What is your idea of success?  Is it just getting a business started on a shoestring with super cheap inventory, making a few hundred bucks a month with virtually no risk to you?  Online book selling is a sure win.  Is it evolving your passion for books into a used bookstore helping other book lovers find that special tome?  Perhaps it is seeing those mega sellers on Amazon with tens of thousands of feedback numbers and thinking to yourself a huge warehouse, a dozen employees and $1,000,000 in annual sales is where you need to be.  For me, it’s none of these and lately I’ve been contemplating closing down my business.  Let me tell you why…

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I wanted to take this time to reach out to my readers to get some feedback on a piece of my personal business.  If you’ve read this blog for any amount of time, you’d know that I not only blog about selling books online I also do it every day.  I try to focus on general topics explaining concepts and giving great advice but I’m in need of some help and couldn’t think of anyone better than my readers so here goes!

I typically receive around 150,000 books every year in huge gaylord boxes that hold anywhere from 1,000 – 1,500/piece.  I always buy in large quantities and delivery comes every so often throughout the year.  I’m also cramped on space as I only have (2) 2-car garages to hold all of this these incoming books!  Because of the lack of space and also labor (it’s typically me and/or a family member) I’m forced to speed through books as quickly as possible to consistently make room for more books.

I’m beginning to lose this battle with space and was curious if anyone else was in my position regarding how they sort through books that do not have a barcode or ISBN.  Currently, when processing books, they get sorted into a few different gaylords; recyclables, books sold offline, manual lookup, FBA or local fulfillment.  Luckily, I’ve been lucky with selling to used bookstores and flea markets and spending time to recycle the nasty books, but the problem I’m currently running into is with my manual lookup gaylords.  They are getting out of hand!  Due to the time it takes to properly look them up and match them with an an Amazon ASIN, I don’t look them up when in the first phase of sorting.  All of these books get checked and then tossed into a gaylord box for later processing.

I’ve been doing this for about 6 months now but it’s now catching up to me!  I currently have around 10,000 books that do not have an ISBN taking up a lot of space plus who knows what kind of value these books hold!  I need to get through them and quick!  However, due to the consistent stream of books coming in, I simply can’t take time to process these.  Do you see my dilemma?  I refuse to sell them for nothing because I’ve found hundreds of $50+ books in these gaylords but they just make it so hard to squeeze that value out of them!

My question is, if anyone else is my situation that has a business model of buying books in bulk and has this problem, what do you do?  Do you just force yourself or your employees to begin processing these kind of books or sell them in bulk just to be rid of them?  I’m in dire need of some suggestions as I’m currently bursting at the seams with more gaylords coming in but an ever-increasing amount of these non-ISBN books.

If you get a minute, please leave your feedback and ideas on what you think I need to do to improve my process and feel free to ask any questions yourself.  I would greatly appreciate it!

Where to find books to purchase is the #1 hot topic for online booksellers and rightly so.  There is a saying that goes something like “you make money when you buy not when you sell”.  If you’re making money when you’re buying books we all want to buy as much inventory as possible!  Common methods that are taught and used are Friends of the Library sales, thrift stores and yard sales just to name a few.  There are hundreds of different places where you can find books to resell.  In fact, Frank Florence has a product called Creative Inventory Sourcing that talks about where to find books for resell and that’s it’s only topic!  The places covered in his booklet aren’t rocket science and are actually pretty common sense if you think about it but I’ve found that you just need someone to point you in the right direction.

When I’ve got my index finger out pointing in a direction to a beginner, I’m usually pointing to the ol’ faithful sources that I used to use such as the aforementioned FOL sales, thrift stores and yard sales.  They were profitable and still are.  To this day, I can go into a Goodwill, spend $5 and easily come out with $50 worth of books.  It’s an easy $45 profit and I’m happy with that but the question I always asked myself afterwards was “Am I satisfied?” and the answer every time was a resounding NO every time.  Don’t think that I didn’t appreciate the profit.  This kind of buying just didn’t fit my goal of creating a large, self sustaining business.

My goal within 2 months of starting this adventure was to create a business than could support myself and my family.  That means a consistent, steady stream of income that could pay the bills, debt, mortgage or anything else our lifestyle may bring.  In making this goal, that means than a one-off $45 profit isn’t going to do much for me besides pay for a month of cell phone service.  I’m going to have to replicate that $45 hundreds of times over in order to reach my goal.  This is when I stopped looking at one-off profits and started thinking in bulk.

