If you are in the market for a new niche to sell in, buckle up. Selling used books can be incredibly profitable, and it is a very scalable niche in the world of reselling. Read on to learn how to sell books on Amazon.
We here at resellingtips.com run a six-figure used book selling business in addition to our other ventures. We scan books in places such as thrift stores, used book stores, library sales, or many other sources, and find inventory for a dollar that we can routinely sell for $15. By using an app on our phones to quickly scan the barcodes on the books, we can find inventory at rapid speeds, leading to a large number of listings per week. Due to the rapid sales of used books on Amazon, this is a high turnover and high margin business.
Why Sell Books on Amazon?
Used books are the perfect gateway to selling on Amazon for the following reasons:
- Books are cheap. Thrift stores sell used books for a dollar or two, and we can sell them at much higher prices, creating excellent profit margins.
- Books are largely ‘un-gated’, meaning most new Amazon accounts are eligible to sell them immediately.
- They can be sold in used condition on Amazon, unlike many other item categories.
- Books are everywhere! No matter where you live, you can find books to sell.
- Books are small and light. You can ship a box of 40 books to Amazon for a very small price. You can also ship them directly to customers easily using bubble or poly mailers.
- Books have barcodes. This allows us to use apps on our phone to tell us if it would be profitable or not, which removes a lot of the work from checking comps.
Where to find books to sell?
Books are easy to find. Regardless of where you live, you can likely find a used bookstore, thrift store, or library that sells books frequently (either on an on-going basis, or at a library sale). Books can also be found at garage sales, estate sales, on local marketplace websites, or in countless other places. As you grow your book selling business, eventually you may start to buy used books in bulk by the pallet, which is a great way to build a scalable and highly profitable business.
When you are first starting out selling used books, perhaps the best place to begin sourcing is at thrift stores such as Goodwill or Salvation Army. These stores often have entire racks of books at extremely low prices. Among these books, there may be some that sell for high profits on Amazon. In the majority of cases, these books could sell at an average selling price of $14 – $18, and you can buy them for a dollar. But in some cases, the selling price can be much higher.
In our first month of selling books on Amazon, I found a book at Goodwill for $2 that we then sold for $240. This now happens frequently in our business.
How to Quickly Know if a Book is Profitable
Perhaps the best thing about selling books is the ability to check profitability within seconds. In other reselling niches, we need to check comps on eBay, Poshmark or Mercari to determine the profitability of an item and make a buying decision.
Not in the world of selling books. If you sell books on Amazon, you will know immediately whether a book is profitable or not, if you use the right tools.
Books have barcodes, which means we can quickly scan them using a bluetooth barcode scanner connected to our smartphone. The barcode is scanned into an app on our phones which then checks the market prices and fees for selling that book on Amazon. Using a buy cost that you input, the app will then tell you immediately if this book would be profitable or not.
Better yet, we can use headphones and listen to audio queues while quickly scanning a bookshelf, and every time we hear that beautiful “dling” sound, toss the book into a basket. By using these tools, we can amass hundreds of profitable books per week without too much trouble.
What App Do We Use to Scan the Books
ScoutIQ is our book scanning app of choice. It’s a great app that runs on Android or iOS, and seemlessly works with bluetooth barcode scanners or with your phone’s camera.
What makes ScoutIQ so great is the functionality and ease-of-use. You can rapidly get set up, and the in-built profitability triggers are perfect for getting started. Simply download the app, set the buy-cost of the book, and start scanning.
ScoutIQ also has a database mode, which means that Amazon’s library of books get downloaded to the app before you go sourcing. This makes scanning incredibly fast, and you can use it without an internet connection. Great for those basement thrift stores!
The great thing when you’re getting started here is that a lot of the tools for book selling have free trials available. Since you likely have books at home, download the free trial for ScoutIQ and scan some of your own books! You’ll see how easy it is to find profit. Word of caution though – it can be addictive!
How Do I List the Books on Amazon?
So now that you’ve used ScoutIQ to find profitable books at a thrift store, the next step is to list those books to Amazon.
Thankfully, this is also a very quick and easy process when compared to what you may be used to in your other reselling niches. Many people who sell books on Amazon will use a tool to aid in their listing.
