QUESTION: I read that you are selling mostly through Fulfillment by Amazon these days. Do you have advice regarding what types of books sell best there? I’ve sent in about 20 books as an experiment and I’m still in the midst of a steep learning curve.
ANSWER: Mostly, I’m selling overstock books on there that I have in quantity – dozens or hundreds of copies of each title. I’ve seen the price and demand collapse for a few of those titles, which gives me pause. For me, the big concern about FBA is building up deadwood, and then having to pay what becomes an unmanageable monthly storage fee — or pay Amazon to return or dump the books. Will that be worse than used to be, back when I had to manually clean the deadwood from my own shelves, a chore that was unbearable? Don’t know yet.
Right now I’ve got a couple thousand books there, and the monthly storage fee is about $50, depending on the season.
I have had pretty good luck in selling my one-of-a-kind books through FBA. That is what I sent in initially, and those are pretty much gone. I have sold a couple of unique books (to dealers) through FBA for up to $350.
So I think anything that’s not a bona-fide collectible book is a candidate for FBA selling. I have sold several run-of-the-mill books for double the price listed by the closest competing non-FBA seller with comparable feedback. Why? Potential savings on shipping fees does not explain why certain buyers will pay $10 to $15 more from an FBA seller. The only explanation is that there’s some percentage of customers who just aren’t willing to transact directly with a third-party Marketplace seller.
I was very skeptical of FBA when it was introduced, and the only reason I dipped my toe in was that I was satisfied, after carefully reading the FBA board, that most of the kinks had been ironed out, and that negative feedback resulting from Amazon’s fulfillment snafus would be struck from your score. Once I got started, and saw the sales, I went whole hog.
Having said all this, I don’t begrudge anyone’s tendency to stay away from FBA. I am a control freak when it comes to my book business, and it was a huge leap of faith to send in that first box.
Related posts:
![[Google]]( http://www.weberbooks.com/selling/wp-content/plugins/easy-adsenser/google-light.gif)
7 Comments
Hi Steve, I’ve been experimenting with FBA as well and am starting to do pretty well with it. I think the reason that buyers will pay $10-$15 more for the same book is that there is a program that they belong to – I believe it’s called Prime by Amazon, and they get perks of some sort to buy books either directly from Amazon or from FBA sellers.
Thanks for this post. When I saw you mention FBA yesterday, I was wondering how it’s going. I’m restarting my writing career and would like to spend less time dealing with my books, but FBA just doesn’t seem very practical to me at the moment.
After reading a lot of the info we launched with fba on Jan 20th. I have sold on Amazon for several years and had a decent feel for their systems. From launch forward it has been a great experience. When we ran into a challenge customer support helped us walk through it. When we received a bad feedback we contacted them and it was struck through right away as it was an fba issue and not our fault. At this point we are averaging 20 sales per day. The big issue has been maintaining inventory. Library sales have been a big help and we bought a 5000 book order that has proven to be a gold mine. I will admit that the new email system does not excite me. No problems yet but it is only a matter of time. I sold on ebay for years and hope Amazon does not follow in their footsteps to far. A word of advice. You can’t get results if you don’t take action. Educate yourself by relying on trustworthy people. Once you have a feel for it go do it. Do one thing well before you add anything else to it. I am 60 years old and disabled. I am also old school and want a handout from no one. I will earn my own way. Amazon is one venue I use and it is starting to produce nicely. Be honest and work hard. It tends to solve most problems. Go do something to improve your life.
Thank you for a down to earth explanation of the pros and cons of FBA.
Looking at a business model like FBA made me scratch my head about how it would compete with lower cost quality alternatives. As a third party seller it did not dawn on me that Amazon’s reputation would accrue to the seller using FBA.
Even if I use FBA I am still a third party seller from my perspective however not from the perspective of the buyer.
Looking at the FBA guidelines it looked to me that the books you send them have to be already packaged for shipping by them. Is this correct?
Charles, you ship to FBA in bulk. Each box can hold as many books as you want, up to 50 lbs. Amazon boxes them individually after you get an order.
Does anyone have good numbers as to inventory size vs. ave books sold per day?
i.e. inventory of 1,000 books yields 20 books sold average per day