There are a lot of different ways you can buy books in large quantities for dirt cheap prices.  One of my main streams of income is buying leftovers from Friends of the Library sales.  As I quote in the revised edition of my popular eBook Used Books: Big Business “Taking the leftovers allows you to forgo all of the hassle and frenzy of the sale itself, get thousands of books for next to nothing and allows you all the time in the world to properly determine value of the books.”

Buying leftovers from FOL sales is only one way to buy books in bulk for next to nothing.  However, in order to buy these books you’ll typically have to shoot the owner an offer and see if it sticks or not.  This is where a lot of people get hung up on.  How much should you offer on these huge lots?  My answer to most answers is…it depends.  It depends on the quality of the books, where they came from, what they were used for previously, etc.

For example, if you’re at a library sale looking at 1,000 ex-library books that are in good condition chances are the Friends are going to just want to simply get rid of the books.  You’re going to get all ex-library books that can only be classified as good condition but at the same time they will sell.  Offer $50 and see what they say.  I bet you they’d take it.  However, if you’re at a used bookstore going out of business these are typically higher quality books.  Depending on if these books were ever tried to sell online I’d offer $0 if they’ve ever been scanned for value from Amazon or up to $400 if I notice that they aren’t newer, mass produced books and most are non-fiction.

Here are some examples of my bulk purchases so you can get an idea on what to offer at your next opportunity:

1. 10,000 most ex-library for $40.

2. 25,000 60% pre-1970 books, 20% donated and 10% ex-library for $400.

3. 250 already all looked up, like new religion books for $400.

I hope that this gives you a good idea on buying in bulk and some examples of real world pricing.  I don’t recommend buying in bulk if you’re a beginner but if you’ve been at it for awhile and have the gumption and storage space take a gamble and take action now!

If you’ve been a ready for any length of time and have looked up at my blog name you’d figure out pretty quickly that this site is about selling books.  Not rocket science, right?  However, as booksellers, we’ve been through it all; old, dusty thrift stores, yard sales during the sweltering heat of summer and digging through boxes that haven’t been touched since Jesus was alive.  Of all the places we go to look for books is it possible that we’ve had such a one-track mind that we’ve passed up many, many treasures in the process?  I know it!

We all can’t be experts on everything and spot every diamond that needs to be polished, but we can be open minded and to get our heads out of the bookshelf and look around a little bit.  If we’re going to travel to places in search for book treasures anyway we might as well take notice of what passes us by on the way to the boxes of books.

This short story is from a reader of mine that wanted to share a find that was out of this world and to convey not to put the blinders on when we’re out and about.  Treasures are everywhere and if we can educate ourselves (we’ve surely got enough books to do that) a little on a broad range of collectible memorabilia then items such as what I’m about to share won’t be shunned just because we’re not “experts”.

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A business, depending on the size, can be made up of dozens to thousands of different processes and each business runs these processes differently.  An online used book selling business is no different.  Have you counted how many different processes that you’ve grown to just do day in and day out without even thinking?  What do I mean by a process?  A process is a vague term for any task that requires more than one action in  sequential order.  Think about an assembly line in a automobile factory.  An auto manufacturer first needs to find suppliers to build the cars.  Once the suppliers are found, they then need to bring in the raw materials to a factory.  In this factory, they have different stations setup to transform these raw materials into a finished product which would be a beautiful, new car!

What core processes constitute a typical online used book business?

1. Sourcing
2. Inventory Receiving
3. Inventory Management
4. Order Fulfillment
5. Customer Service

Under each of these processes, you’ll have other processes such as what you typically do at a library sale, how you pack books, answer customer questions, etc.  Each of these processes makes up your entire business and it is very important for you to periodically evaluate each process and determine if you’re truly meeting your goals in each area.  It is very important to set a a goal in each area in order for you to evaluate how you’re doing.  If you don’t have a goal, you have nothing to shoot for.  You’ll just continue poking along and continuing your ho-hum, mediocre process and then blame the economy when your sales tank.

There are numerous changes that you can make to your processes to improve efficiency, decrease time and leverage more resources to make each process a success.  From my experience, I will try to list and explain some of these changes to the core processes that I’ve made in my business that may help you in your business as well.

Tips for improving each core process of an online used book business

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