Q&A: How big can I build an online bookselling business?

QUESTION: I own more than 300,000 books already, and I'm building a business at home. How many books can one person list, sell, package, and ship on their own? In other words, assuming I have all the latest technology, how big can I make my business? A 75,000-book inventory? Fifty thousand? How big should I build?

ANSWER: That's an interesting question. It all depends on the person, and there's so many variables. I think it depends largely on how well you're able to get your hands on good inventory and organize and automate your business.

Some people would be overwhelmed with more than a few thousand of books in inventory. On the other hand, I'm sure some sole proprietors working solely on their own could handle 25,000 in inventory.

I have always been a sole proprietor. I've never been against the idea of hiring help, but I've never felt it was necessary for me. At my busiest (about 1.5 years ago) I had about 11,000 hand-picked used books listed on Amazon, and was selling about 100 each day. That's probably better volume and cashflow than lots of brick-and-mortar used bookshops have.

I probably worked 10 to 12 hours a day six days a week when my inventory was that high, so that was my max. Each workday included a few hours per day finding and hand-picking used books and listing them, primarily on Amazon. Since then, I've also gotten into selling new books. The great thing about selling new books is, you can list and sell multiple quantities of the same book. The trick is to avoid buying tons of the wrong books, and getting stuck with dead inventory.

So I'd say there's three critical things to having a one-person home-based bookstore with high volume:

1. Access to inventory. Sounds like you've got this covered. So this could potentially give you more time to devote to other parts of the business and get your volume up.

2. Organization. You need to minimize the time you spend on repetitive tasks. One way to do this is to have an SKU system, where each book has a unique number affixed to it with a sticker. I learned the value of this after I'd been selling for about six months. Until then, I'd organized my books alphabetically, A to Z. After I got a few thousand books in stock, it started taking me a few minutes to find each book and make sure it was the right one. I realized pretty quickly I was wasting lots of time picking my way through the alphabet for every book. I eliminated this wasted time by switching to an SKU system, which ended up saving me multiple hours per day after my business grew larger.

3. Automation. The two big things here are automating your price checking, to make sure your inventory is priced competitively, and having a system that automates the printing of your packing slips and postage. For example, I built a system to print my postage/address labels/packing slips in one batch each day. That saves a huge amount of time.

One other thing I changed that eliminated some wasted time and expense was switching to jiffy mailers for books worth less than $10. Until then I'd used cardboard bookfolds to mail any book, no matter how cheap it was.