For anyone new here, the game plan is simple: buy college textbooks cheap and sell them for a profit when students return to college.

Reselling college textbooks is the best business for beginners to start for 3 reasons:

1. Predictable behavior

2. Little capital required

3. Scalable

If you want to learn more about my process, check out my step-by-step guide to college textbook reselling. (It’s very simple)

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With that, let’s take a look at the numbers for December:

Total Sales: $2,643.95

Cost of Goods Sold (Including Amazon fees): $1,125.25

Expenses: $80 (Keepa, Amazon, SellerAmp)

Total Profit: $1,438

Average Profit: $36

Year-to-date Profit: $5,427.57

As I write this, busy season is upon us.

During the month of December, I sold ~25% of my inventory with a strong profit margin to those students eager to pick up their second semester textbooks.

That closes out the year with more than $20,000 in total sales and a profit margin just over 25%…

That is exactly what we’re looking for.

And, just for the sake of reviewing performance, I pulled up my December 2023 sales:

Despite the growth, there is still a lot of room for improvement.

With nearly 18 months of experience reselling college textbooks, I am confident that this can be scaled to $100,000 revenue/year business with slight adjustments and efficiencies.

What do I mean by that?

I think this tweet by BowTiedTiger does a much better job than I would explaining:

For me, scaling is the following:

• Tightening up shipping efficiencies

• Creating a sourcing step-action

• Integrate automation where possible (inventory reconciliation)

• Find more avenues to buy books

BLUF: This year has been great, however, there are plenty of opportunities for improvement to get this to the point of generating $25,000/year in profit.

If you want to see more profit reports from my business, start here with last month’s write-up:

Need help getting started?

I’ve developed a few resources to shorten your learning curve:

Guide to Reselling College Textbooks - Step-by-step process to starting your college textbook reselling business from the equipment needed to generating your first sale

Book List - I’ve created a list of 1,000 College Textbook ISBNs for you to use to get started setting alerts in Keepa

For anyone new here, the game plan is simple: buy college textbooks cheap and sell them for a profit when students return to college.

Reselling college textbooks is the best business for beginners to start for 3 reasons:

1. Predictable behavior

2. Little capital required

3. Scalable

If you want to learn more about my process, check out my step-by-step guide to college textbook reselling. (It’s very simple)

Subscribe now

As expected, October was much slower than August. I sold out most of my inventory during the summer and did not send an any new shipments during September. For the majority of the month, I only had 30 books in inventory.

Do I mind the slow month? Not really.

I spent the month of October doing the following:

• Building a new KPI Dashboard (More to come)

• Buying Books

• Completing Joji Davenport’s A2A (Amazon to Amazon) course

Overall, the month was very productive.

October also was my one year anniversary to reselling my first college textbook. In that time, I’ve sold over $20,000 in college textbooks, learned a ton of new skills, and accrued a lot of credit card points.

So, despite lossing money this month due to business fees (Keepa, Seller Central), I continued to move my business forward.

With that, here are the official numbers:

Total Sales: $90

Cost of Goods Sold (Including Amazon fees): $

Expenses: $80 (Keepa, Amazon, SellerAmp)

Total Profit: ($30)

Average Profit: $15

Year-to-date Profit: $5,427.57

If you want to see more profit reports from my business, start here with last month’s write-up:

Need help getting started?

I’ve developed a few resources to shorten your learning curve:

Guide to Reselling College Textbooks - Step-by-step process to starting your college textbook reselling business from the equipment needed to generating your first sale

Book List - I’ve created a list of 1,000 College Textbook ISBNs for you to use to get started setting alerts in Keepa

Great performers have many arrows in their quiver.

When I first started reselling college textbooks, I primarily set Keepa alerts and waited until my alerts went off before buying a textbook. After doing this for a year, I realized that I needed to expand my sourcing methods if I wanted to continue growing.

Given I had experience reading Keepa charts and setting alerts, I built off the knowledge I had gained and started using the Keepa Deals page.

For those who don’t know, the Deals page is a feature within Keepa's platform that filters for books that are currently experiencing significant price drops.

By significant, I mean more than 50%.

Yeah…

The Keepa Deals page allows you to continually refresh and look for these opportunities.

With over 120,000,000 books listed on Amazon, there are endless opportunities to sit there and find deals.

What causes these large price drops?

Many things: wholesellers liquidating, pricing error, water damaged copies, etc.

With that, I’ll show you the setups I’m using to find these deals.

Read more

For anyone new here, the game plan is simple: buy college textbooks cheap and sell them for a profit when students return to college.

Reselling college textbooks is the best business for beginners to start for 3 reasons:

1. Predictable behavior

2. Little capital required

3. Scalable

If you want to learn more about my process, check out my step-by-step guide to college textbook reselling. (It’s very simple)

Subscribe now

As expected, September was much slower than the explosive (relatively speaking) August I had. Regardless of the total, I saw my key performance metric in line:

Greater than 25% average ROI per book sold

As long as that measurement is tracking, I’m content with the progress. Rather than running the orange line up to a huge number, like most Amazon Sellers, maintaining a strong return on investment is the most important.

