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:
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)
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
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:
Profit Report #6: $1,932 in College Textbook Reselling Profit during August
Welcome Back, I am an Amazon FBA college textbook reseller documenting the journey of building my online business.
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