I was repricing early in the morning nearly every day. I went mountain biking in Colorado for a few days and did my best to reprice on the road when I was in and out of cell service. I made a ton of bad buys that lost money or barely broke even.

I’ll get into more details below, but I think I figured a few things out and learned where I should be doubling down on and areas to avoid for future busy seasons.

If you want to compare this month to last month, you can check out the July 2025 income report.

P&L for August 2025

Total Revenue: $76,592.89

COGS / Expenses/ Fees : $54,157.43

Net Profit: $21,610.72

Profit per item: $39

ROI: 57%

Profit margin: 28.52%

2025 Net Profit: $37,021.10

Ramblings

I lost about $900 profit in bad buys. $1800 in revenue, but nearly a thousand dollar loss for me. Good reminder that profit is the only thing that matters.

Not all of my busy season inventory has sold out yet. I have some items priced at breakeven just so I can get my money back to churn again. And there are a few books I decided to try and hold until winter to sell again.

The nice thing about the summer busy season is that you only have to wait 3-4 months to try and sell your books again in the winter. If you try and hold from winter until the following summer, you’re looking at a seven month holding period.

I think sometimes it’s better to cut your losses when you can. If you can get your money back and buy more inventory you can probably get your 30% return and move on. But the Keepa charts for a few items told me to try and hold and sell again in the winter. I’ll be adding another 2-3 months hold time and hopefully get a 50-60% ROI. I’ll take it.

I expect to make some more sales in September. My repricing has become more aggressive, meaning I'm lowering prices. So we’ll see what my profit actually is.

I’ll have some returns coming. TBH, I don’t know how to account for those in these posts but 90% of the time I am able to resell them. The annoying thing is that Amazon usually sends them back to me instead of just relisting them as FBA.

I think Amazon doesn't want to bother grading used books so they just send it back to the seller.

I have had a lot of New books that have been returned and end up being relisted on FBA as new. For used books you have to pick if it is Acceptable, Good, Very Good, or Like New. Easier for Amazon employees to just mark it as defective and send it back.

For return costs, I have to pay Amazon to get my books shipped back to me. Then once I get them, I send them BACK to Amazon and pay them AGAIN for shipping/receiving. Kind of a silly process but it is what it is.

Reflections

Here are a few other random things I’m thinking about after this busy season:

• Slippage

I got lazy with my tracking and had missing books. Books were lost being sent to my prep center, lost being sent to Amazon, or lost when Amazon was doing their logistics. I got refunds and filed support cases when I noticed it, but there could be a lot improved here in the future.

To implement better tracking, I need to record each order for quantity ordered and dollars spent. I can follow the quantity as it gets sent to my prep center, then to Amazon. And reconciling along that pipeline.

For dollars spent, I can record the total cost of each order and make sure that the amounts paid on my credit card match up as expected.

• Accounting

I am pretty sure these posts are considered “cash basis” accounting. I do a lot of napkin math in google sheets to crunch numbers.

But this could still be improved. These posts are probably more for entertainment and give me a chance to review the past month, but they definitely would not hold up under scrutiny. I used a CPA for last tax year and will use one again for the upcoming tax year.

• Inventory that didn't sell

According to Amazon Seller Central, I still have 237 units on hand in my store front. Not all of these are books I bought specifically for the busy season. I have toys, other online arbitrage items, and books from the last busy season that didn’t sell.

But I would love to be able to track what I bought specifically for the busy season and check what didn't sell.

I have a google sheet that has a lot of busy seasons ASINs listed, but this was handmade and I’m prone to errors. I’ve been updating that daily the past month. But I’m probably missing something or my data is inaccurate. Some automation here would be nice.

• End of year sales

There must be a psychological phenomena for this, but despite last month blowing away any expectation I could have ever conceived when I first started this venture in May 2024. I am more disappointed that September, October, and November will be slow months because I have not been sourcing at all the last month.

Repricing was priority number 1 in August. But next time I want to have some sourcing going on at least so that my numbers don't drop dead until December. It’s kind of funny that I’m already forgetting about last month and annoyed at a slow down coming up.

