Amazon’s FBA service has become hugely popular as of late and rightfully so.  You can’t beat someone else shipping orders for you, accepting returns and dealing with irate customers!  It’s a great service that many have chosen to take advantage of.  However, there are some sellers that either haven’t started yet or are still a little unsure on exactly how it works and exactly what to send to Amazon for fulfillment.  Why are sellers unsure of what to send?  The fees!  Amazon has become known as the place to sell used items.  One of the reasons why is due to the free listing.  Unlike eBay who charges your every time an item gets listed, Amazon only charges you if your item sells.  This means there is absolutely no risk to you if nothing sells.  However, with the introduction of FBA, Amazon also brought forth the inventory fees and rightfully so.  Your stuff takes up warehouse space and incurs labor costs to manage it.  This is why Amazon introduced the monthly storage fee and more recently, the long-term storage fee.  These fees are incurred the moment your book gets listed regardless if it sells or not.  Oh no!

The monthly storage fee is a fee that’s charged on a monthly basis based on the size of your item. To be more specific, it is based on the size in cubic feet and currently it is 45 cents per cubic foot. This fee begins to incur the moment your item is scanned in at Amazon and the total cubic feet of all your inventory is tallied up every day and then tacked on to your total monthly charge. Refer to the link above for more information.  The recent long-term storage fee was introduced because presumably too many sellers were leaving their stale inventory in Amazon’s warehouses and the FBA program was unexpectedly much more popular than what Amazon had intended.  This fee is a whopping $45 per cubic foot!  This fee doesn’t start to incur until your item has been at Amazon for longer than a year and you have multiple copies.  Due to these inventory fees, sellers have become a little more choosy about what they decide to list for sale via FBA.

With the thought of potentially shelling out hard-earned cash without selling anything in return, how do you decide what to send to Amazon to try your hand?  Here are the 2 criteria you need to look out for.

1. High Demand

If you’re in a position where you are charged a fee based on time to sell you better send items that sell and sell quick!  The less time they spend in the warehouse the less money you have to pay.  How do we do this?  I’m glad you asked!  The answer is the Amazon sales rank or “bestsellers rank” as they’re calling it now.  Without going into the technicalities of this, this number is simply a measurement of how well a particular book is selling relative to all other books on Amazon.

The sales rank is a great way to guesstimate how fast your item will sell.  Personally, I choose a sales rank of 1,000,000 or under to send to FBA.  Others have told me they use 500,000 that aren’t quite as daring but I like to live on the edge.  By taking the sales rank this high you will get some books that never sell and decide to sit in the warehouse forever.  These have to be returned to you or destroyed if you don’t want them incurring the dreaded long-term storage fee.

2. Low Lose Weight Exercise/price ratio

This is an important piece to take into consideration also.  Some people will tell you to only send lightweight books like mass market paperbacks and be done with it.  I choose to explore all opportunities for profit and actually dive into the numbers to see the potential of sending 1,2 even 4 pound books to Amazon.  The Lose Weight Exercise is irrelevant if the price that you can get is high enough.  To figure out this ratio, here’s a quick calculation that you can do. Disclaimer: All prices shown will be for media items.  If you want more pricing information you can visit Amazon’s FBA pricing page. Let’s say you’ve got a book with a sales rank of 50,000 that weighs 3lbs.  This is a pretty good sales rank and I’d estimate it would sell within 1 week barring any unforeseen circumstances.  My strategy is to list this book and match the lowest FBA offer which, at the time, is $10.00.  I say, at the time, because by the time that item gets to Amazon and listed it may be $9.75 depending on how volatile the pricing is.  Just remember the price 9/10 times will always go down.  Remember to take that into consideration.

We’ve now got a few pieces of key information.  We’ve got our expected sale price ($9.75), our expected time to sell the item (1 week), our current sales rank (50,000) and our Lose Weight Exercise (3lbs).  We’re now ready to calculate our potential fees.  Let’s list them out.

Expected storage fee: $0.45 / 4 = $0.12 for 1 week’s worth of time

Pick/Pack Fee: $0.60 flat fee

Weight Handling: $0.40 x 3 = $1.20 for our 3lb book

Commission: $9.75 x .15 = $1.46 flat commission

Variable Closing Fee: $1.35 flat fee

Our fees end up adding up to $4.73 giving us a profit of $5.02.  To get a feel for the profit if you decided to list it yourself you could run similar numbers.  Amazon has an excellent FBA price calculator that allows you to run various scenarios with ease.

I hope this has helped you in deciding what to send to FBA.  This was one of my questions whenever I first started with FBA back in March of 2009 and through the years I’ve learned the hard way what not to send.

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This is a guest post by reader, James Cecil.  James has a site called Candle Light books.  Be sure to check it out sometime.  If you remember James works at Amazon and is trying to build his book business on the side.  I hope you enjoy his informative posts.  Be sure to “Like” this post or post a comment to let him know if you learned something new today.

- Adam

During one of my many searches on the topic of Amazon sales ranks I came across a web site called Novelrank. Novelrank provides free Amazon sales rank tracking of books being sold on Amazon. Below is a picture tutorial of how to use Novelrank’s Amazon Sales Rank Tracker.

