We want you to get the most out of Zen Arbitrage, and make the most money possible. And without question, and the best category for online book arbitrage is textbooks.
And it’s important to understand why.
While Zen Arbitrage isn’t just for textbooks (we have over 23 million books in our database), textbooks present a lot of opportunity.
There are very specific reasons that textbooks sold via FBA can consistently command prices 10x or more than their non-FBA counterparts.
Most Amazon sellers know you can get more for many items when sold via Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). But this fact goes into the stratosphere with textbooks.
This remains a little known secret: People will pay astronomical prices for a textbook sold via Fulfillment by Amazon. We’re talking $35, $40 and even $50 above the lowest non-FBA offer. (Even $100 more is not unheard of for well-ranked books.)
Most people don’t believe this until they try it.
Why are textbooks so special? Textbooks are the perfect formula for profit when sold via Fulfillment by Amazon.
Here’s why:
1. Urgency. Textbook purchases are usually time-sensitive, and delivery is needed on short notice by a fixed date. This is where free second-day shipping (and cheap next-day shipping) is a major selling point.
2. The Amazon Student program. The Amazon Student program offers six months of Amazon Prime for free, making students a disproportionately large percentage of Prime subscribers (30 to 40 million subscribers total).
3. The economics of being a student. Fact is, many students aren't paying for their own books, don't have skin in the game, and simply don't care they're overspending for books. They just want the books fast.
So you can forget whatever you think is a “reasonable” price, or what you think people will pay, and price higher. Much higher.
What qualifies as a “textbook”? More than just “textbooks.” Virtually anything that finds its way into a university syllabus can command textbook-level prices with FBA. These include “regular” books with supplemental material (critical analysis, etc) geared towards an academic audience, smaller non-textbook-sized books that have primarily college-student demand, and more.
Zen Arbitrage has four powerful search options that will let you zoom in on textbooks (and a third one that helps refine the results).
Textbook search option: After months of development, we recently introduced your Textbook Search feature (see tab just above search results). This is a painstakingly curated list of hundreds of thousands of textbooks. We’re really proud of this feature.
Note that this list is currently comprised of books that are used in a college setting, and includes many titles many would not think of as “textbooks.” However it is the very best list in existence, and we are constantly updating it to make it as laser-focused as possible.
Keywords: As you get more experience with textbooks, you will also identify many keywords that are generally only found in textbook titles and subtitles. One example is the word “edition.” While this word is found in the titles of a wide range of books, it is found in textbook title very, very often. Your list of keywords will increase over time (and you might not want to share these with anyone.) Download a list of over 1,000 academic keywords here.
Amazon’s price: Most textbooks have high cover prices. If you really want to increase your odds of finding textbooks, set the minimum Amazon price to $49.95 or up.
- Peter Valley