Remember these books from the garage sale? I used the Amazon Seller App to scan the barcodes and list them. It took about 15 minutes in total to post 13 books. These are now just listed on Amazon as regular listings. If someone buys them, I print shipping labels and mail them like I would on an eBay sale. The next step will be converting them to Amazon FBA orders. I print out stickers for each one, and then ship one giant box to Amazon. They then add them to their regular inventory, and handle the rest of the transaction. The other great thing about using this method is that since the items are now in Amazon's warehouse, they can qualify for Prime shipping rates, and can also count towards a regular buyer's quota to get free shipping. Are some of these items as fancy as other antiques and collectables I may find? Not necessarily, but a lot of people have been using this program to streamline buying and selling cheaper things.
I had set these starter books out at the garage sale to get rid of them for space reasons, at $1 a piece. With the garage sale traffic, I was able to sell 2 whole books; not too great for the point of getting rid of them.
In the time of posting the books last night to writing this, one of them has already sold for $29, not a bad start for 15 minutes of book scanning! I think I'll test the waters with this by getting rid of things I don't need or want, like old books, CDs, and movies.
With this new stuff in my brain, I was driving by a Goodwill with a little free time and stopped in. Personally, I feel like Goodwill isn't the best place to find great deals, and they have a pretty streamlined process for taking expensive donations and marking them at what they're worth, or auctioning them on their own. CDs were half price when I walked in, so I thought I'd test the new Amazon Selling app in the store and see if I could find anything quick that was worth money.
First thing i found was an unopened audiobook of Mario Puzo's "The Family." With a quick scan of the barcode I could see that a new copy sells for $25, and the cheapest used copy sells for $9. I decided it was worth the $1 to buy!
The next odd thing I found in the CD section were three Pioneer CD Magazine Cartridges, mainly for a car where you could load 6 CDs inside, and then put the whole cartridge inside, having six CDs ready instead of one. (yes kids, there were a lot of odd workarounds before music was on phones)
These were $1 each, and the cheapest they're selling on Amazon is $15. It's the kind of thing that will never be produced again, and if you have a car that uses them (they were stock in BMW for a couple years) then you'll want a spare if they break. Are any of these items going to be fast sellers? Probably not, but the fact that I can buy them, post them, and get them out of my house is pretty cool.
From looking around online, the key to FBA success is to have a lot of merchandise posted. Some people will try to buy a bulk purchase of books or DVDs at a garage sale, and then scan them all and ship them, hoping to find a couple gems in the batch. Other use it to find clearance items in bulk at regular stores like Target and Walmart. Buying and selling new stuff doesn't appeal to me, but if this is successful, grabbing a large pile of books and sending them off may be worth trying, and letting the revenue trickle on as they're sold.
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