Thrift Store Profits - Turning $39 into $504 Selling Used Books

http://www.booktothefuture.com/youtube Learn to Sell Used Books on Amazon FBA. Here's the transcript of the video: Hi. This is Nathan Holmquist of BooktotheFuture.com and, for this video, I'm going to show you the results of a thrift store that I went to a few months ago. And, so, here are the books that I bought. As you can see, it's a lot of self-help type books, Eating Disorders, 12 Steps, Psychotherapy, Chemical Dependence, Counseling. These types of books normally go for quite a bit of money on Amazon. And this one right here, Groups, was one of my all-time best sales. So, I'm just going to go ahead and show you some of the results from this thrift store. So, I went to the thrift store on January 21st, bought 27 books, and they all cost $1.00 each. So, I'm going to show three examples. The first one is called Groups: A Manual for Chemical Dependency and Psychiatric Treatment. So, this one has a low price of $94 used, $200 new, no FBA sellers, and a pretty high rank of 2.5 million. And I sold this one for $299 on Amazon FBA. So, the buy cost of $1, that leaves me with a profit of around $250, 84% profit margin, and a return on investment over 25,000%. So, a huge, huge sale right here and this sold as good condition. So, it's over three times the lowest Merchant Fulfilled price for used. It did take seven months to sell because of the high ranking. It sold on August 13th. But, still, a very, very good investment right here. And, by the way, this is a screen shot of my Inventory Lab account. Inventory Lab is an Amazon listing, bookkeeping, analytic service. So, I'm going to go ahead and show a few more. Alright. The second book is called The Counselor's Intern's Handbook. It's got a low Merchant Fulfilled price of $22. It does have Used buy box of $64. That's the lowest FBA seller. A pretty good rank of 327,000. And I sold this for $69, so that leaves me with a $55 profit, almost an 80% profit margin, and a return on investment of over 5,000%. This one sold right away, ten days after I bought it on January 31st. And the last one, Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders, this has got a pretty big spread here. It starts out at $10 plus shipping and it starts going up pretty rapidly. There is one FBA seller I believe selling for $85. And I sold this one for $38.95, with the $1 buy cost, that leaves me with almost a $29 profit, 74% profit margin, and a return on investment of close to 3,000%. And this one sold about a month after I purchased it. And, so, let's go ahead and just look at the purchase numbers. I bought 27 books, paid $30 for all the books with tax, spent another $10 shipping to Amazon. So, my total costs were about $40. Seven months later, 15 of the books sold. Total sales after Amazon fees is just over $500, so that leaves me with a profit of $465. So, a really, really good trip to the thrift store here. I was only in there for about an hour. I probably spent another hour listing and shipping them to FBA. So, a couple of things to talk about, a couple of tips here. When I went to this thrift store, they asked me what I was looking for, and I told them, "Well, I'm looking for used books." So, when I told them that, they showed me a back room full of books, and that's when I found all the psychotherapy counseling books. And I never would have found that back room if I didn't tell them what I was looking for. So, that's just one thing to keep in mind is just to make sure that you tell the owners, the people who are working there, what you're looking for. And the second tip is just to specialize in something. I specialize in books, but you can specialize anything you want. It can be toys, DVDs, CDs, videogames, whatever because, when you specialize in something, you have something to tell people what you want because people want to help you. And, so, when the people asked me what I wanted, I was able to tell them books. And, so, they took me to a room full of books. And, you know, if I would have told them I'm just looking for barcodes to scan, they wouldn't have been able to help me. So, it really pays to specialize in something, become an expert in some type of niche. So, those are my two tips and it really worked out well at this thrift store. Close to a $500 profit. And that's it for this video. For more tips and tricks on FBA, please visit my blog at BooktotheFuture.com. Also, if you want to try a one-month free trial of Inventory Lab, those are the screenshots that I showed you in the video. Inventory Lab was a listing, bookkeeping, and analytic service for Amazon sellers. Please click on the link below and you can get a one-month free trial there. Alright. That's it for this video. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time. Alright. Bye.