Book Flipping

Book Flipping: How to Make Money Selling Books Online

Book flipping at sites like Amazon.com still yields a buck, but you must maximize your efforts to get fruitful results. This blog looks at book flipping after most dealers quit or moved away from single-unit book buying and selling.

In this blog, I’ll discuss ways to sell single-unit books online, distinguishable from each other, and I will present a routine for beginner booksellers’ benefit. The competition in book-selling expanded to include sources who used to sell to dealers, but you can still discover used books and multiple ways to sell them. This blog will give you that knowledge.

Book Flipping: Get Started!

Used books fill the listings at websites like Amazon.com and eBay. The requirement to start won’t break the bank: You need a computer, a stack of books, and some wheels (a vehicle, that is). It also helps to take a scout lookup tool that retrieves pricing information off a satellite.   What to do with a stack of books and a desire to sell?

• Sell the books yourself.  
• Sell the books to other dealers. 
• Sell the books to local stores. 

Each option offers strengths but also differences. Books can be sold in one market but not another, but not because of restrictions. It’s just difficult to make money on books consistently.  

Book Flipping: Sell Books from Your Online Store

The most rewarding success selling books comes from your own store at Amazon.com. As the biggest retailer of books globally, your books receive the most significant exposure here. If you do your homework, the return-on-investment at Amazon.com, on average, is superior to other seller venues. Though independent booksellers enjoyed a more considerable profit margin in years past than in today’s market, Amazon’s still the place to sell. 

What are the Advantages?

• List your books free and sell casually, or go all out and build a big store.  
• If you can pay the Amazon fees and still make money, you’ll discover Amazon’s advantages.  
• Other websites exist in Amazon’s shadows. You can duplicate some or all of the inventory you sell at Amazon.com across multiple venues like Ebay, Alibris, and others (assuming you can clean your book listings effectively).

Tell: Suppose you decide to sell across various venues. In that case, you may get the boot from selling websites if you offer inventory for sale that you can’t fulfill. cleaning your listings is essential to success. Third-party vendors offer this as a service, and if you’ve got your business going, it’s worth a look. 

 Tell: Book-flipping at Amazon takes time. Today, you must discover expensive books like textbooks in demand if you want to make money. 

Book Flipping: Buy Low

Because of the selling fees, list books with a high dollar value. When sourcing from thrift stores, go after a high-profit margin. That is, pay very little for a book and get at least three times your investment back. That’s a high-profit margin. You won’t get ahead with razor-thin margins unless you bulk-sell and source your inventory from a wholesaler. 

Picking through stacks of books with a scanner is labor-intensive, so each item must bring a high-profit margin. Thrift stores can scan the books just like you do, and they do scan their inventory, whenever they can—everything thrift stores discover with value they may sell online at their thrift store website, decreasing your likelihood of success.

On the bright side, A flood of donations hit places like Goodwill/Easter Seals, and their staff doesn’t always find time to scan the books. High-priced books end up on shelves or in the piles at the Goodwill Outlet stores, so there are still opportunities to find pricey books. Still, many dealers have quit because the thrift stores grab all the desirable books before dealers show up. 

Other Sources

• Garage Sales 
• Church Sales 
• Neighborhood Sales 
• Book Fairs

 Another area for merchant sales at Amazon and other sites is books that bring a high dollar value but don’t command much return. If you as a merchant has a place to store antique books, you can list them for months, and wait for a buyer to show up.  

Unfortunately, antique books are a collector’s market. Many serious buyers are as rare as the books.  

Lookup tools are essential to your success.  The smartphone apps to check out include FBA Scan by ASeller Tool, Scoutpal, Profit Bandit, Scoutify, ScoutIQ, Bookscouter, and ScanPower. The number of tools also suggest that the book flipping effort is still profitable. if you want to increase your chances, a scanner makes a difference.  

Book Flipping: Sell Books to Other Dealers

The business of selling books to other dealers also works. Many brick-and-mortar vendors want a shot at buying your books. They pay less per item than the price you enjoy trading on Amazon, but on the other hand, they offer money for books that are difficult to sell at Amazon.  

Thrift stores scanners often overlook these books because they don’t yield money at sites like Amazon. Places like Powers, Sell-Back-Your-Book, and Textbooks.com pay for titles that you could never sell for anything at your online store. Put together a box of books and ship it to the store with the airbills the bookstores provide. After a few weeks, money arrives in the form of a check or funds deposited in Paypal. 

When selling to other vendors, the best lookup tool is Bookscouter because it displays these vendors’ offers and even allows you to sell a book right there on the spot. Any scout tool will work here, but you will have to look up each title at each bookstore unassisted by any lookup tool other than Bookscouter.  

Despite such great tools, a high-profit margin may elude you, but it is a way to move inventory you have trouble getting rid of.  

Book Flipping: Sell Books to Bookstores Near You

If you can’t find a buyer for your books online, consider visiting your local bookstore and selling in that market. Find out if a local bookstore buys used books from the public and see if you can ascertain their pricing criteria.  

They won’t tell you, but they may be interested. In my experience, this is the resource of last resort because the profit margin for you is so low. Often, it’s a way to just get rid of inventory and break even on your investment.  

What to Pay for Used Books?

The high-profit margin mentality is a must. You must try and pay as low a price as possible. For example, Goodwill Outlet stores have books that run about .25 cents a piece, on average, and while that’s a reasonable price, it could be lower.  

 Inquire at the Goodwill Outlet about bidding on whole boxes of used books. If you win the bid, you buy hundreds of books for as little as $20. You must remove your entire purchase, including inventory you’d never buy, and dispose of it yourself (the boxes are big, shipping-container-big), so bring a large vehicle or a trailer. Discover someplace to get rid of the books you cannot sell before exploring this option. 

Garage stores and church sales often have prices that run from .25 cents to a buck per book, but if you’re going to spend a dollar on a book, you must be careful. Make sure all the positive selling numbers line up before spending the money.   

This article was originally published in 2021 and was slightly edited.

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