With busy season now out of the way, I can step back and say that, overall, it was a success for the following reasons:

• Average ROI > 25%

• Validation of the book reselling hypothesis

• Experience gained

These are all great, but let’s break them down a little further.

Now that I have experienced a busy season, I can confidently start buying inventory for next year (assuming it fits my criteria) with the expectation that I will increase my bottom line.

Additionally, I have a basis of knowledge that I can leverage to test other setups, like Christmas books and fiction books.

The key to reselling books is having a diverse inventory.

Some might supply 10,000 copies of a book, which is fine.

But I’d prefer to have 1 copy of 10,000 books.

With that, here are the official numbers:

Total Sales: $1,316.65

Cost of Goods Sold (Including Amazon fees): $895.27

Expenses: $80 (Keepa, Amazon, SellerAmp)

Total Profit: $341.38

Average Profit: $16.25

Year-to-date Profit: $5,457.57

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Here is how most of my flips looked:

Sales Price: $55.00

Purchase Price: $21.29

Profit: $17.45

ROI: 81%

Not all flips will be winners like this; there will be underperformers…

That’s why I choose to diversify my inventory.

If you want to see more profit reports from my business, start here with last month’s write-up:

Need help getting started?

I’ve developed a few resources to shorten your learning curve:

Guide to Reselling College Textbooks - Step-by-step process to starting your college textbook reselling business from the equipment needed to generating your first sale

Book List - I’ve created a list of 1,000 College Textbook ISBNs for you to use to get started setting alerts in Keepa

For anyone new here, the game plan is simple: buy college textbooks cheap and sell them for a profit when students return to college.

Reselling college textbooks is the best business for beginners to start for 3 reasons:

1. Predictable behavior

2. Little capital required

3. Scalable

If you want to learn more about my process, check out my step-by-step guide to college textbook reselling. (It’s very simple)

Subscribe now

For my first busy season, I had two goals:

• Generate $10,000 in sales

• Earn an average ROI >25% profit per book

With that in mind, I spent the last six months loading up on inventory, determining an effective pricing strategy, and staying proactive with my business.

Now that August has passed, I have an opportunity to step back an assess my performance.

Between August and July, I sold $10,116 in books with an average ROI of 29%.

Perfect.

I’m I saying this to brag? Absolutely not.

The amount of money I made this summer won’t impact my life at all.

However, I have proven to myself (and publicly) that college textbook reselling is a business that I need to double-down on.

Now that I have the infrastructure to buy and ship books, the experience of sourcing, and the small efficiencies in place, I have much more aggressive goals to set for next summer, but that’s for another post…

For now, let’s take a look at the August sales:

Total Sales: $7,023.87

Cost of Goods Sold (Including Amazon fees): $5,010.21

Expenses: $80 (Keepa, Amazon, SellerAmp)

Total Profit: $1,932.79

Average Profit: $16.10

Year-to-date Profit: $5,116.19

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Here is how most of my flips looked:

Sales Price: $70.49

Purchase Price: $26.87

Profit: $28.16

ROI: 67%

Not all flips will be winners like this; there will be underperformers…

You have to trust in the long run that the winners will exceed the losers.

If you want to see more profit reports from my business, start here with last month’s write-up:

Need help getting started?

I’ve developed a few resources to shorten your learning curve:

Guide to Reselling College Textbooks - Step-by-step process to starting your college textbook reselling business from the equipment needed to generating your first sale

Book List - I’ve created a list of 1,000 College Textbook ISBNs for you to use to get started setting alerts in Keepa

Today we’re going to setting objectives with your business.

Sounds broad, right?

Well, to give some context, my W-2 in consulting works with banks to assess the performance of their consumer products. For example, we’ll come in to take a look at the historical performance of their debit portfolio and provide recommendations for how they can get cardholders to spend more.

With this, one of the first questions I often ask is, “how are you measuring the performance of your portfolio?”

I can’t tell you how often I get the response, “we don’t…”

How does someone, who owns a portfolio, not measure its performance?

The idea is crazy to me. But think about this, anon…

How many people go to the gym and don’t use a lifting journal? How many people put money away for retirement but don’t track its performance? How many people want to be better golf players but don’t keep a log of their scores?

The list of use cases is endless, and I’m just as guilty in certain aspects of my life of not tracking performance.

However, over the last year, I can’t emphasize how important it has been to measure the performance of my textbook reselling business. Particularly when starting out, it is crucial to be aware of performance in the testing phase.

People don’t just float into a profitable business that contributes to their income…

They set goals, build strategies to achieve those goals, and make changes when necessary.

I want my textbook reselling business to scale to a point where I can pay myself $3,000/month.

Bowtiedbookseller, how are you going to do that?

Well, as of August 2024, my average proft / book is $15.

Therefore, I would need to sell ~200 books per month in order to achieve my objective.

Now, this is just a high-level example of the type of thinking that’s required to grow a business, while keeping reality in check. I would argue that it’s one of the most important parts of growing a business.

