Everyone wants a deal. And there's plenty of cheap books you can profit from. But cheap books are the most likely to be saturated with FBA competition.
If you're focusing on books priced $15 or less, you're going to spend a lot of time going through books that no room for profit whatsoever.
The less you're willing to pay per book, the more time you're going to spend searching. There's a very direct correlation there.
Now, if you are looking for high margins, and again, if you're looking for...if you really want to focus on cheap margins, then cheap books may be for you because you'll spend very little time to find books that are going to give you very, very razor-thin margins. When I say razor-thin, you know, online book arbitrage, we are like so spoiled, right? Forty percent profit margins in a retail setting is considered great. That's considered razor-thin with books because we're so spoiled, right? So, but if you just want to make like 40% margins, oh man, yeah, no issue there whatsoever. You can spend $5 in a book and sell it for, you know, I'm just doing the rough math here but, you know, sell it for $13 or something all day long, you get those 40% margins, not a problem whatsoever. But if you're looking for the high margins, when you start to spend $10, $15 and up per book, the opportunities become exponentially greater. So just understand the relationship between the amount that you spend per book and the opportunities that are available as well as the just the margins you'll expect and so on and so on.
Online book arbitrage is about a lot more than textbooks, but they tend to be the most profitable category. So there's big money in knowing how to find them.
A few ways to find textbooks:
Our separate textbook database contains over 300,000 textbooks. It may even be 400,000 by the time you see this, and we're adding tons of tons of new titles on a daily basis.
Its important to mention our textbook database is not perfect. It's inherently difficult to define what a textbook is, so you will find a lot of
Title keyword searches, where you plug any word into the search field and we only show you books for which that particular word shows up in the title. It's fairly simple to come up with keywords that will only appear in the titles of textbooks or "scholarly non-fiction" (the close relative of textbooks).
Publisher searches. There are tons of publishers who cater to an academic audience. Run them through the search field and bring up only books published by that publisher.
High Amazon prices. Not a lot of books are being sold by Amazon directly for $50 and up aren't textbooks. (And of course, Zen Arbitrage has an Amazon price filter.)
Everyone wants a book that's going to turn over quickly. There are a few problems with that. One, super high demand books tend to cost a lot more. Two, they can be more competitive.
A sales rank that you might think is bad may not be that bad. A book ranked 300,000 is still selling about once every 36 hours. And books ranked 500,000 or even 800,000 are still relatively strong sellers.
A lot of members don't understand how powerful this is. Yet if you had to give us a hierarchy to how powerful the search options are, this is up there at the top.
The lower you set this number, the higher the chances there are of being no FBA offers or FBA offers that are really high.
The flip side of this is the lower you set that number, the more number of books you're going to exclude from your search results. So it is a give and take.
Everyone wants the well-ranked textbooks they can resell for three times their investment. And those opportunities are common. But if your business model involves always tripling your money, you're going to spend a lot more time searching.
If that is your model, stick to it by all means. I don't want to dissuade you. But understand that if you relax those standards a little bit, the opportunities for finding books become exponentially greater.
There is a virtually limitless number of offers that you can resell for 50% profits.
So it's another give and take: if you relax your standards a little bit regarding the profits you want to see, the opportunities open up dramatically.
When you limit your searches to only those products with a high price Amazon offer, you raise the ceiling that you can price your FBA offer for.
(When we're talking about Amazon's offer, we're talking about the price of the book if you purchased it from Amazon directly, not from a third-party seller.)
The reason is that it's virtually impossible to price higher than Amazon and still get sales. So you have to price below Amazon.
So if Amazon's price for a particular book is $15, after Amazon commissions you simply cannot turn a significant profit (if any) selling that book. The profits just aren't there.
The higher you set that price in the search options, the higher your price ceiling and the more room for profit.
Most books have low-ball FBA offers that do not allow you enough room to hit your desired profit margin. But you don't always have to compete with the lowest FBA offer. You can be second or third in line, and when those lowball offers sell out, you'll be the next sale.
The higher the demand for a book, the more liberal you can price, and the more comfortable you can be pricing second, third, or even sometimes fourth, fifth in line.
If you find a high-demand book, and the lowest FBA offer does not allow you room for profit, look at the second offer, maybe the third offer. Then ask, "If I match that or price below the second or third, is there room for profit?" If the answer is yes, you may want to consider investing in that book, and just waiting for that low-ball FBA offer to sell out.
Check out this video with even more concepts: