I've been flipping more or less consistently since my last post, but for about 6 months or so was solely drop-shipping as I moved into an RV and didn't have the storage space. I still am, but am now able to use my parents' shed for business and have gotten back into ebay,and more recently (should've started a lot sooner!), Amazon FBA, and holy shit, FBA is great. While you end up paying more in fees for certain items, the time saved is more than worth it. Their consumer base is also enormous, and for books, there's really no comparison. I've made $1000 in sales in my first two weeks and by reinvesting most of the money, it's relatively easy to quickly put together a semi-passive income stream. For anyone interested in FBA, a bluetooth barcode scanner and offline database for your phone is mandatory. I use the CT-20 with FBAScan. You'll be wary about dropping the $50 or so on a scanner and $30 on a database, but you will literally make that money back in a day at a place like Savers by scanning through the books for a few hours. It's really pretty ridiculous how simple it is, and I find myself with not enough time to buy all the books I could be.
My method is as follows: FBAScan (ASellerTool) through the education, non-fiction, history, biographies sections, pull out the good stuff (decent rank and profit margin, you'll get the hang of this as you continue to scan), then double-check with the Amazon Seller app, as the database is not always completely accurate. Sometimes it'll bring up a secondary listing for a book with a crazy high price. You can usually tell this is the case if it has a poor (very high number) ranking. You should double check by barcode/ISBN and with the Flow image search. You'll save yourself a lot of money. At $2-3 a book, I generally only buy those with an FBA price of around $12 or more. If there are no FBA sellers (FBA scan doesn't show the FBA price/s if they're not within the lowest 20, another reason to double-check) and the rank isn't too terrible, it could be worth buying just because a large portion of buyers only search items with Prime offerings.
I've been shipping multiple 45-50lb boxes of books and other goods to FBA each week, and if everything sells for what I think it should, then things will be looking good. My best find so far in that niche, while the ranking is very low, is a book of movie reviews from the 80s with only a couple of other sellers, listed for about $300. More commonly you'll find books in the 20-50 dollar range, with maybe 2 or 3 $100+ each week. It's exciting work, wondering if you'll stumble upon a gem worth thousands of dollars.
Those camera lenses in my last post STILL haven't sold. I don't even know why I still have them listed. I've lost about $16 in insertion fees. Yeah, I think I'll just drop the prices to a ridiculous low and re-donate them if they don't sell in a month.
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