Miles Points Reselling

I’m Trying Something New, Flipping Used Books

I started reselling over a year ago because I wanted to makes some extra cash for my travel budget slush fund and I wanted to explore new avenues to manufacture spend. During the last year my focus has entirely been on online arbitrage.  Meaning, I look for deals online and flip them on Amazon.  I ended up having way more success than I expected.  I ended up finding a product (Hydro Flask beer growlers) that I was able to flip for 6-7 months.  My profit after the deal ended was around $4,000.  Not bad for little side hustle.

The profits wetted my appetite for more.  Unfortunately, online arbitrage takes a lot of digging around online and the ROI is not always great. Once I find something profitable I tend to just focus on that and move as much of it as I can until the deal dries up.  It is not a great business model.  I also don’t have a lot of time to be spending online hunting down deals.  So that got me thinking about shifting gears, and that is where used books step in.

If the FBA blogs about flipping books are to be believed the margins look very promising.  Pick up a book for $.50 or $1.00 flip it for $12, $20, or more.  I currently have a few books listed on Amazon that I found at thrift stores that sell for $100 that I picked up for $2.25 each.  At these prices I can pick up a lot of inventory on the cheap with potentially huge profit margins.

Aside from the profit margins it also takes less time for me to source inventory than online arbitrage.  I went to thrift store during my lunch a couple of weeks ago and in 45 minutes I found 8 books for $18 that should earn me over $200 in profit.

It all seems a little too good to be true, so before I send in a shit ton of books over the next few months and potentially saddle my self with Long Term Storage Fees, I want to run an experiment.  I currently have 50 books with Amazon.  From what I have gathered I should expect to double my investment within 30 days and sell 25% to 50% of my inventory within 60 days.  Thus far my investment has been $70.  I probably still have another 20 books to send in and then I will pause and see how things play out over the next 60 days.  If the returns are what I am hoping for than I will probable go full tilt and aim to send in 100-200 books per month and see how things shake out.

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