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

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:

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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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.

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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:

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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