Back in the saddle, FBA is amazing

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. 

Finds of the week

Pickings are a little slim this first week back but I did only source on two days. Picked up the 4 CDs houdini magic deck, On The Dot, Oyo Sports lego knockoff figure, and the Donald hat for a total of $12 on Sunday. The bare minimum I'll make on the CDs is $5 profit each, but I expect it'll be more if I don't impatiently drop the prices. The toy isle is one of my favorite sections to scour through as everything is typically very reasonably priced if not dirt cheap. I guess it's a combination of a large supply, all toys generally looking the same to an adult, and the employees not wanting to overcharge children. The Oyo Sports Football champions figure, On The Dot game and Houdini deck were all in a $2 bag. The figure is sealed and should go for at least $10 on ebay, paying for the bag. The houdini deck is probably worthless, and I might make a buck and a positive feedback on the Dot game. The Hat was $2 and judging by similar listings, I should make at least $5 on it. 

The rest of the haul was from a different Savers, one I hadn't been to before. It was a little farther away than I would normally consider driving, but someone told me they had a lot of CDs and that they were cheaper. Made my way through a couple of shelves of CDs before I accidentally unpaired my scanner and found it wouldn't reconnect. Looking around I found a $2 bag with the two decks of playing cards. The only similar listing for the Crown deck is in green and is listed for $40. Threw mine up for $25 and we'll see how it goes. I think I could pull in $10 at the very least. The Spaniel deck doesn't seem to be worth anything.

The best finds were when I was getting ready to check out with nothing but a vintage deck of cards and decided to give the display case a closer look. The camera lenses were $15 and $6. Not wanting to look them up in front of the clerk, I decided to take a risk on them as they felt like quality lenses. I might make $5 on the smaller one and $10-15 on the larger. In a bin full of gameboy games for a buck a piece I picked out Kid Icarus: Of Myths and Monsters, Spider Man, and Tom and Jerry. Considering the Savers I usually frequent prices these at $3+ each, this was an exciting find. I picked these up for my collection, but I could easily make $10 on Kid Icarus. Haven't been able to get Spider Man to boot up, but Kid Icarus makes up for it. That's all for this week.