My line of work is in custom landscaping; this year hasn't been really good for me though. People are having a tough time making ends meet, and landscaping, on their list of priorities, is about the item after the last one. One of my credit cards had a balance that I had been hoping to pay off and the way my assignments were thinning off was beginning to scare me. One day as I was rummaging through the attic, it occurred to me that I certainly had lots of books. I do have a great reading habit, and I'd accumulated something like 3000 books over the past 25 years. Since I had already read them, and gained from them what I could, I wondered if it wouldn't be a good idea to try to find a way to sell them. As far as I could see, I had two options in trying to make money online selling my books. I could either use eBay, or I could choose Amazon.
EBay is really wonderful, but there's something more regular about the experience at Amazon that appeals to me. It seems to call for lower maintenance, and it seems lower-priced. If you want to make money online selling stuff, you have to realize that to make a significant amount of money, you had better be in it for real, devoting all hours of the day to the activity. I still had my landscaping job though, and only wanted to use this to tide me over for a few months. 3000 books seems like a lot to begin with, but at an average of $10 a book, they don't go very far. So the moral of the lesson is, you need to make up your mind right at the start what it is you want to make money online selling for. If it is a something you make a living off, you'll have to make sure you have enough stuff to sell, and enough time to devote to it. I was happy with more modest aims though. But since I had hundreds of books to sell, I picked Amazon's monthly fee plan or pay them $40 to cover the whole month.
In the end, I didn't actually sell all of them; not that I didn't have customers; it was just that some of my books were just too precious to me to part with. So when you start out, you need to make sure that you know how much exactly you will be willing to give away. So how much did I sell? It was pretty good for extra income. On a really active month (count out a couple of months before and after April when people need to pay their taxes), I'll say I made about $1000. And on the slow months, I considered myself lucky if I could move $200 worth of books. To add to my income, I went out to yard sales to look for rare books. I did find plenty of cheap bestseller novels out there, but I knew that I would never make anything off them. There's so many of them on Amazon already going for one dollar. What I looked for were the rare finds; something on photography, something in poetry, something that could be a collector's item. Stay clear of computer texts and so on. Nobody pays for old technology.
So how do you price your books competitively? Whatever you sell, Amazon gets a $1.99 cut. You need to quote a realistic figure, and you need to make a profit. You probably don't want to get into the position of having to pay someone to take your books off your hands. You need to do a little research to see how much someone out there wants something you have. You don't always have to price it to sell either. Sometimes, if you describe it wonderfully, the description itself will attract a buyer who cares about the subject, and will like you for dealing well with it.
If you want to make money online selling anything, you have to manage the business end of it really well. And that means dealing quickly and politely with your customers. You could have months of positive ratings on Amazon; if you mess one sale up, you can be sure they willcomplain, and that's going to make your ratings go way down. Nothing gets people keyed up more than a delayed delivery. You can spend a lot on packing if you're not careful, and really erode that margin you built up. My rule is, to never actually buy any packaging material. I just ask a shop or two that seems to be going out of business for their excess stocks, and I buy a little. And to save on postage, you could get a Stamps.com account, if you believe that you're going to be selling enough.
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