Step One: Type in the following web address in you browser’s address bar; http://www.novelrank.com.

Step Two: Open up a new tab in your browser and type in your Amazon store front in the address bar.

Step Three: From your store front select one of the items from your inventory.

Step Four: Copy the URL address of the item you selected.

Step Five: Switch over to the Novelrank tab that you have open in your browser and click on the Track Your Book button.

Step Six: Look for Add Your Book to NovelRank and paste the URL that you copied from Step 4.

Step Seven: Once you have your item’s web address pasted into the Add Your Book To Noverank click on the Track Book button.

Step Eight: To see the tracking results click on one of the three results that Novelrank will present to you. These results may be Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, or Amazon.com. As you can see in the image below I selected the Amazon.com since this is the one where I’m selling from.

Step Nine: The final outcome will be a page that shows all three tracking results that were mentioned in step 8. Below is the image of what that screen will look like.

As you can see in the image above one of the books I’m selling has a ranking of 261,088 on Amazon.com, a ranking of 1,678,028 on Amazon.co.uk and a ranking of 282,3700 at Amazon.ca.  – James

Listing books with ISBNs on Amazon is one of the simplest sites you can find to list your books on.  Simply search for the ISBN and it will then automatically come back with the title/author/publisher/copyright date and you’ve found the listing to place your copy under.  However, if it’s a book that too old for an ISBN (pre-1970) then it’s a little more challenging.  In this post, I’m going to show you how to find the Amazon listing to sell your copy under.

The first order of business is to take yourself over to the Amazon’s advanced search page and fill out all the appropriate information.  Always put in the last name of the author, title, publisher, binding and date.  If you match all of those, you’re golden.  If nothing comes back, you’re going to have to create a Product Detail Page (if you’re a Pro-Merchant).  If you’re not a Pro-Merchant maybe you can ask one politely to create you a page.

Amazon Advanced Search Page

Once you put in all of the required information, you’ll then come to the search results page where, depending on the book, there will probably be more than 1 listing that matches all of your criteria.  Amazon HATES this because it makes them eBay-like.  They even have crawlers going over their site 24/7 to consolidate these listings but I’m straying from the point here.  You’ll see a search results page like this.

Amazon Listings

Notice my arrows?  These are here for a reason.  Once you’re at this screen you’re then going to need to pay attention to 2 things.

1. Amount of copies under each listing – You are going to see all kinds of listings.  You’ll see listings with 1 person fishing for a price (notice the $40 price tag on the 4th one down?), all listings in between and finally the sweet spot.  This is where you want to place your copy.  Do you think that the listing with one guy is the actual market price?  Highly doubtful.  That totally defeats the whole “market” idea, right?  You need more than 1 person to make a “market”.  We need some competition!  Search through the pages until you find the listing with the MOST people under it.  This is the true market value of the book as competition is present.  The price under this listing is 9 times out of 10 what that book is selling for on other sites as well.
2. Sales rank of that listing – Now that you have the listing, what if you have a few that are close such as the example above.  You have one listing that has 5 copies, one that has 4 copies and one that has 3 copies.  That’s not a whole lot of difference, right?  You’ll have some fudge room when you run into low numbers like this.  Click into each of these listings that you’ve whittled it down to and see which one has the lowest sales rank.  This one, more than likely, is the listing that gets the best exposure in the search results when buyers are looking for it.

Amazon Sales Rank

Once you’ve spotted your golden egg of a listing a number of “it depends” situations comes up.  Are you a very small seller that just has a few dozen books?  Click the “Sell Yours Here” button on that detail page and Amazon steps you through the process.

Amazon Sell Yours Here

Are you using a third party service such as FillZ, Art of Books or your service de jour?  You need the ASIN to punch in so that it knows which listing to match your book up to.  Copy the ASIN from your listing and put it into your input screen.

FillZ Inventory Input

Run through your normal process of listing and you’re done!  The book should be live.

I hope for your sake that you always get books with ISBN numbers but if you’re a rare book dealer, person that just likes to sell older books or someone that simply can’t find any newer books at a good price this is the post you’re going to want to bookmark.

For anyone currently listing books without ISBNs, how do you do it?  I’m sure people have their different ways.

Amazon’s sales rank is a crucial component in determining the demand for a particular book.  The Amazon sales rank provides a snapshot of current sales of a particular book selling on Amazon.com and seems to have become the de facto standard at least in the online book-selling world.  I’m most familiar with using the Amazon sales rank from book scouting as I’m sure some of you are also.  Book scouts use the Amazon sales rank for buying decisions at the moment in time they’re at a sale to determine if it would be worth it to the to purchase this book for resale or not.  This typically gives them a leg up to do a rudimentary prediction on how quickly a book will sell but did you know you can also use it as a trending metric for better buying decisions?

Think of an example such as this.  You’re at a book sale scouting for some books and come across a book that is being sold for a buck.  You scan it with your trusty bar code scanner and notice that it’s currently selling on Amazon for $50 with a sales rank of 100,000.  You would be pretty excited, right?  I probably would too, but how do you truly know that the sales rank is actually steady at that time?  Is there a chance that this book was in very high demand because of some event or fad and is now slowly dying off in demand?  Of course!

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