I’m constantly amazed at how few of my friends sell their old books on Amazon. I must have made hundreds of pounds over the years this way and it’s very quick and easy to do. So this week, I suggest that we start flogging our unwanted books, and those of our friends and family, with a cut to our charities. I’ll start off with Amazon – the best market in which to sell most secondhand books, I believe – and work through some of the other ways of selling old books later in the week.
Photo from Flickr by Annie Mole
Once you have set up your Amazon seller’s account (easy!) it takes about three minutes (I’ve timed it) to list a book for sale. You just enter its title or ISBN into a search tool on the site, find out what others are offering it for, match the lowest price (if you want a quick sale), fill in a quick form about what condition your book is in and sit back and wait for it to sell. Amazon automatically adds £2.75 p&p to your sale price. When someone buys your book, you receive an email and you then have to mail your book to the buyer within two working days.
There are no fees to list your book; you only pay a cut if it sells. For a book, your profit works out as 82.75% of the sale price plus £1.40, which all goes twanging into your bank account (though you will have to pay for p&p).
There are a few things to watch out for. Merchant sellers get a better deal on postage and fees than we do and can still make a profit even if they sell a book for 1p. Unless your book is as light as a feather, you can’t match that offer without losing out after you’ve paid for postage. Also, Amazon offer free p&p for their own books if they cost over £5, so you must always beat their price on such books by at least £2.75 (a lot of sellers don’t seem to have noticed that!).
Once you’ve listed, it’s worth keeping an eye on your prices. I check about twice a week when I’m selling and often have to reprice books. I’ve just read on a very helpful Amazon selling primer on Martin Lewis’s site that all these years when I’ve been undercutting the lowest price by a penny I’ve probably been triggering a commercial seller’s automated system that then makes them undercut me by a penny. I should have been price matching, not price beating (and now, I will be!).
So, to get started, I suggest you fish out a few likely books that you no longer want and just type them into Amazon’s usual search field to see what they’re selling for. Try a range of books to get the feel of it – there are 2,500 copies of “The Da Vinci Code” being sold from 1p, for example, but less mass-markety stuff does better. If you’ve got anything worth selling, then take a look at the helpful primer, and at Amazon’s selling advice, and get stuck in.
It’s up to you what to donate; I’m going to donate 50% of the profits of my own stuff and 30% of what I sell for friends. I’m going to sort some books out now and will tell you how I got on tomorrow. Happy selling!
Money I’ve raised today: £0.00
Money I’ve raised so far: £137.15
I offer a new moneysaving tip each week and you donate part of any saving direct to biomedical research charities
Grand total raised is £11,174 as of this week; £7,169 MERUK and £4,005 RRF, including all Justgiving pages and offline donations direct to charities. Keep on giving!
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