Book Flipping - Im Only Breaking Even

Hi justlukeyou,

Let's see after only 10 weeks of launching a new venture you have already reached the breakeven point, and you are complaining? Amazon went many years before they finally broke even.

Obviously, with a little tweaking of your marketing effort, you should be able to push past the breakeven point into profitability, plus you are building your assets in the form of customer base, and inventory.

Sounds like you are on the right path, you cannot assume that you have mastered a niche after only 10 weeks. Analyze what you have done, look for ways to improve, and take it to the next level.

Start by segmenting your marketing efforts, find what is working and do more of it. Find what is not working and improve it, or drop it if you cannot improve it. Beyond that, there is so much more that you can learn and do just in the arena of marketing strategies. Also consider things such as lowering your cost of goods, reducing shipping costs and other expenses, or finding clever ways to pass some of those costs onto consumers.

Congratulations on your success so far!
Like others wrote, tweak your system.

For example, here's my thinking:

What books are you selling?
Fiction? Non-fiction?
How much are you paying for your books?
I go to thrift stores and look for great book deals there.
I also go to the book stores run by local non-profit agencies and companies.
I get some awesome prices there.
One of them is run by a local company that employs people with disabilities .
What books are selling well? Sell more like that.
What are you using to determine what types of books to buy and sell?
Did you look at the best sellers list on Amazon?
Maybe you could find and sell books on that list?
Take a look here. It's the Amazon best sellers list for every book category:
Amazon Best Sellers: Best Books

Hi Auctiondebteliminator,

I wish all of my competitors thought just like that.

While it is true that a product will have a price range that the market will support, there are so many issues in eCommerce that effect you conversion rates, marketing is just part of it. If you go through a couple cycles of CRO, and implement proper market segmentation strategy, it should be relatively easy to significantly boost profitability in a case such as this one.

If a new business just settles for whatever the first attempt produces, and never tries to improve, then they make an easy target for savvy competitors to come in and knock them out. I put guys like that out of business dozens of times each year.

I have about 160,000 books sitting in Amazons warehouse - and thats how you make money with books, volume and weeding out books that won't ever be worth money before you buy them to resell. The only reason I even have this many is because local library's sell books by the box at book sales so I paid .20 per book.

If I were you, go through your books and find the ones that are currently selling for about $29.-$35 - and then list them for $35 on Amazon with FBA which Amazon Prime members will purchase because of free 2 day shipping. You can ship an 60 lb box to Amazon for $10.00

Also, rank is a huge factor. Look at rank more than profit, because you might have a book you've found for $4, and it sells for $60 on Amazon which is a nice $56 profit - but if it has a rank of 2.5 million, then it might be a year or two before it sells for that meaning that there is only 1 person to go on Amazon within the next 1-2 years to look for that specific book - and what happens if someone comes in 1 week before that customer comes looking for the book and undercuts you by $2.00 and grabs the sale?

Try to keep track of how many "long tail books" you are selling and how many "low profit, high volume" books your are selling. Long tail books are books that typically have high profit, but sell in low volume - and these should only take up about 20% of all of your inventory. 80% of my inventory is low profit, high volume. I might only make $2.25 in profit from my Low profit high volume books, but I sell thousands of them a month. My high profit books, even wih several hundred thousand listed, I might only sell a couple hundred of each month.

If I were you, I would use Amazon FBA to sell my $35 books with a ranking of 1.5 million or less, then purge everything else and liquidate your inventory and restart with investing in 80% of high volume books, and 20% long tail books that are "purpose" books someone might purchase for extra research, DIY info, college text books, collectibles, etc and I wouldn't touch the 2nd edition novels with a ranking of more than 1.6 million.