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What is Amazon’s Charge When Ship program?

Amazon’s new Charge When Ship program is the new way that Amazon is charging buyers of 3rd party (you!) sellers on their marketplace.  It is a major change that does not affect buyers but affects sellers greatly.  Previously when a buyer purchased a book from a 3rd party seller, Amazon would charge the customer and place the money into your Amazon account.  You would then ship it out and the customer would receive it.  Transaction Done.

Now, with the Charge When Ship system in place, Amazon does not charge the buyer UNTIL you confirm that the item was shipped.

How will it affect me?

This change will affect the 3rd party seller in 3 ways.

1. Shipment Accountability – This will force you to be accountable for the time it takes you to ship out the book.  You will now know that the buyer will know exactly when you ship out the book thus holding you accountable for shipping out in a timely manner.
2. Shipment Due Diligence – This will force you to send “shipment confirmations” if you will if you have not done this before.  I have learned that some sellers simply rely on Amazon to send confirmations to the buyer.  This is bad practice!  The buyer wants to know exactly when his/her item is shipped out and now with this new system, Amazon is forcing you to be diligent and confirming each order you ship out.
3. Increased Customer Satisfaction – This will please the buyers because they now know that every single 3rd party seller has to send them a shipment confirmation.  Before, this was hit and miss with sellers.  Some good sellers would send shipment confirmation and some wouldn’t even notify the buyer of the order let alone the shipment!  I am going to assume that your feedback will raise now that you have to send a shipment confirmation with every order.

There are still a ton of questions that are stirring around in regards to this topic so if you’re interested in more information, you can visit the Amazon Charge When Ship FAQ or the official Amazon Charge When Ship page.

Are you the type of person to make a quick buck a few times or do you really want to make some serious money working from home selling books online?

If you’re the prior, here are a ton of sites that you can quickly make some money from books without any work whatsoever.  You don’t even have to pay for the postage and you never have to visit my blog again.

http://www.bluerectangle.com

http://buyback.abebooks.com/

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/frames/selltextbooks/index.asp

http://www.valorebooks.com/sell-textbooks

http://www.mbsdirect.net/k12ezdrop/index.php

http://cash4books.net/?gclid=CPO07v35zpsCFRJxxwodWFJbnw

http://www.textbookwheel.com/home.php?coupon=GOOG

http://www.webuytextbooks.com/?gclid=CIjuzf75zpsCFRJxxwodWFJbnw

http://www.firstclassbooks.com/buyback?referer=google3&gclid=CLyN3__5zpsCFQKHxwod7l1dnw

http://www.abundatrade.com/ship-your-stuff

http://www.powells.com/sellonline

http://www.sellbackyourbook.com/

Now that I’ve given you a ton of options to sell your general books and textbooks without hardly any work and you haven’t gone off fervently typing in ISBN numbers checking to see if one of these sites will buy your valuable books for a few bucks, I’m going to assume that you’re interested in skipping the middle man and keeping all of these profits for yourself.  I’m so proud of you!

Book BuyBack Sites

Can you believe how many sites there are out there that give you the convenience of shipping books to them?  Do you see a pattern here?  Do you see how much demand there is from these sites for these books of yours?  Why do you think they make it so easy for you to send your books to them?  Because they can sell them again for much more!  Why would you send books willingly to these sites and let them cash in on the value that you currently have in your books?  There are only 2 reasons I can think of.  You’re either A. ignorant of what it takes to sell books to get maximum profit or B. too lazy to care how to do it and OK with a lackluster amount of money for your books.

The Do It Yourself Way

I’m here to help you with A.  If you stick with me, sign up for the email list or better yet, purchase my Used Books: Big Business – The Secrets to Selling Your Books Online for Big Profits *hint* *hint* , I can help you eek the most money out of any book you decide to sell online.  I’m here to show you the tricks of the trade that I, myself, have learned from doing the same.  If you chose B, refer to the first paragraph of this post.

