Books to resell - Any experienced Amazon/Ebayers?

[WiscoGringo]

So I recently decided to do some decluttering and I thought that my overflowing bookshelf would be a great place to start. I wrote down all the books I'd be willing to get rid of and put them in a spreadsheet. I then went through Amazon and entered the price I thought was reasonable (I usually took the lowest price of a used one, except in a few cases where I thought mine was in better shape than the others).

I was going to try to list and sell all of these that were worth selling, but I realize that I have no experience in selling books online and have no seller rating to back me up. Plus, I don't really have the time to deal with all of this.

So, if someone who likes reselling stuff would like these as one big package, I'd sell it at a reasonable discount to make it easier on me. I realize there's a fair amount of them that are probably not worth shipping around to sell, so let me know if you'd like to make an offer on a chunk of them and then I'd donate the ones that are not worth it. I'm relying on your mustachian honor and I will take your word for it.

There's also a BOSS ME-50 guitar effects pedal on the list, but I'd get rid of the package without it and sell that on my own.

There's a group of books on the bottom that I'm unsure of a price (either I couldn't find a comparable one online, or I got sick of looking). I don't think any of them are worth a ton, but the photography ones should be worth the time to sell them.

TL;DR I want to put all these books in a box and send them to someone who likes reselling stuff, shoot me an offer, I'm less interested in getting rich off of this than I am in getting rid of this stuff.

Spreadsheet attached.

PM me!

[jengod]

Suggestion: Keep the top 15-25 on your list and just sell those on Amazon. (No one cares if you don't have a seller rating if you have the lowest price.) Donate the rest to your local library book sale. After Amazon fees and your time you'll make pennies. Barely.

Enter them all with a boilerplate description "This book ships fast from Minnesota, etc." UNLESS the book has highlights or marks, which should be mentioned in the description field under the quality designation "ACCEPTABLE."

Start collecting shipping material (envelopes or brown paper bags and shipping tape) now so you have it on hand when something sells.

Bookmark or print out the Media Mail rate schedule and keep it on hand, as that will be the basis for your postage costs. I use Amazon.com shipping services to have the verification and to save time, but most beginning sellers will just use stamps. (You can't print out Media Mail rate stamps on the main USPS site, at least as far as I have found.) The Amazon.com shipping services cost a few pennies per transaction. I don't mind, but depending on your Mustachianism level you may want to avoid this. If you are going to use stamps, stock up at the post office next time you are close by. Maybe tell the postal clerk what you need them for and they can recommend useful denominations.

Protip: When you click on "sell on Amazon" on an item page, you can see an item's Amazon Sales Rank. From this number you can get a general idea of how fast something will sell. If it's less than 10,000 it'll be sold in a couple of days. If it's more than 1,000,000 it may linger in inventory for a year or more.

Good luck!

[Hypersion]

I would try to sell anything over ~$40 or so and then use something like bigwords where it searches multiple book buyback websites.  They will buy your items without you having to wait to sell it retail.

[grizz]

Definitely follow the advice jengod gave. It will save you a lot of time. Also, I wouldn't bother selling anything on Amazon for under $10. Their fees are pretty steep.

[Cognitive Miser]

If you think you might want other, different books, you can sell to Powell's.  They'll give you credit toward more books and they paid decent rates 3 years ago, which is the last time I sold to them.  You just send your books to them by Media Mail, which is cheap and might take a month to get there.  I think maybe they even paid postage...?

http://www.powells.com/SellBooks/SellBooksOnline.aspx

[jooles]

Books that have low value, that you won't be selling on Amazon, can also be sold enmasse to your local used book store.  They will likely give you a credit towards purchases that you can make in their store, or they might give you some small amount of cash.  You're supporting local small business and getting something for yourself too.  Personally I love used book stores.  I like browsing and buying in them and I like selling my books to them.  But I also sell books worth $$ on Amazon.  I did it for the first time with some valuable school textbooks and then repeated with relatively new and popular books that I wouldn't be reading again.  Selling on Amazon has worked out well for me.  I don't have a big seller rating and folks bought from me because I priced my books at or below the lowest price that others were listed at.

[Ensign1999]

Another option might be to see if there is a used book store somewhat near you.  You list rural Wisconsin, but you could try calling some in a nearby city.  Tell them you are looking to liquidate your books and ask if they would be interested in seeing the list of what you have.  Worst case, they say no, but if they are looking for inventory, then you email them the spread sheet you already have, they let you know which ones they are interested in and you negotiate a price.  A bit harder if you are not close to where the store is, but still quite a bit easier than listing each book on Ebay individually, paying all the fees, and going through the hassle of shipping them.

My experience with this was simple as there was a used book store within walking distance of my house.  I put them all in a box and walked down there.  The owner went through the box and pulled out the ones he wanted and made an offer.  I countered and then we agreed on a fare price.  I then walked a little farther and donated the rest to the library (who either added them to circulation or put them in their own store).

One other option is using half.com.  It is part of ebay, but is set up for selling books, videos, and music.  There are no listing fees and you only pay if the item sells.  I've listed one item on there just to see how it works and it was pretty fast.  When you go to list, they show you all the books with the same ISBN that have sold and are currently for sale as well as what the sellers are asking.  Still have a boiler plate statement ready to go if you plan to list multiple items.

Good luck!

[Choices]

Do you itemize deductions for taxes? If so and each book isn't worth the hassle of selling it, you might consider donating them and writing off the value.

[Enigma]

When I was selling old books, I used half.com

[grizz]

Half.com doesn't get the traffic it used to. It's eBay's redheaded stepchild.

I believe that somebody above said that you can't print media mail postage. You definitely can through Paypal.

[Joggernot]

Do you itemize deductions for taxes? If so and each book isn't worth the hassle of selling it, you might consider donating them and writing off the value.

We did this when we donated about 600 books to the library.  I itemized each book and valued them at 1/4th the face price unless they were signed first editions.  Those were valued at 1/2 the face price.  These values were based on what I could have gotten at a book store that buys good books.  My tax preparer was very impressed with the list and we got a tax deduction.

[Elle 8]

First, when you looked at prices, were you looking at sold books or what they're being offered at?  I'd search actual completed sales to determine price.  I know you can do this on eBay but I'm not sure about Amazon.  I had some luck selling some of my daughter's college textbooks on eBay.  This was a couple years ago so it's not fresh in my mind.  I remember it being fairly easy because if you plug in the ISBN number when creating the listing, the description and picture would pop right up.  I only had to take pictures for a couple where the version I had had a slightly different cover or to capture damage on a couple of them.  Then you enter the condition noting anything significant like highlighting or notes in the margins.  I used 'Buy It Now' versus auctions because I figured they wouldn't want to wait for the auction to end before ordering the book.  Definitely use Media Mail.  I was amazed at how much cheaper it is than other USPS options!  And like some others have said, I wouldn't bother with anything less than $10. 

[Lis]

When I was moving I decided to check out Amazon FBA to see if I could offload any of my books with them. Out of the 30ish or so I decided to try, about 20 of them would have made me over $3 (my threshold). All you do is add them to your order, print out labels, and ship them where it tells you (they have a deal with UPS so shipping a box of 20 books cost me $7 and change). A lot of them were textbooks from my college days, so many of them sold around August. So far I've made about $60 in profit. Not bad for work that took me an hour. I have another box of books that I picked up from Craigslist that I want to send in, but I keep forgetting. I started looking into selling on Amazon as a serious side gig (lots of people do - there are plenty that claim to have quit their job and use Amazon as their main source of income). There's no real reason that I haven't yet tbh. Now I feel motivated to get my ass in gear.