Over the next few sections, I’ll break down how I think about building a dashboard of performance and setting objectives.

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For anyone new here, the game plan is simple: buy college textbooks cheap and sell them for a profit when students return to college.

Reselling college textbooks is the best business for beginners to start for 3 reasons:

1. Predictable behavior

2. Little capital required

3. Scalable

If you want to learn more about my process, check out my step-by-step guide to college textbook reselling. (It’s very simple)

Subscribe now

This my first time reselling college textbooks when students return to college in August. In preparation, I bought as much inventory as I could and made sure I gave myself enough time for my inventory to be received by Amazon.

Towards the end of June, I reviewed ~200 SKUs to make sure my pricing rules were applied to each book:

• Set a minimum price that is a 50% ROI

• Be lowest used item that is prime-eligible

It really is that straight-forward…

Now, with that, let’s take a look at the July numbers:

Total Sales: $3,093

Cost of Goods Sold (Including Amazon fees): $1,790

Expenses: $80 (Keepa, Amazon, SellerAmp)

Total Profit: $1,223

Average Profit: $25.48

Here is one of my better flips:

Purchase Price: $39.00

Sales Price: $107.86

ROI: 111%

Not all flips will be winners like this. There will be weaker performers.

You have to trust in the long run that the winners will exceed the underperformers.

July set a lot of records for my college textbook reselling business:

1. Most sales in a month

2. Largest profit in a month

3. Best sales margin in a month

The above are all great, but there’s still work to be done to continue scaling this business.

By this time next year, I need to more than double my inventory (~400+ SKUs), develop another reselling setup, and improve my shipping efficiencies.

However, given what I’ve learned over the last 10 months, the above priorities are all achievable.

Scaling a business, like textbook reselling, is all about setting a goal and building a plan to achieve that goal.

Along the way, pause to assess performance, and realign your trajectory, if needed.

Less than one year ago, I did not even know that college textbook reselling through Amazon was a business.

I set out with one goal in mind: create an internet business where I can pay myself $3,000/month.

Now I have a profitable business that I am scaling.

Crazy how quickly that can happen...

If you want to see more profit reports from my business, start here with last month’s write-up:

Subscribe now

Need help getting started?

I’ve developed a few resources to shorten your learning curve:

Guide to Reselling College Textbooks - Step-by-step process to starting your college textbook reselling business from the equipment needed to generating your first sale

Book List - I’ve created a list of 1,000 College Textbook ISBNs for you to use to get started setting alerts in Keepa

I am an Amazon FBA college textbook reseller documenting the journey of building my online business. 

For anyone new here, the game plan is simple: buy college textbooks cheap and sell them for a profit when students return to college.

Reselling college textbooks is the best business for beginners to start for 3 reasons:

1. Predictable behavior

2. Little capital required

3. Scalable

If you want to learn more about my process, check out my step-by-step guide to college textbook reselling. (It’s very simple)

Overview of SellerAmp

Today we’re going to take a look at how I leverage SellerAmp for increased efficiency in sourcing and managing my textbook inventory.

For those who aren’t familiar, SellerAmp is a tool that provides additional analysis on Amazon products, such as calculating ROI, setting additional alerts, and looking at price history.

Disclaimer: I’ve never done this, but people also will walk around stores with their SellerAmp mobile app and scan items to see what they’re selling for on Amazon.  

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For anyone new here, the game plan is simple: buy college textbooks cheap and sell them for a profit when students return to college.

Reselling college textbooks is the best business for beginners to start for 3 reasons:

1. Predictable behavior

2. Little capital required

3. Scalable

If you want to learn more about my process, check out my step-by-step guide to college textbook reselling. (It’s very simple)

Subscribe now

Typically, June is not the busiest time of the year. However, I sent in a shipment of over 90 books in May and nearly doubled my inventory count.

With that, let’s take a look at the June numbers:

Total Sales: $1,666.19

Cost of Goods Sold (Including Amazon fees): $1,265

Expenses: $80

Total Profit: $321

Average Profit: $11.88

Here is one of my better flips:

Purchase Price: $47.83

Sales Price: $109.83

ROI: 97%

Not all flips will be winners like this. There will be weaker performers.

You have to trust in the long run that the winners will exceed the underperformers.

The key theme from my June performance is pricing. It wasn’t until now that I realized I was too casual in setting the price of textbooks when I created the listings. My average profit and average ROI were too low (we target 50% ROI).

How am I going to solve that?

Simple, I found a tool, SellerAmp, that calculates the ROI targets for me at the time of purchase. 

Like this:

Now, whenever I buy a book, I click “export” on my SellerAmp plugin and my tracker automatically populates with the target sales price along with the breakeven price.

Scaling a business is all about getting experience and correcting as you scale.

Was it frustrating to have suboptimal returns on the books I sold during June? Yes

But now I addressed the problem, integrated a solution, and will improve going forward. August is going to be here before we know it, so time to keep accumulating inventory to get in stock.

If you want to see more profit reports from my business, start here with last month’s write-up:

Subscribe now

Need help getting started?

