A year ago, more or less, I started on the road to selling on Amazon Marketplace. I was working part-time and three big expenses were looming in the next few months.
Christmas was the most immediate of these but my lease was also running out so it would soon be time to move house, and sometime in the new year I was going to inherit a car from my family and insurance is not cheap on your first car.
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Moving also meant finally parting with a few of my books. I have loved books all my life (a habit I inherited from my dad) and my collection was beginning to get a little out of hand!
So many had been bought because the title sounded interesting, or they were pretty to look at, or were part of a series that I just had to complete. And I had read them.
Most of them anyway, some of the self-help titles were less than helpful, and though I had the books I never could get myself to draw. It was time to part with them, if only for the sake of my poor bookshelves.
I had previously traded in unwanted books using Amazon’s Trade In service or dropped a bagful of books into a charity shop as a donation, but those were ways to get rid of a handful of books rather than enough to fill a couple of bookcases.
In the end, some went to charity and others were given to friends as presents, but that still left the majority of them, taking up space that I really needed to start packing.
Amazon Trade-In
Amazon’s Trade In policy is perfect for people who have a few extra books, DVDs or CDs that they no longer want, and who are happy to get Amazon vouchers in exchange. Its restrictions make it less useful for a professional seller but very occasionally it can be useful to an amateur.
I did find a book that traded in for more than it sold for, once, but the hassle of manually searching and checking trade-in values makes it a poor cousin to selling yourself.
It was a friend who pointed me to Amazon Marketplace. I had always thought of the Marketplace as somewhere not for individuals but for companies, some of them of uncertain quality. All the book sellers seemed to be selling at ridiculous rates – a penny for a book, plus postage, how could an individual operate in an environment like that?
No, I was told, those are the bulk sellers, the ones who sell huge volumes of popular (and once popular) books at rock-bottom prices by making deals with postage companies. What I had to sell was rarer, niche books that would not interest such sellers – nerdy hobby books that would only attract a niche market and could command a higher price. Why not try?
So I did!
Like everything else made by Amazon, the Marketplace was remarkably easy to access, just another of the plethora of optional extras that fill your Amazon user page. Ten minutes of entering my name, address, bank details and such later and I was an official Amazon Marketplace Seller.
In my next blog, l’ll be covering making my first sales, data entry and going pro!
Thank you for reading.
Sarah
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