Sourcing Books Day 1 Amazon FBA

I have been educating myself about becoming a FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon) seller. After hours of research I decided it was time to try the simplest beginner method, selling used books. Well aside from selling items out of my own home that is. Originally I was going to do Online arbitrage but the investment was clearly higher and more high risk. As after calculating the fees I saw that even items 50% off resold on amazon can end of netting zero to negative profit.

First thing I did was to sign up for Amazon FBA, this way I would be able to use the Amazon Sellers App to be able to scan the books that I found. Next thing I did was look online for book sales. Since it is winter I figured there would be no tag sales to find. Thrift stores were another option, but I ended up finding a book sale a couple towns over. So I downloaded the Amazon Sellers App and looked up the event details. The sale was open to the public, I just need to make sure I woke up by 8AM on a Saturday(not the easiest thing for me to do). So I got up and reached the Library for 20 minutes after 10 AM. The event started at 10 for normal people and 9:30 if you donated money previously to the library.

I had no idea what expect but went inside with a heavy duty shopping bag. Once I got inside they had signs point to room filled with all types of books. This was the bag room, as I entered the ladies who were collecting money for the books informed me that the cost would be $7.00 a bag. They had a row of paper bags to grab from. I thought to myself well I guess I really don't need this bag, as I was supposed to use there bags anyway. Quickly I would realize it was a good thing I brought my bag though because the weight of the books ripped others bags. So I put my paper bag inside the much heftier bag that I came with. It felt awkward at first to be scanning books to resell. But it was exciting too seeing what each book was ranked and how much it was selling for. I tried to make sure I had at least one great book in each bag. Then I tried to fill them the best I could. Seven dollars got me a lot of books and as long as I could make a profit in someway they didn't need to be lowest ranked or highest priced. But i'm just starting out so I could be wrong.

As time went on I quickly began to see I was not the only one there to resell books. I saw a couple other people who were trying to sell on Amazon as well. I though this is not good they are going to find the books that I need to be finding. This became an even larger fear once one more seller came in. He had a scanner attached to his phone. I'm not sure if it was working as good as I thought but this guy was scanning boxes of books in seconds. Luckily then I realized that even with the other sellers and regular customers there were so many books that everyone would come out with something. The guy with the scanner seemed to be looking for books ranked under 100 thousand and with a high profit margin. The other sellers seemed to be more like me just getting a couple bags of decent books.

After going through so many books, I noticed the CD's not looked through at all. I asked the lady at the check out table if they were being sold individually. She responded that the CD's could be put in a bag as well. So for my final bag I started filling it with CD's. I went through and grabbed all the bands I liked, then some I knew of and finally scanned a couple that looked interesting. Maybe not the best way of doing it but I didn't think it was worth the time to scan each one. I filled the rest the bag with some books that seemed descent enough.

After I put my third bag in my car I went bag in and looked around the rest of the library. Beyond the  unorganized bag room there was another room with organized books. These however were one to two dollars a book. What I had learned was it would be wise to know what are some really good books to sell. This way I could go to the organized book area and then buy accordingly. I looked around a little more and left. I stopped at Savers on the way home but didn't buy anything as there books were up to $7.00 a book. So I figured short of knowing exactly what to get today was not the day to look through. Afterwords I went home, the next step now is to see how I can sell these books for the most money then how to ship them out.