I’ve developed a few resources to shorten your learning curve:

Guide to Reselling College Textbooks - Step-by-step process to starting your college textbook reselling business from the equipment needed to generating your first sale

Book List - I’ve created a list of 1,000 College Textbook ISBNs for you to use to get started setting alerts in Keepa

Today we’re going to be discussing how to price college textbooks to sell. Before we get into the specifics, it’s crucial that we recap our general strategy of college textbook reselling.

TLDR: Every year college students wait to buy their books when school is starting (August & January). During the other months of the year, they sell their textbooks for a cheaper price to try to recapture some of their costs. As college textbook resellers, we buy low during the off-season and sell high when students return to school. Click here for a full assessment of our strategy.

With that, we need to tailor our pricing strategy to align with our overall hypothesis of college textbook reselling: seek 50% ROI on books during busy season and be complacent sitting on inventory during the off months.

I want to make sure that idea is solidified before getting into the pricing strategy, so let’s also take a look at a price chart from keepa.

The black line = Used Price

The green line = Sales Rank

During August and January, we want to try to capture as much profit as possible. Aka when black line and green line go up, we sell. When black line and green line go down, we buy.

This pricing strategy is unique to the demand of the product. Unlike beauty products or clothes, there’s only seasonal demand. Therefore, we need to adjust accordingly.

The last point I want to make about pricing before we dive into this, is about the fulfillment method. There are plenty of booksellers who will have listings on Amazon, eBay, and Chegg all at the same time. Therefore, they might be the cheapest on Amazon, but will not be fulfilled as quickly as Prime products.

I say again, a seller that is not fulfilling through Amazon, will not be listed as a Prime offer.

Since we are fulfilling through Amazon, we are seeking to be the lowest cost seller that is fulfilled by Amazon.

So, we are not competing with all sellers, we want to be the lowest priced “used” book fulfilled by Amazon.

With all of that being said, today we’ll discuss the following:

1. Selecting a Pricing Tool

2. Setting the Price Rules

3. Adjusting your Pricing Over Time

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I am a college textbook reseller documenting the growth of my business and teaching other how to profitabily resell college textbooks.

This page is intended to act as a blueprint for my substack and will be updated as I post content.

There is every resource here to start from zero and build up your college textbook reselling business.

Subscribe now

Start Here:

Ultimate Guide to Reselling College Textbooks - In this step-by-step guide I walk you through every part of running a college textbook reselling business.

Proving the Textbook Reselling Hypothesis - If you’re not convinced that college textbook reselling should be your next business, start here.

Sourcing College Textbooks:

The Art of Setting a Keepa Alert - Learn how to find and set alerts on college textbooks that are expected to sell when students go back to school.

Keepa Deals Page - Use this article to see the search criteria that I use on Keepa Deals page to quickly find books selling at a discount

Managing Inventory:

How To Ship College Textbooks to Amazon - Here I take you through how to pack and ship a box to Amazon (the proper way).

Pricing College Textbooks:

Pricing College Textbooks to Sell - This article will teach you how to price college textbooks to sell during busy season and as inventory ages

Best Practices with Textbook Reselling:

Setting Business Objectives 101 - Setting objectives with your business is crucial. In this article, I lay out the framework to tracking performance, setting objectives, and assessing the outcome.

4 Ways to Get Capital for your Textbook Reselling Biz - If you don’t have money to start an online business, this guide walks you through getting initial capital.

Top 5 Lessons Learned from 6 Months of College Textbook Reselling - I reflect on my first six months of college textbook reselling and point out the key mistakes to avoid.

Monthly Profit Reports:

Profit Report #6: $310 in College Textbook Reselling Profit in September

Profit Report #5: $1,932 in College Textbook Reselling Profit during August

Profit Report #5: $1,223 in College Textbook Reselling Profit during July

Profit Report #4: $321 in College Textbook Reselling Profit during June

May 2024

April 2024

March 2024

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As you can see, over the last few months sales have been slow (since kids aren’t returning to school…). During the month of May, I shipped in my largest quantity of books (90) and repriced some of my original purchases to sell.

So, as you can see, we had $1,151 in sales:

Although this is a nice bump from last month, there is a lot more to the story than the top-line image you see above.

Like I said, I repriced some of my first book purchases (a.k.a. were not good buys), so I took losses on those. Additionally, I was very hasty setting the price on my big shipment. I did not think I’d have this problem, but I started selling them when they got into inventory at my target summer price.

Nonetheless, another great month of lessons learned and experience under my belt as I gear up for the summer.

So, without further let’s break down the numbers:

Revenue: $1,151

COGS: $915

Gross Profit: $0

Expenses: $223 (Keepa, Amazon Seller Central, and shipping)

Net Profit: $13

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I grew up in a house of Ramsey Budgetoors and always struggled rationalizing financial risk to reward. It wasn’t until my late 20’s that I started to realize that saving 15% of your savings (Ramsey’s Rule) was not enough to retire before 65 years old.

Once I found the jungle, I was hesitent to start any business due to the loss I could face and muh opportunity cost of not investing that into the market (e.g., iF yOu sKip A a CofFeE eVerYdaY aNd InVeST foR 25 YeArs YoU’lL haVe $325,000 wHen YoUR 65).

Evenutally though, I realized that my retirement investment isn’t enough, generating extra income is necessary.

With that, starting any kind of business requires a bit of captial to test and see if it’s going to work. Books aside, you need money to test ads, to buy equipment, and to even get courses. I figured I’d lay out the steps I’d take, if I was starting over again, to financing a new business venture (and I’ll use this method again in the future).

There’s no crazy alfa here, just an amalgamation of what I’ve digesed over the last few months. Here are the 4 steps I will take to generate the money to test my next business:

Note: before performing the following steps, have a tentative plan in place for how you’re going to use the money (e.g., I’m going to buy a pressure washer and create flyers or I’m going to start an affiliate marketing business).

1. Open a Checking Account

The first step I will take is opening a checking account but not just any checking account. I’ll head over to doctorofcredit.com and find a checking (personal or business) that’s paying a sign-up bonus over $400.

For anyone who hasn’t been on this site before, it’s a blog that captures all of the sign-up bonuses going on, both nationally and within each state. The site lists the criteria for getting the sign-up bonus and includes a comment section below where people talk about their experience.

Typically for a sign-up bonus of $400, I’ll put some direct deposit money in from my W-2 and hit the bonus ASAP.

Here’s a few examples:

https://www.truist.com/small-business/banking/checking-offer

https://broadway.bank/landing-pages/500

This account will also serve another role. After I’ve received the bonus, I’ll set the account up for my new business. I’ll create a few sub accounts for things like inventory and a small reserve.

Now, my checking account has served two purposes: given me some capital to work with and helped organize the finances for my new business.

Total Starting Capital after a Checking Account: $400

2. Open a Credit Card

After I open up the checking account, I’ll head to doctorofcredit.com and the BowTiedBum Substack to see what credit card deals are giving the best sign-up bonus. Since we’re starting a sole prop, we can apply for a personal or business card, depending on our current financial picture.

I’d look to get a card that gives at least a $750 sign-up bonus (e.g., Chase Ink Cash or American Express Business Gold).

Once I’ve found the card I want, I’ll read the T&C to confirm that I am able to spend what the sign-up bonus requires. I personally don’t have a high monthly spend, so I’ll have to explore other avenues to generate the required spend, like a buy group.

Here are a few examples:

https://www.doctorofcredit.com/chase-ink-preferred-100000-points-offer-with-lower-8000-spend-requirement/

https://www.doctorofcredit.com/american-express-business-platinum-150000-points-bonus-15k-spend/

For anyone who’s hesitant, it’s not a big deal spending $10k+/mo on a credit card…

I won’t go too much more in-depth on this section; for more info from the master, check out BowTiedBum.

Once I hit the sign-up bonus, I now have a card that I can use for my new business and additional capital to throw at the investment. I personally like to keep all my spend for textbook reselling on one card; that way I know exactly how much I’ve spent and easily gauge my expenses.

Total Starting Capital after a Checking Account and Credit Card: $1,150

Sell a couple items

I almost did not include this section because it seems like a catch all for any furu on the internet.

However, after taking this seriously and seeing what I could sell, I was shocked at how much extra stuff I had. I live by myself in a 700 sq. ft. apartment and was able to find $400+ worth of things to sell on eBay…

I can’t emphasize this enough.

If you’re skeptical and claim to having nothing to sell, I challenge you to spend 20 minutes looking around your house. I gaurantee you’ll find a couple hundred dollars worth of goods.

I sold a couple old iPhones, a wet suit, and a watch on eBay.

In addition to getting some extra cash for the new business, setting up eBay listings helps get in the swing of interacting with people on eBay. For my book reselling business, I use eBay daily to look for goods to purchase.

So, learning how to list and interact with others on the eBay marketplace is a good experience that’ll help.

Total Starting Capital after a Checking Account, Credit Card, and eBay sales: $1,550

Gig Work

The last activity we’ll use to generate starting capital for our business is doing some gig work.

I’ll leave this section open and do some basic math to support my claim.

If you have a car, I’d suggest doing Uber over any other time-for-money gig given the flexibility and lack of committment in the long run.

The results are mixed and the gig work you choose might be different, so I’ll put a conservative estime in that you’ll generate $25/hr and work ~18 hours over the next three months (while you wait for your credit card and bank SUBs to hit): $450

Source for income estimate:

I don’t want to spend too much on this section because you get the idea; do some time-for-money gig a few hours per month so that you can plow into your real business.

Total Starting Capital after a Checking Account, Credit Card, eBay sales, and Gig Work: $2,000

Conclusion

There you have my step-by-step process to generating capital to have a “free” shot of starting a new business. For anyone who’s hesitent to start something, there really are no excuses in 2024.

Now, will $2,000 start the next Amazon?

No.

Will it start a lot of other small businesses with potential to scale?

100%.

From a textbook reseller perspective, you could buy ~75 books (assuming avg. price of $20) and have a good idea if it’s something you want to stick with. If, after a couple of months, you don’t see value in continuing, you’re out no money.

I’m at a point now in my career where I can take larger shots than this using savings from my W-2, but trying new things out online (tweethunter, Keepa, etc.) is always easier for me when I feel like it’s “free.”

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Need help getting started?

Guide to Reselling College Textbooks - Step-by-step process to starting your college textbook reselling business from the equipment needed to generating your first sale

Book List - I’ve created a list of 1,000 College Textbook ISBNs for you to use to get started setting alerts in Keepa

It’s that time of the year where students are in school and all textbook resellers are gearing up for August. The majority of my time right now is being spent purchasing textbooks and starting to prep my inventory for the summer.

For those who are new, the high level game plan of college textbook reselling is simple: load up inventory from various sources during the semester and sell to college students via Amazon FBA as they’re returning to schoool.

Click here for my step-by-step guide to college textbook reselling where we go through the process start to finish

As someone who’s still newer to college textbook reselling, I accumulated my largest inventory of books to ship in over the last couple of months. This week, I had 93 books to send in.

With the help of my P2, we were done within 2 hours due to our efficient shipping setup.

As Amazon processes my shipments, I’ll spend the next couple of weeks setting pricing rules for the book (article to come) before the students return in August. With the big shipment going in this week, I figured what better opportunity than to do a deep dive into the shipping process.

We’ll going to start buy reviewing the following:

• Equipment Needed

• Steps to ship

• Tracking your shipments

Side Note: if you’re new to reselling on Amazon, you should be sending in shipments yourself and avoiding third-party prep centers. As a new seller you don’t know what items you’ll be selling and how Amazon processes work. I would highly encourage anyone new to roll up their sleeves and ship in themselves until it doesn’t become manageable.

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Welcome, Anon!

As you can see from the title, it was a very slow month of selling for my college textbook reselling busines.

However, let’s think for a second… Who’s buying college textbooks in April?

Let alone at busy season prices…

Remember, our thesis. As children go back to college, supply decreases and demand (price) increases.

Conversely, during the semester, supply increases will deamand (price) decreases.

What do I mean by that?

Take a look at the Keepa chart below:

We’re in the phase where demand (green line) decreases from <100,000 sales rank to nearly 500,000.

When that happens, the price (black line) also decreases

As a college textbook reseller, now is the time to accumulate inventory for the summer.

Although this month did not have yuge sales numbers, I spent a lot of time sourcing deals and adding inventory. I purchased 30 books (which met my criteria) and have 6 50-lb boxes ready to send in.

Our goal was to have 250 books in inventory by July and right now we’re sitting at 186. Time to get to work!

So with that being said, here’s the breakdown from April:

Breaking Down the Numbers:

Revenue: $0

COGS: $0

Gross Profit: $0

Expenses: $60 (Keepa and Amazon Seller Central)

Net Profit: -$60

Now let’s get into the good stuff: Sustains and improves

Sustains:

• Come in Every Day: Building anything (muscles, businesses, real estate) takes consistency. Doing the same tasks repeatedly over time are what allow progress to be made.

  Why’re you saying this is a sustain BowTiedBookSeller?

  Because I am starting to see significant progress towards my goal for this summer (250 books in inventory for July). When you first start out, it is frustrating having days go by where you don’t have any books come across that you can purchase (Note: see the thumbnail for this article to understand what I’m talking about).

  You start to question if what you’re doing is even worth it. However, I’m at the point now where although I don’t see progress on a day-to-day level, I see the broader progress that’s been made over months of work and that’s a sustain.

• Interact with others: Part of the reason I started a Substack and made a twitter account was to have the credibility to interact with other. I don’t think I have much, if any, credibility now. However, if I DM someone on twitter, they’re able to click on my profile and see that I’m activly building something instead of being some anon account.

  Now, just because I have a profile and 5 Substack articles doesn’t mean people respond or I have respect. However, I’ve noticed that people are more willing to be candid and helpful when you’re trying as well.

  I haven’t sought out or expected crazy alfa from people in the DM’s, but it’s been helpful and will continue to be as I grow.

Improves:

• Continue repricing: During the last two months, I moved and now have my packaging station setup at a friend’s house. I used to be on a cadence where I shipped in packages as my inventory grew (e.g., once I got 14 books in stock, I’d send them right to Amazon).

  Given my new living situation, I’ve built up ~6 boxes worth of books and haven’t shipped them in yet. With that, I also haven’t adjusted my listing prices. I’ve set all of my inventory to 50% ROI and not thought about it since Febraury (end of winter busy season).

  From a capital perspective, it makes more sense for me to be intentional with monitoring the prices and performances of my inventory to see if there’s opportunity to flip some books during the off-season. I’m at a point now where my initial investment has been churned a few times and I don’t need to continue injecting liquidity into the business. But it’d be helpful to get some sales during the off-season and remaining congnizent of prices.

• Maintain Cadence: From the structure of my writing and way of running a business, maybe you can tell I used to be in the Army. My brain works well with a lot of structure and if I don’t stay on top of it, I lose momentum.

  During the last month, I lost momentum with my reconciliation process.

  I need to reconcile my purchases from eBay, to my excel tracker, to Amazon shipments, and then inventory. Reconciling 5 books might take me 10 minutes. However, reconicling 30 books will take me an hour…

  The longer I put off reconiling, the more I don’t want to do it. With that, I need to continue carving out 30 minutes every week to reconcile my purchases so I don’t lose accountability of my purchases and it doesn’t become a task I don’t want to do.

Conclusion:

I’m expecting May and June to be similar stories; accumulate inventory, set pricing, and repeat.

Given our performance in January, we’re trying to set ourselves up for the best performance possible this summer.

And like most professionals, we’ll take time to reflect on sustains and improves to drive our preparation for the following busy season.

With that, happy to talk through any questions or comments.

Good Luck, Anon.

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Guide to Reselling College Textbooks - Step-by-step process to starting your college textbook reselling business from the equipment needed to generating your first sale

Book List - I’ve created a list of over 2,000 College Textbook ISBNs for you to use to get started setting alerts in Keepa

Today, we’re going to take a 10,000 foot view at the strategy we’re trying to play when it comes to college textbook reselling.

It’s always helpful to pause and reassess the broader strategy every once in a while. Remember, a good hunter will put themselves in a position to have the highest probability for success, so let’s do the same.

Quick Note: for anyone who did not get a chance to read Guide to Reselling College Textbooks, we’re going to quickly recap our strategy.

The Strategy

Let me start by using an illustrative college student, Tristan.

A native of Connecticut, Tristan goes to Kenyon College, a small liberal arts school in Gambier, OH to get an undergraduate degree in Gender Studies. His dad worked in Investment Banking, so unfortunately Tristan didn’t qualify for any grants / funding; he’s paying $66,490 per year…

The timeframe is August and his mom, Karen, is getting ready to drive him back to beautiful Gambier for the fall semester. Before she hits the road, she packs up the Suburban with all of his clothes, toiletries, and snacks.

Tristan asks, “Mom, did you buy my books for the semester?”

Karen, always prepared responds, “of course, I just ordered them off Amazon this week! They’ll be shipped to your dorm.”

Note: Karen, completely indifferent to price, wants Tristan to succeed so she finds a Used-Like New listing on Amazon so Tristan has all of the tools he needs to excel (Fun Fact: she bought BowTiedBookSeller’s listing)

Like most parents, Karen found the title to each class on Amazon Prime and had them shipped to Tristan’s dorm.

A few months after dropping Tristan off at school and returning home to Connecticut, Karen finds Tristan’s books from last semester sitting in his bedroom.

Thinking to herself, “oh we don’t need these anymore,” Karen decides to list Tristan’s old books on eBay for some other college student to hopefully use. Not realizing there’s a market for college textbooks, Karen lists the book for $50 and has no sales price in mind.

She leaves the listing on eBay until someone (BowTiedBookSeller) sends her a DM, “Good morning! Are you willing to sell the book for $20 (50% off)?”

Without hesitation, Karen says, “of course, I’d love to get rid of this. Enjoy the book!”

Karen goes to USPS, ships the package (via Media Mail at BowTiedBookSeller’s request), and gets ready to repeat the cycle when Tristan goes back in January for the fall semester.

Breakdown

So what did we just read?

We saw a parent who, who does not care about price, purchase a book during peak time of demand and then sell books from the previous semester during the lull in demand.

If you’re not following my logic, here’s a Keepa chart that’ll better explain:

As you can see, the Used Textbook Price (Black Line) Goes from ~$30 - ~$80 during the months of August to September.

Also, you’ll see the Green Line (Sales Rank, a.k.a. Demand) goes skyrocketing during August and January.

Then, during the time when Karen was selling (October / November) the price of the books comes back to ~$30 as there’s no demand.

Not only do we see this play out in the Keepa chart, which informs our decision to buy and at what price, but every day on eBay this plays out. Don’t believe me?

Nearly everyday I submit low-ball offers and get responses from people who clearly are just trying to get rid of their books.

Targeting the Right Seller

How do you find the Karens of eBay to buy from?

I look at a few things:

1. Feedback Score < 1,000: as you’ll see above isgoe_80, has a score of 134. Anything over 2,000 and they’re probably a reseller.

2. Personal Photo: you can quickly tell if someone used an iPhone to create the thumbnail for their listing. If it’s anything other than a thumbnail, they’re probably a serious reseller.

3. An Honest Description: Most people who only have a few eBay listings, will take the time to write a description; a reseller will use eBay’s AI-generated text.

Again, submitting offers for college textbooks is like duck hunting. You put yourself in the stand and send out offers.

Some days you’ll get 10 offers that meet your criteria and other days you’ll get 0; it’s part of the game.

Conclusion

Today I provided a real-life scenario that tends to play itself out year-after-year with not much changing.

