, but I’d suggest trying to do a little better if you can.

Particularly, this makes sense if you’re able to hang on to an item for a while– textbooks are usually only bought near the beginning of school semesters, older video games can surprisingly come back in style, and you never know, sometimes a book just comes back in style– and you’ll get an order even if you’re over the lowest price.

When will you encounter this though? Well, you’ll sometimes find some used books (and other items) listed on Amazon.com that you can buy for as little as $0.01 plus the minimum shipping charge. The price tends to get this low when there’s literally hundreds of copies of the book available (or at least a somewhat insurmountable amount.) People snipe each other on price until it gets down to a penny, and suddenly there’s a lot of penny copies.

Now while you could sell for a penny, and even if you’re okay with just breaking even, it would actually be cheaper to just drop the books off at GoodWill or another charitable organization. I’ll get more into the actual price breakdown that I’ve found in the next article.

As for pricing, in the end it’s your call. I’ve done all three of the above– sold books for pennies and taken a loss, given the books away to GoodWill or others, and just set a basement price. Weigh the factors– is your book in good condition? What are the chances it will come back in style? Do you want to hang on to it for a while? Your call; I’ve been surprised with the basement price myself though. (My basement price is $7, and I’ll get the “why” behind it in the next article.)

Which also leads into a good final point– keep a tab on what the current price is for items you’re selling, and try to be the lowest price in your condition’s category if you’re looking to sell quickly. In other words, if you’re selling a bunch of “like new” books, try to be the lowest price among the “like new” books, or even in the “new” books if it works for you. Lower prices appear near the top of the used book lists.

To do this, go to the seller central hub and click the “view your current inventory” link and you can not only see the lowest price for the item you’re selling, but you can also modify your own price. You can go a penny under if you wish, however I think going in increments of $0.50 below is somewhat saner.

And that’s about it in terms of listing your items on Amazon.com. The main thing to remember is to follow Amazon’s rules, and it doesn’t hurt to follow their guidelines as well. A well organized storage system can make this rather easy to achieve.

Thus the next article in the series will be on the topic of storage. Thanks for reading, and see you then!

Hi all,

I’ve gone ahead with a re-design I’ve wanted to do to get a consistent and hopefully cleaner look and feel across the entire site.

Up until the beginning of this year, I’ve had run the entire website with just DokuWiki and the Monobook for DokuWiki skin on that, and although it was fine, I’m not certain it was exactly ideal for just simple “blogging,” so I wanted to play with WordPress as well.

To me, skinning DokuWiki is fairly easy, however WordPress seems a bit more of a challenge.

The way you skin DokuWiki is by using wrapping your entire look and feel around a function called tpl_content() , and this really takes no time at all. At a minimum, you have to implement one file, main.php.

In WordPress, it’s not quite clear, since their default template contains more than eight php files, and it seems at a minimum you have to implement three of them: index.php, comments.php, and single.php.

What also makes WordPress somewhat more difficult is that you’re at your option on how to lay out each component of the site. As much freedom as this gives you, to me this appears very difficult, and it appears that you need to know how the software works internally to really succeed with it.

So I’d say it really just depends on where you bend that determines which is more appealing:

• If you’re into really into functionality, DokuWiki’s great.
• If you’re into really deep into site design, WordPress is for you.

(Though you’d think you could write something like a “tpl_content();” for WordPress for easy skinning… Grumble…)

Okay, so back to my site design.

Functionally, I did not want to have to maintain two separate templates that displayed the same look, so in fact this templating scheme uses one set of look and feel resources. Essentially what happens for both DokuWiki and WordPress is that there both simply “include” the look from their respective directories, with an additional include per software (and for WordPress, per page type) for function hooks that defines what is displayed in the “content” area, and an area I call “per page tools” that defines buttons or labels for that particular page.

For an example of per page tools, say if you’re reading this on the main page, the per-page tools will have the “Blog”, or if it’s the single blog post view, it will say “Blog Post, Comments.”

At any rate there are some other things, like meta headers for plugins that are loaded per piece of software, the title is dynamic based on the software type, etc, but the “look and feel” portion has no idea about this, just some hook functions it knows define the content portion.

