i know you're like bro you don't even write anymore. well guess what? i've been busy making money. i little over 2 years ago i started selling used books on amazon, and it has been a hell of a ride. from making less than $200 in a month to over $8000 in a month February of last year. then back down to nearly $3000 this past december. i made a lot of great decisions but some really fucking dumb ones too that probably cost me thousands. i don't even want to think about those lol. it's all just opportunity cost at the end of the day.
i share a lot of my sales and tips over on threads but rarely have time to sit down and write anything. so if you follow me you might have seen me talking about the ups and downs. i lost my full time job on april 1st (not a joke apparently) along with a ton of other shitty things happening around the same time. it got rough. i had 2 choices - give up and go find a shit job as fast as possible to try to pay bills.... or bet on myself. clearly, i chose myself.
fast forward to now, and we just crossed $12000 in revenue in the past 30 days.
a lot has changed as you can see - we sell on amazon, ebay, etsy, poshmark, depop, and mercari. there's this super dop software called Nifty (what are the odds?) that makes managing listings across all platforms easy as hell so it handles everything non-amazon. as you can see, amazon is still in the lead but everything else is pacing up. average sales price on both are super solid. over $27 on amazon, and over $34 on all other platforms. now, for context - i sell primarily used media. books, dvds, cds, video games, etc... but have started to expand into different types of collectibles and vintage electronics.
here's a breakdown of the different categories. amazon is about 80% books, 20% media.
what's wild about these numbers is how low my average cost per item actually is. i source primarily from estate sales, garage sales, thrift stores, library sales, and book/media stores. my average buy cost for media is probably around $2 if not a little less considering i do a good amount of bulk buys. bulk buys, i typically pay 15c per pound of books. 20c per dvd/cd. so the margins are insane. thousands of percents most of the time. here's a couple examples of what i mean by insane margins.
this set i paid about $1 per book
paid $1 for this bible
got this art book for free in a bulk pickup
paid $15 for this guitar hero controller because they thought it didn't work
ok, that's enough. i think you get the point. there's money sitting out there in people's dusty attics and gross basements. you just have to be willing to put in the work and go get it. it's 100% possible to start and scale this business with $100 and some hard ass work. i pay a lot in fees, for sure. especially on amazon, but that's so you have access to the largest media market on the planet with built in traffic and existing listings. ebay isn't too bad and pays daily. there's a balance across all of it.
alright, i've gotta get back to sourcing. i didn't even get into flipping books bought on amazon right back on amazon. i have been doing this quite a bit as well, but that's for a future post.
if you wanna see my stores, i'll leave some links. there's even links for the software i use. if you want to learn more about this... comment and let me know. i'm considering subscriber-only tips and items to look out for, etc...
thanks frens
peace