Since most books have barcodes, we can scan them using a barcode scanner which helps to speed up the listing process. What’s more – books on Amazon already have stock images, so you don’t need to photograph your inventory at all. You simply need to scan them in, set a price, set a condition and condition note, and submit. If you are selling Amazon FBA, meaning Amazon will fulfill orders for you, then there’s an additional step of sticking a barcode label to the back of the book, but this only takes an extra few seconds if you’re using a thermal barcode label printer such as Dymo 450.
Books can be listed directly using Amazon Seller Central, but this is a slow process. We much prefer to use software to list hundreds of books at a rapid speed.
What Software Do I Use to List Books?
We use AccelerList to list our books.
AccelerList is a listing tool that allows us to quickly scan books, set prices, and list them. By building in our condition notes and criteria in advance, we can streamline our workflows and speed up listing dramatically. AccelerList connects directly to Amazon, and pulls the information of every book that we scan in. We can quickly view the prices set by other sellers on that listing, which helps us to price competitively in seconds. AccelerList will also process the barcode label after we submit a book to be listed. Overall, we don’t need to leave the AccelerList tool at all during the process, until our batch of books are submitted to Amazon and we need to close out the shipment.
AccelerList is also a web-based listing tool, which means we can use it from any device, even if we are on a sourcing trip out of state.
Click here for a free two-week trial of AccelerList.
There are of course many other options for listing software to get your books uploaded to Amazon. If you would prefer a faster tool than AccelerList, check out ScanLister. ScanLister is software that downloads directly to your computer, which makes it lightning fast because it doesn’t need to work through a web browser. If you want to list in bulk, that may be the way to go.
How Do I Ship Orders?
This is the beautiful part for people who sell books on Amazon.
If you have never sold anything via Amazon’s Fulfilled By Amazon program, you are in for a treat.
Amazon FBA is a program whereby Amazon will fulfill your orders for you. They will take care of shipping items to the customer, and handle all customer service related to fulfillment. They will also store your inventory at their warehouses, which helps you to focus more of your time and effort on sourcing.
Once you have listed your items using AccelerList, you can then ship them in large quantities straight to Amazon’s warehouse. Amazon will then take it from theres, and you will get paid as your items sell.
Don’t confuse this for a passive income business, because selling books does take a ton of work. You need to consistently send products in so that the business will keep growing. But after you’ve listed them and shipped them out to Amazon, it does become passive from that point, and your attention turns to the next batch of inventory to source, list, and ship.
I won’t go into detail in this article about specifically how to ship your items to Amazon, but I will say that it is super easy to do, once you’ve learned how. AccelerList will guide you through the process. All you need are a thermal label printer, labels, and some shipping supplies such as boxes, scales, and tape.
What Other Tools Do I Need?
In addition to ScoutIQ and AccelerList, there are a few tools that would greatly speed up your workflow if you want to sell books on Amazon. Some examples are included here.
Dymo Label Printer
A thermal label printer will be your best friend in the world of book selling, particularly if you are selling via Amazon FBA. As you list your books, this printer will quickly print out the FNSKU label for each item, which is a requirement if you’re shipping them to Amazon for fulfillment.
These are often on sale at great prices.
Desktop Barcode Scanner
A desktop barcode scanner allows you to quickly list your books by scanning the barcode directly into your listing software, such as AccelerList.
These are relatively in-expensive, and can be extremely helpful to have as a reseller.
Mobile Bluetooth Scanner
A bluetooth barcode scanner connects to your phone and allows you to source inventory at rapid speeds. This is a must-have, and if you use this with ScoutIQ, you will find profitable inventory extremely quickly. It will pay for itself in your first few sourcing trips due to how much faster you can work.
We have tested multiple brands, and the Eyoyo are an extremely inexpensive yet great quality option.
Get Started!
Selling books on Amazon is a great way to build a profitable reselling business. It is common to see new booksellers take their business from zero to six-figures in sales during their first year, with enough hustle. Books are everywhere, books are cheap, and books are ungated. This is the perfect gateway to selling on Amazon.
If you are already a reseller, used books could be a great second niche to supplement your current business and diversify. If you are brand new to the world of reselling, consider used books as your gateway to selling online and selling on Amazon.
Download the free trial for ScoutIQ and the free trial for AccelerList, and try it out on some books at home.
You won’t regret it!
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Do you currently sell books online? How has it worked out for you? Let us know in the comments section below.
