Terence J. Grant

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!