Bottongos.com

Committed for Better Business

When I started my online bookselling business almost five years ago, purchasing books for my inventory was hit or miss. The first two hundred books were for the most part expensive firewood. Then I put the internet to work for me and started looking up book values ​​before buying. At the time, the only way to do this was to call my wife (at home) from my cell phone and tell her the ISBN to look up on the Amazon.com website.

This was cumbersome and time-consuming, but it allowed me to buy more books with a high enough resale value to make a nice profit. I know the stores I was shopping at must have thought it was a little weird pulling books off the shelves and reading the ISBNs to someone on the other end of my phone call, but it beat buying more firewood.

Then came wireless search services that let you type an ISBN into your Internet-enabled cell phone and get the latest online prices for that title. Personally, I really like doing this; It’s a lot like playing slot machines except I don’t lose. I simply type the ISBN number into my phone and wait for the numbers to appear on the screen to see if I have a winner. Of course, some winners sell much faster than others, but now, I rarely buy firewood, and I can usually gauge how long it will take to sell a book based on Amazon’s sales rank, which the search service also provides.

There are very few times that I will buy a book without looking for it first and these can be classified into two categories.

1) When I see a book that I know I’ve sold before and made a good profit on.

2) When I attend a big library book sale and the prices are low enough to buy everything I think has potential. I always end up with some firewood from these sales, but I have enough experience selling books online now that the winners I pick far outweigh the losers.

If you’re planning to get into online bookselling and haven’t already, I highly recommend researching wireless search services and signing up for one that suits your needs. If you go out and blind buy your inventory, you are likely to fill your shelves with firewood.

Many new online booksellers tend to think that if a book is old or classic, it would be a good book to sell. The truth is, these types of books are in demand, but the supply tends to be much greater than the demand, and many can be purchased online for a penny or two.

My own parents are prolific readers of all kinds of modern publications, for example, novels, thrillers, mysteries, and even drama. Every year they buy me a new book for my birthday and/or Christmas. Last year they bought me a new and very popular book at their local bookstore. I didn’t want to sound ungrateful, but I hated to see them spend $29.99 plus tax for a book they could have bought online for $0.15 plus $3.49 for shipping. Since my mom is very active on the internet, I told her where to look for books and now they buy all her books online from her.

While this little side story about my parents doesn’t have much to do with wireless search services, it does go to show that even books that you might think would make good sellers online because they’re still sitting on the windows of your local bookstores aren’t. always profitable online sellers. There is no direct correlation between physical store prices and online sales prices. If you are going to sell online, the prices of physical stores are irrelevant, you need to know the price and the demand online.

To further emphasize irrelevance, about 70% of my online inventory comes from the clearance shelves of a brick-and-mortar bookstore. They don’t have a demand for these books and can’t sell them, so they put them on their clearance shelves and I buy them for about $0.90. I have bought dozens of books from these clearance shelves and sold them for over $50 in the last two months alone. Several others have sold for over $150.

The point is that as an online bookseller you need to know the online value and demand for a book BEFORE you buy it and there are various search services available to you for $5.00 to $30.00 per month. Any of which will pay for itself in the first hour of book searching that you use.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *