Profit Report #4: $321 in College Textbook Reselling Profit during June
Welcome Back, 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:
Predictable behavior
Little capital required
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)
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:
$13 Profit in May Reselling College Textbooks
Welcome, Anon! As you can see, we had $1,151 in sales.
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