Colleges still require textbooks, parents still pay for everything, and people are lazy so they want Amazon Prime.

eBay isn’t flooded with just Karen’s offloading books; there are legit book resellers there too (Pro Tip: The resellers often will offer deals if you bundle… e.g., I’ll buy all 5 of your books for $100).

Once you spin up your college textbook reselling business, you’ll be shocked at how many people don’t realize the market they’re in.

Goodluck, Anon.

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Need help getting started?

Guide to Reselling College Textbooks - Step-by-step process to starting your college textbook reselling business from the equipment needed to generating your first sale

Book List - I’ve created a list of 1,000 College Textbook ISBNs for you to use to get started setting alerts in Keepa

Greetings, Anon.

If you’re new to the Substack, welcome.

I spent time over the last week organizing the content ideas I have into a calendar to keep myself on track going forward. As I was finalizing my (tentative) list of articles for the year, I realized I am coming up on 6 months since my first sale…

To be honest, I didn’t know if my Amazon Seller Account worked until I saw this transaction appear.

I shipped books in one at a time when I first started (which is a costly mistake btw). At the time of my first sale, I had ~10 books and stock and was waiting to make a sale before I bought more.

With that being said, April 31 will be 6 months since this sale occurred and I have learned so much about WiFi money since then.

You might be thinking to yourself, “but BowTiedBookSeller, you’ve only sold $5,500 worth of books?”

True, but remember, even some of the best entrepreneurs started out reselling college textbooks…

The skills I have developed and people I have interacted with have taught me invaluable skills that I will continue to leverage in my WiFi money journey.

Eventually, I will build my textbook reselling business to a point where I can balance the time to reward and begin to focus on the real purpose of being in the jungle: E-Comm.

So, for anyone who is considering spinning a WiFi money venture, I’ve set out the top 5 things that I learned from 6 months of reselling college textbooks:

1. Just Start

2. Don’t Take “No”

3. Wait for your Setup

4. Organization is Crucial

5. Crawl, Walk, Run

Now, let’s breakdown each of these…

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To anyone new, here’s a quick recap of the business:

Resell college textbooks through Amazon FBA to students at the beginning of the semseter.

Since this is my first month writing a recap (and I’m not the best writer), you can expect this format to continue to evolve. For now, we’ll present the performance metrics and discuss sustains/improves going forward.

With that being said, here’s the breakdown from March:

Breaking Down the Numbers:

Revenue: $252.00

COGS: $176.60

Gross Profit: $75.40

Expenses: $60

Net Profit: $15.40

Not too really impressive? I agree.

However, remember how our business model is developed: accumulate inventory after the semester ends and sell when kids go back to school.

With that in mind, I’ve been buying as much inventory as I reasonably can. I purchased 45 books during the month of March while allocating ~30 minutes/day to making offers on eBay.

So, I currently have 88 books in inventory that will be sent to Amazon prior to June.

Now let’s get into the sustains and improves…

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With the lack of initial capital required and repeatable cycle of supply and demand playing out, I personally think college textbook reselling is the easiest side businesses to start running. Think about it, every year college students (who don’t know anything about business because they’re paying for college) have to buy their textbooks before the semester begins. Once the semester ends, they’re looking to get rid of the books and, if anything, generating a little money offloading them on eBay.

Well Anon, that’s where we step in. 

As people sell their textbooks following the completion of the semester, the supply of books being sold increases and the demand decreases; who is buying a college textbook in March? Other than BowTiedBookSeller, of course.

Then, when the semester is about to start back up (August/January), the supply will decrease while the demand increases causing the prices to go up.

Earth-Shattering, right? 

Lucky for us, this process happens year-after-year and most book titles remain relevant regardless if a new edition came out.

Once you give your bookselling operation a couple of hours per week, you’ll be shocked at how our thesis plays out.

I stumbled into the college textbook reselling space in September 2023. I was not fully convinced of the thesis, therefore I only bought a few books prior to the January busy season. Sure enough, the theseis played out very well and majority of my inventory sold for ~50% ROI.

Is this money life-changing? No, it is not.

However, the January busy season gave me the confidence in the strategy and assurance I needed to load up for the next semester starting in August.

In this guide, I’m going to show you how to capitalize on the repeatable event that happens twice per year to get you churning to your first $7,014.

Before we get into the bulk of the process, I want to lay out a few ground rules:

1. This guide is intended to be what it is titled, a guide (Merriam-Webster: one that leads or directs another's way). I am laying the foundation and giving the guiding principles for you to run with. If you’re unable to use this framework, do your own research, and apply what you learned, I’m sorry, Anon, you’re NGMI.

2. With any venture you start, you might find that it’s not for you. That’s totally fine. I promise, if you give your textbook reselling business a good chance over a six month period you’re going to end up in either of two places: with a profitable book reselling business or a bunch of skills in inventory management, FBA processes, and credit card points.

3. Apply your own flavor to what I share. I continue to learn new things everyday and have created so many efficiencies with my textbook business than I had when I started. If you read my guide and can make it even better, do that.

Now, let’s get into the nine steps to follow in order to get your college textbook reselling business up and running…

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