So I'm starting a business where i buy media items such as books, cds, dvds, and similar items then sell them on sites like amazon or ebay. I've been getting decent volume of mostly books lately and I was looking to get funding to be able to buy a couple thousand more books soonish. Whats a good way about going about doing this or any other tips for running this sort of thing? Thank you

Put some numbers to this.

1) What is "I'm getting some decent volume" mean?

2) How much do you make per book?

3) How much would you need for a couple of thousand?

Also are we really talking about re-selling books on Amazon or did I just miss some obvious euphemism?

1) decent volume is making maybe 500/month profit.

2) generally i offer to buy them for about 1/2 of what I will sell them for so after fees i make 25-50% profit. If i think i can get them by offering less than 1/2 ill do so. I take shipping costs into account when i make offers for items too.

3) Ideally I'd like about 5000 to work with for now. I'd be pretty happy with 2000-3000

I'm also working on finding some1 to get a website set up for me.

You're doing it wrong unless you are buying textbooks. If you want to do well selling books you need to buy them in bulk. You need to find the guy who doesn't read and somehow came across 15 boxes full of books. You want to remove these people's problem by buying all the books. Pay $5-10 per box and haul them off somewhere to sort them. After a while you will become good at spotting books that you can make money on. Fiction books are worthless.

What kind of website are you trying to set up?

why do u say fiction books are worthless? Which books seem to make a decent profit on?

In fact,http://www.dhgate.com is not bad.

ya im working on textbooks and im right by a college so should be able to get some, but there's also a few textbook stores around here so some competition there. Most of the books I've bought have been from people selling anywhere from 30 to 300 and have a few people that want to sell much more. Videogames is where I've been making most my $ so far though, advertise that I will pay 10% more cash in gamestop and I can usually still double my $. any tips on how to find the boxes of books?

for website i just want something basic at first for contact info and such, but ideally I would like something that would take an ISBN/UPC and output a price

Fiction books seem to be ok if you sell them in bulk lots with the same author for a quick turnaround. Generally sold by themselves a lot of the older ones are up for shipping cost + 50c and i dont think they sell

What city do you live in?

Regarding textbooks, the margins are very thin and the market is very competition. From my experience, you need to have 200k - 300k in capital to be able to achieve decent returns. If you don't have a store, there will be a ton of hustling to get the books and the operation is not very scalable. Your best bet is to find places that have large volumes of books and are looking to unload them quickly like library sales and Goodwill.

grand junction, CO

true, it seems like it''ll be hard to make decent $ on textbooks, i can hope to pick some up here and there for $30 and resell for 60 or something like that but i don't think i can compete with the buy prices of the big sellers. my goal from this btw is to make 1k-2k a month to pay for college and living expenses.....sorta like what i use to do with poker *sigh*

I'm also curious how hard it is to sell old "collectible" books. I see a few listed sometimes from early 1900s and late 1800s up for $300+ but i I'm guessing it can sit there for years and no1 will buy it, am i right? If i find something like that am i better off just tossing it on an ebay auction and hope i can get 1/3 of what some1 on amazon is asking for or wait it out? I'm trying to move product as fast as possible right now and it seems to be working ok. I'd like to focus mainly on Videogames because they seem like they have the biggets profit margin and sell fast, but though i might as well deal books and dvds too

I don't really have any experience selling old or collectible books, my forte is college textbooks. However, I suspect that you need to have a very large knowledge base to know what to look for regarding old books as there are tons of ones that have zero value and a few that are actually worth the time to research and resell.

FWIW, I started out by buying textbooks from college classmates and reselling them at the end of the semester. You still need a good amount of cash in order to get into that business as you generally need to offer at least 50% of the resale price to get students to sell to you. I have had students at different universities that we do business at tell us that the books that the school bookstore doesn't buy, the kids often throw them away or recycle them. I'd look into trying to get those books as you are most likely to find them cheap and the books still should still have at least some resale value.

Do people still even buy CD's? I would have thought thats going to be a pretty dry market.

I have also thought about selling books before on ebay etc but postage costs just kinda kills your profits I found, who wants to buy like a 99p book and then pay £5 for postage when somebody like play.com offers free delivery?

One thing you could do is try and buy second hand or cheap textbooks which are course dependent for Uni and advertise them on your faculty message board? Again not sure how profitable that would be but usually there are core textbooks whice we have to have for the course so demand is definately there and uni campus bookshops are a joke for prices!

check out ****** for setting up a website. very simple. you can build the website before you buy a domain or hosting. works great

i know when i was in college the spreads on what the college and local bookstores would buy them for was huge (books they sold use for 80 bucks they would buy for 15) and people would wait in long lines to both buy and sell
there is good money to be made at the beginining of semesters if you have a lot of cash

I just read an article in Entrepreneur mag (buy it for the facebook advertising coupons) about a daily electronic deals site...cant remember the name. The kid got to a decent point, and was able to grow by leaps and bounds with credit that companies he bought from extended to him. If you are consistently selling/profiting etc, check that route out.

Because people sell them on Amazon for $0.01. There are exceptions but rarely will fiction break more than a couple bucks. As a small seller you can't make money with that. Non fiction books are where the money is.

Books are good when you can find them, but you can broaden what you sell. Sticking something in a box isn't that hard. You can find them by going to estate sales, flea markets, auctions and talking to people and handing them a card that says you buy books.

I don't think it is worth your time to mess with a website that does the online buying. There are at least 100 sites that do this so the competition is going to be very high which will make it hard for you to buy books.

You want to get 'ABC for Book Collectors' by John Carter. This book has all the lingo you will need to know to describe a collectible book.

People do still buy CDs. There are many niches that still sell well, but generally CDs sales are pathetic. CDs that sell well are either out of print and have not been made digitally available or first pressings. This is a tiny percentage of the CDs out there which makes finding them very difficult.

Amazon has a 3.99 shipping charge for books and these small fiction books may cost $2 to ship so its actually some profit there

am i the only one that thought Vandelay Industries when they saw the title? Could of sworn there was going to be something about fine latex products in there somewhere.

Amazon also charges a variable closing fee of $1.35 per book, there is a 15% referral fee, the cost of the book, $0.20 for the mailer and shipping label, customer service and the work involved in mailing it out. The repricers are also to pretty quickly drop the price to a penny.

Unless you are set up to do high volume you do not want to waste your time with cheap books. I would suggest not bothering with any books worth less than $4-5.

You are also better off with higher quality books that can be listed as very good. Pay attention to the sales rank of books also. Anything under 1 million has a good chance of selling within 3-6 months. When you get over 2 million the sales are very slow.

sales rank thing helped a lot thx

I thought I'd have a lot to add having worked with one of the biggest used book resellers out there, but Recliner has nailed pretty much everything so good on him.

If you want to do well with textbooks your only hope really is to buy physical and sell online. Like he said there are way too many competitors online, including sites like bigwords and bookfinder that actually scan all the reseller sites and give you the best price ANY of them will offer. With physical purchases you can offer them something all the online sites can't, cash in hand right now.

That's going to take some pounding the pavement though, and you're going to want to have an idea what they sell for when you're buying them.

Of course, Chinese businesses is your choice.