Home › Forums › Buying and Selling › Selling on eBay › We're adapting to Amazon increases in book fees by turning to Ebay!
Tagged: Book Selling on Ebay
- This topic has 7 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated 6 years, 12 months ago by Eve Everett.
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03/23/2017 at 2:26 pm #15177
We just hit 1000 listings on Ebay, taking our once successful Amazon book business and turning to Ebay. With the increase of book selling fees our past bread and butter books are now selling bundled on Ebay. Amazon clearly does not want us to sell the $6.95 book anymore…their fees for FBA on that exact book is $6.50. So we are making Lemonade out of Lemons…lol!
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03/23/2017 at 2:30 pm #15178
I;ve also noticed that all our books at FBA (about 500 of them) have incredibly high fees. I had to go in and raise all the prices so we wouldn’t lose money.
–Will you be selling all your books on eBay?
–Do you think you’ll make the same money?
–What kind of building is that? -
03/23/2017 at 3:33 pm #15189
Hi Jay, We still have about 3000 books in the FBA warehouses and around 4000 Merchant books for us to fulfill so I’m hoping that once everyones prices go up our business will begin to stabilize. For a comparison, last March we sold 780 Books and had $8800 in sales mostly FBA. This March we have sold 139 books with $2000 in sales so far with the same # of units in stock. Yipes! Like every business you need to adjust when facing changes. Ebay has been really busy for us, although our average sale is lower (around 22), so therefore we need to sell volume. We do buy bulk books for $.10/LB so we try to monetize as much as we can from each shipment. The building is our warehouse, it houses 3 other retail businesses and our square footage is 1650, it’s not pretty but it is perfect for us!
Thanks Jay for all you do!
Mary-
03/23/2017 at 4:01 pm #15191
Do you rent the warehouse? Or did you build it?
We’re planning to build a large storage building so this is very interesting to us.
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03/23/2017 at 7:18 pm #15194
I rent the warehouse, I have seen the pictures of the space your building and it’s super exciting! I had a brick and mortar retail clothing store for 6 years and it I’m happy to be out of that business. I think once your space is set up it will be alot easier for all of your inventory.
Let me know if there is anything else I can help with!
Mary -
03/24/2017 at 8:42 am #15225
Hi Jay, One quick question, does your new building have a garage door in it? I was thinking about that because that is one thing I love about our warehouse, we are able to accept pallets through the garage door.
Mary-
03/24/2017 at 8:49 am #15227
We haven’t started building the storage yet. But it will have an 8′ garage door. We plan to be able to sell more large furniture.
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03/24/2017 at 12:28 pm #15233
Mary:
My partner and I have been selling on Amazon for over a decade, so since u didn’t ask, I thought I’d give you some unsolicited advice. 😃
First, have you made the migration to Amazon’s new shipping platform where sellers now get to offer free shipping, etc?
Anytime Amazon tinkers it’s a cluster for a few months.
To have such a dramatic shift in sales volume it’s either a Amazon problem or a price changer issue. Perhaps your inventory was dumped off the site without u seeing it, and thus not available to buy at all.
Here’s one way this happens:
Do you have your own price changer or do you outsource that, or use Amazon?
If you use Amazon’s freebie price match/ changer, you do so at your own peril. We tried it and discovered that it would toss hundreds of listings into inactive with no explanation.
Very long story short, I ended up on the phone with the kind development department for that price changer and we went thru my audit of our books for an hour. Turns out even if the price doesn’t go below or over your rule, if the Amazon price dramatically fluctuates, their system will close seller’s copies into inactive at random on the theory this stabilizes price fluctuations.
For those that tried Amazon’s price changer, the best and safest way to completely exit its tentacles is to DELETE that sku, and completely realist it. If not, even if you end it, then relist from the same Sku, or think you have stopped using their changer, you really haven’t. Your rule still applies and it can randomly create havoc.
(We should have stayed with our home brew in the first place as it works fine, but hey open minds..never again Amazon)
Second, you need to analyze what changed, if anything in the quality of what ur reselling. What are you doing differently. Was this is a long downward trend or sudden downturn.
It’s quite possible it’s a rankings issue. If u stock is dropping off into crappy ranks, they sell slower or not at all.
To be blunt, it could simply be the quality of your Stock over time. If your stock has snail velocity, of course it’s going to cost a lot to store, and when FBA fees went up ouch.
Third if u r cross posting on both sites, be very careful. That can quickly cause a mess. Our models are completely different. I only post antique or collectible books on eBay and post the rest on Amazon. We found that the type of books we sell (non fiction technical specialized books and textbooks) move slower on eBay , relative to Amazon, so it wasn’t worth the effort.
I hope by bundling, u get good results.
Finally, I don’t want to hurt your feelings but consider exiting the Volume model for a rankings/quality model.
There aren’t any books in our Amazon stock that have over a 1.2 million rank and would sell for less than $12.00 net. Ideally we aim to make an average of $18 and up with a rank between 0 to 750,000.
My opinion, is if Amazon book rankings aren’t on the radar / buy to resell considerations (with exceptions, such as truly scarce books), one’s bookselling life will not be sustainable even if one merchant fulfills.
Believe it or not, you can make a good living with a minimum rotating stock if the quality and velocity are there. (This, of course, can be said about any resale item).
Bottom line from over a decade of doing this:
you need to totally audit your present listed stock, bring out your Dead as a tax write off or donate for charitable deduction.
(Your price changer will greatly thank you, work faster and increase sales, for starters. Not to mention the storage costs etc)
You need to make sure the stock you Think is listed, is indeed really listed on Amazon. It happens. It also can make a price changer inefficient, or plain not work properly.
Third you need to look around that facility and seriously think if this is the route you want to go. Personally, volume sales are not for me, and companies like Better World Books and Thrift Books among many, often pound smaller volume sellers to dust, simply by being.
In any event your March comparisons suggest a serious inventory issue that needs to be directly audited. It’s a grueling haul, but fix that and u won’t need eBay unless u want to ditch books.
Best of Luck.
- This reply was modified 6 years, 12 months ago by Eve Everett.
- This reply was modified 6 years, 12 months ago by Eve Everett.
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