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

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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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.

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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