Selling stuff on Amazon?
I started my journey as an Amazon seller in May of 2023, so I feel like it's time for an update. I've learned a lot. When I first started, I really hadn't the slightest clue what I was doing, I just knew I had to start. I launched a single product as a test, and when sales started rolling in daily, I knew I was onto something. Now, this one single product wasn't exactly the best, but we do still sell them daily. We make about $4 per unit, which is great considering our buy cost per unit is less than 10 cents. They just move slower than we hoped.
After a couple months of selling just a couple random products here and there alongside our 1 "flagship" item... We started researching other product categories and found one that seemed insanely easy. Media. Books, DVDs, & CDs. The market is insanely large, and Amazon is one of the largest media retailers in the country. A lot of people don't even know that Amazon initially launched as an online book store, before you could buy literally everything on there.
Considering books make up approximately 10% of Amazon's worldwide revenue, there's definitely opportunity to take advantage of that. I'm not saying everyone should sell books. In fact, only a handful of people that actually start will still be doing it after 2 months. It's a long game, and it's a lot of hard work. Those that stick with it... the sky is the limit.
Books, DVDs, & CDs?!
I've shifted my focus to media, as I said. I have scaled to buying in bulk and much prefer this method to the "cherry picking" I started with. Cherry picking is still very profitable, and I will never stop doing it. This basically just means you're going into thrift stores, library sales, estate sales, etc... to scan books, then buying the profitable ones. I thoroughly enjoy spending time doing this, but buying in bulk is much more effective. Usually more profitable as well. For example, I spent $700 on 200 books cherry picking about a month ago. Profit on that haul was around $2500. I bought a shipping container that had about 4500 random books in it... That has turned into well over $6000 in profit.
The major difference is, you're going to have a lot of books that are in such bad condition you have to dispose of them. You're also going to have a ton of books that you can't make a profit selling on Amazon. Then the question comes... Well, what the hell do I do with the ones I can't sell on Amazon? That's really up to you and whatever your storage situation may be. Luckily, I have a few local book stores that buy them. They won't buy just anything, though. There's also online companies like Sell Back Your Book that will sometimes offer a small percentage of what that book may be worth.
Something else you will run into is being restricted in certain brands. For example, a lot of text book companies like McGraw Hill do not allow just anyone to resell their products. Have no fear, though. There's also companies that will sell restricted items on consignment. I use a company called Restricted Inventory for anything I can't get ungated (approved to sell) in. They take 50% of every sale up to $20. This means if you send them a text book worth $100, then it sells... They take their $20 and you get whatever is left after fulfillment fees. Not a bad set up. It also acts as another place to park slow moving inventory.
I just recently started selling DVDs & CDs as well. They're a different beast, and I haven't quite mastered them. Obviously, DVDs and CDs are going out of style. There's not a ton of people that actually buy physical media, but they do exist. In my most recent bulk buy, I came across a set of CDs on meditation, which I sold for $50. Getting ungated for CDs & DVDs takes a little bit of a workaround, but it's 100% doable. I was able to order 10 copies of some random DVD on christianbook.com, then submit that invoice to Amazon to get ungated. This is not guaranteed to work, but it did work for me.
Listing Products
Once you start selling on Amazon, you will quickly realize how shitty their seller dashboard is. It's actually appalling and should be criminal considering how much money 3rd party sellers make them. Listing products on Seller Central is a nightmare and takes way too long. I use a software called Go2Lister that lets me list hundreds of products in minutes. It's pretty basic right now, but it's made by an actual Amazon seller that knows how horrible their native Seller Central UI is. G2L does a lot of really awesome stuff even as a basic listing software, though. It provides a dashboard that shows you your actual profits after all the bullshit fees/shipping/cost.
Kinda mind blowing that the actual seller dashboard makes you do so much work and digging to see your actual profits. Forget trying to manage your inventory through the dashboard unless you have less than 100 items. Someone like myself dealing with thousands of items, it is pretty useless. Luckily G2L just added inventory management into their software and is working on all sorts of useful stuff for sellers that amazon really should be doing themselves.
Sales
Since starting media sales in late July, I've done about $25k in sales. From my first month just shy of $250 to this month already being over $4000 in sales, is pretty amazing. It only took me about 6 months to get to this point. Don't get me wrong. This is a lot of work. A lot of driving, late nights, and heavy lifting. If you get up every day with a goal of finding more products to list, you really can't lose unless you fumble super hard. More products = more profit, especially with media. You just have to make sure you're getting your products for the right price. This is why I prefer bulk. Rather than $1-$3 per book, you can generally get them for pennies if you buy enough.
I plan on doing a little more in depth stuff, maybe even tutorials on sourcing products and such. Let me know what ya think.
Peace.