How much to pay for used books
How much should you pay for your inventory of used books? You should have no trouble limiting your costs to $2 or $3 per book by buying at library sales. It’s hard to get into serious trouble when you’re spending only a few dollars per book.
If you’re fairly resourceful in finding books and decent at picking them, on average you should pay about $1.75 per book and your average sale should be about $11.
A good rule of thumb is to try to triple your money when acquiring stock. Remember that commissions, shipping costs, and items that don’t sell will cut into that mar-gin. But like every rule, there are exceptions. If you find a book you know you’ll be able to sell quickly at $100, do not hesitate to pay $60 to get it. It’s a lot easier to make $40 on one sale than making $5 on eight separate transactions.
Nobody bets right all the time, and no matter how good you are at picking books you will inevitably accumulate some losers and pass up winners, if you’re just working with hunches. However, now it’s possible to research book prices even while you’re at a sale if you have a Web-enabled cellphone. You can even hook up a scanner to some of these phones so you don’t need to type in the ISBNs. This type of tool can take some of the pure joy out of finding a great books through serendipity, but it can also help your bottom line.
New in paperback: The Home-Based Bookstore: Start Your Own Business Selling Used Books on Amazon, eBay or Your Own Web Site (by Steve Weber)
If you’re fairly resourceful in finding books and decent at picking them, on average you should pay about $1.75 per book and your average sale should be about $11.
A good rule of thumb is to try to triple your money when acquiring stock. Remember that commissions, shipping costs, and items that don’t sell will cut into that mar-gin. But like every rule, there are exceptions. If you find a book you know you’ll be able to sell quickly at $100, do not hesitate to pay $60 to get it. It’s a lot easier to make $40 on one sale than making $5 on eight separate transactions.
Nobody bets right all the time, and no matter how good you are at picking books you will inevitably accumulate some losers and pass up winners, if you’re just working with hunches. However, now it’s possible to research book prices even while you’re at a sale if you have a Web-enabled cellphone. You can even hook up a scanner to some of these phones so you don’t need to type in the ISBNs. This type of tool can take some of the pure joy out of finding a great books through serendipity, but it can also help your bottom line.
New in paperback: The Home-Based Bookstore: Start Your Own Business Selling Used Books on Amazon, eBay or Your Own Web Site (by Steve Weber)
posted by Steve Weber at 10/26/2005
1 Comments:
I am a bookseller and what I do is use an online book price comparison search engine. What this does is quickly allow me to find which on-line bookseller has the lowest price book. The website I use is SmartBookFinder.com for finding discount books. There are large price differences on-line between bookstores and I like to know I paying the lowest price. How else will I turn a profit!
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