The next step you need to do is to start arming yourself with knowledge!  Knowledge of book selling online is the key!  You can either get that knowledge here in a pretty package and/or you can visit each site yourself such as Amazon, Alibris, Abebooks, eBay, Half.com, etc and learn the ins and outs yourself.  I recommend doing both.  This blog will give you a ton of information along with the ebook, email list and future learning products but you can get the most out of it by taking action and futzing around yourself on the various sites, getting out looking for inventory, etc.

So, get out there start looking for some more inventory and get on the online book marketplaces and start futzing!

Have you ever tried to drive in an unknown city without a map or GPS?  How about going to Wal-Mart to find a mundane piece of non-skid rubber? (actually did this one recently)  First, how in the hell are you going to find find that Dunkin’ Donuts without putting it into your “Donuts Near Me” menu in your GPS?  Also, have you ever tried to find something in a Wal-Mart to where it could actually be in multiple categories without asking for an employee for help?  Not a chance on either!

I’m not here to ramble on and tell you I get lost all the time and since this is a blog about online bookselling this has to relate to that somehow, right?  I promise, it does.  It’s all about our favorite topic, SKUs!  For me, SKUs are so important they save my sanity when I’m looking for books that have sold.

When I first started selling books online I noticed that little SKU box that Amazon gives you and didn’t think much of it.  I would simply let it go with that arcane combination of letters and numbers because Amazon would just let me go without messing with it.  The easier, the better, right?

At first it was OK and I didn’t have to understand what a SKU was because I had a dozen books for sale.  However, when I decided to really make some money at this and purchase a few THOUSAND, I was in a world of hurt because I was going back to my old habits of being SKU-less.  I refuse to learn these “SKUs”!

The problem was I had a few hundreds books listed on Amazon and had no idea where I would shelve them and how I would find them once they sold.  Maybe I should look at this SKU thing again.  “Hmm..you know what, a SKU is actually a way to keep track of inventory.  Maybe I should look into this.” was my thoughts.  After some research on defining what a SKU was and what it’s historical significance was I thought I was really onto something.

Do you mean to tell me that with this simple combination of letters and numbers, I can, at the same time, tell where my books are at on the shelves, where I got the book at, how much I paid for the book, when I bought it and just about anything else that you can acronymnize?  No way!  Imagine the reporting possibilities!  Do you want to run a report on what source is reaching the highest sales?  Done.  Do you want to tally up your total inventory cost for tax time?  Done.  All with a single little combination of letters and numbers.

If you are willing to dedicate the time to learning what a SKU is and how it can help you as an online bookseller, you will have a great system for not only being able to find a book on your bookshelf but a plethora of other great things such as tax reporting,  sales analysis among a large number of other things.

Learn, in detail, how SKUs can help your business in my eBook, Used Books: Big Business – The Secrets to Selling Books Online for Big Profits.

In case you’re not on my mailing list where I gave a little history behind it, you may be wondering where in the world the new Used Books: Big Business section popped up in the sidebar from.  I wanted to take this time to explain a little what this eBook is, where it came from and how it can help any online bookseller.

When I first started writing this blog I wanted an outlet to help others in their quest for selling books online.  I love doing it so much and have learned so much in the process, I thought it would be neat to talk about it and to share my successes and failures with anyone willing to listen.  At first, this was fine.  I was posting simple blog posts every so often about anything that was on my mind that would help the online bookselling community.  However, I found that I had so much more information to share that a blog post or even a series of blog posts just wouldn’t do.  This is when I decided to start working on an eBook.

An eBook (and hopefully a print book pretty soon) was a great way for me to spend hours writing my brains out discussing what has worked for me, what hasn’t and my overall experiences with my online bookselling business.  I am very proud of myself that I could dedicate such a long length of time writing this eBook.  I’m also very proud that it’s actually pretty good!  I’ve had numerous people read it and have gotten all thumbs up!

The eBook outlines everything that I’ve ever experienced in online bookselling thus far.  It also includes some topics that I have heard of but had to do some research on to give an accurate explanation of the topic.  It runs the gamut from inventory sourcing to order fulfillment.  I’ve included a brief summary of it and some screenshots of the book on the Used Books: Big Business e-book page.

I hope this gives you a little more information about my first eBook.  I promise you’ll get a lot of great information from it!