One of the things that had to go were the per-software global site plugins. For instance, DisplayWikiPage for DokuWiki won’t work for this template, so everything is hard coded for this look and feel. Neither will any of the WordPress plugins that get loaded on the “sidebar.”

Hard-coding is the solution for these items, though it’s actually not as bad as it seems. For instance, the Google Analytics code is hard-coded, but that also means I don’t have to look for a per-software plugin for this either, which is a big plus.

What’s interesting with this technique though is that it actually lends itself to be useful if you’re skinning software in general. So for instance, you could come up with a look and feel for one piece of wiki software, and just write the implementation hooks per software suite. Thus, for instance, I could write Monobook for DokuWiki to be more generic, so that it would work with other competing wiki software. (Don’t you dare beat me to it, though!)

Ok, so in terms of implementation…

Well, I’d go into more detail at this point, but it’s not perfect just yet and I’m working out some kinks. I’ll write about it later when it’s better defined.

With that in mind, go ahead and view the site, and if you run into any problems or have any suggestions, feel free to leave me a comment or shoot me an email.

Thanks.

Hi all,

Since the last blog post, I’ve gotten a lot done, but not blogged anything recently; so here’s just a couple of quickies to let you know what I’ve been up to:

• Wrote/Directed/Produced a short film
• Redesigned my company site: Tate Mode Entertainment
• Moved from Florida to Illinois

There’s more of course, but it feels less interesting or informative, so I feel it’s not really worth mentioning right now.

I’m still running through some tasks, though I’ve earmarked a day this weekend to do some new software releases for DokuWiki, so that should be exciting.

Incidentally, I am proud to say I am now a free again to manage new projects– whether it be film, TV, Video Game or otherwise.

So if you’re looking to hire someone, check out my portfolio, see some testimonials, and shoot me an email.

Thanks,

–Terence

I’m interested in defining an absolutely generic Graph as an Abstract Data Type, and am looking to build a theory of “design” (for instance, how to design algorithms) around it.

By definition I have:

1. Graphs are defined as G=(V, E), where V is the set of vertices, E is the set of edges between nodes…
2. And sets are defined as a collection of unique elements, so no duplication of vertices or edges is allowed.

So here’s the questions I have:

1. Are the above statements correct, and is it all you need to define a generic graph?
2. (See image below) Is this graph correct when you have no edge weights?
3. (See image below) Is this graph correct when you do have unique edge weights?

Essentially what I need to do is ensure that what I have is correct
for these cases:

1. Define what a graph is when neither the vertices nor edges have attached data
2. Define what happens when you have edge data

I almost think that the definition at the top of the post can carry
both cases without modification, but I need to make sure.

Please add comments to this post and help me figure this one out, thanks.

— Terence.

Hi all,

I’ve been selling used books on Amazon.com for about a year now, and people have been generally happy with how quick I ship and the quality of the packaging and so on.

I thought I might get a few of the more popular books sold, but it’s turned out better than I hoped! In total, I’ve sold nearly 150 books, and at this point I have exactly 50 left. This amounts to about three boxes full.

Now I’ll be packing up my car and moving in exactly one month, and although I’ve already been prepared to take these books with me since day one, I also realize three less boxes to carry around can be a good thing too.

Some books are Computer Science related, others are Film related, and there’s a variety of general interest subjects that were donated to me by friends a while back as well.

Most items are priced as low as $7.00, and all others are priced well below sticker price. Everything’s ready to ship (already packaged), I can guarantee that they’ll ship within 48 hours, and Amazon.com handles the entire payment transaction, in other words the ordering process is no different than ordering a new book from Amazon.

Also, yes, I will ship internationally.

So take a look and see if there’s anything you’d like by visiting my Amazon.com storefront here.

Thanks, and look forward to shipping you some books!

–Terence

I just bought Avid Media Composer in the last few weeks, version “3.X”.

Avid has since announced (and released) version 3.5, which is a major upgrade.

I called the local Avid sales representative to ask about upgrade options.

They got back to me with this: as long as you bought it between February and March, the upgrade will be available as a free download.

Otherwise, you’ll have to pay to upgrade.

That’s all I have for now, more details later when I try it out.