Thanks for sticking through that stream of consciousness.

ROI Recap

I’ll get to what we all came here to see: Gradient screenshots!

Here are books I got cooked on. Maybe I tanked too hard on some of these, but I really wanted to exit my positions and not be forced to hold for another year.

Here’s an interesting one. All these sales were profitable in the $25-$28 range. But we have ROI ranging from 10% to 138%.

For the one that only made 10%, I risked a lot more money to only make $26. Compared to the ones where I spent $25 to make $25 profit. Not really sure what the takeaway is here yet.

And here are the fun ones! Big profit and great ROI.

I went deep on one textbook this past year. Bought about 17 copies because every time I looked at the chart it just looked too good. I did an average of 227% ROI on those sales. And I probably could have still bought more.

I’ll be watching that book for the next busy season.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading.

Other than my prep center, this is still a one man operation. I’m doing my best to present all information accurately. There’s always a possibility I’ve messed something up.

Please let me know if you have any questions and I’d be happy to try and answer them.

The first few days in August have been off to a good start, but I have way more inventory I need to sell through than I have the past two busy seasons.

And if you want to compare this months to last month, you can check out the June 2025 income report.

P&L for July 2025

Total Revenue: $6,933.77

COGS: $3,058.36

Biz Expense + AMZ Fees: $1,957.32

Net Profit: $1,918.09

Profit per item: $19.77

ROI: 63%

Profit margin: 28%

2025 Net Profit: $15,410.38

Yes! Good month, hope it’s a good omen for a great August. If I stop sending these posts out it’s because I got cooked. (Don’t worry I’m only half joking)

Winners

I had 30 sales that had a 100% or greater ROI. That’s so cool to see. Yea, sometimes the profit was only $6, $15, or $18. But sometimes it was $77!

Can’t always get these huge winners, but it shows the potential of Amazon.

As I start scaling to a bigger and bigger seller, I’ll have to settle for lower ROI and higher volume. But it’s still fun to see the dark green gradient and a 262% return.

Losers

The 22% ROI isn’t really a loser, but it showed up as red on my spreadsheet so I included it.

That -100% ROI at the top is because Amazon sent out another one of my units as a “replacement” to the customer.

Can’t complain when only three sales lost money. I know I probably have some inventory that isn’t priced appropriately at the moment and will need to be sold for a loss eventually. I am still figuring out how to best track and handle those deadbeats.

Most of June was spent buying final textbook deals and getting them shipped into Amazon from my prep center. I’m awaiting the final books to be received by the prep center before sending in my final batch.

I’m eagerly checking to see how the inventory I bought is performing so far. A lot of the books will have extremely high demand in August, but the supply is also very high as well. I’m still a little nervous. But I still think the worst case scenario is that some of these buys will break even (either lose a little money or make a little).

The highest percent I allocated to one ASIN was 3.56% while 80% of my money spent is spread across 102 different ASINs.

You can check out the May 2025 income report to compare performance.

Let's check out the numbers for June 2025.

Profit and Revenue for June 2025

Total Revenue: $5,416.47

COGS: $2,025.35

Biz Expense + AMZ Fees: $2,486.93

Net Profit: $939.57

Profit per item: $9.89

ROI: 46%

Profit margin: 17%

2025 Net Profit: $13,492.29

I have just barely missed hitting $1k net profit this and the previous month because I had to pay a lot in prep center fees and inbound shipping fees. That will even out in the coming months but I would love to get over the milestone round number.

My goal for the year is to hit $25k net profit. I think it is doable but it depends how August goes.

Time will tell if I screwed up and bought books too soon.

ROI Gradient

Screenshot from my P&L spreadsheet.

I’ve been having fun adding gradients everywhere I can to all my trackers. This is it sorted from lowest to highest ROI

And a few books got close to 200% ROI (two of these were found with my automated scraper, pretty cool!)

Can’t believe we’re already into June. May was a good month revenue wise but a bit lower than what I would have liked for the net profit.

I sent in a lot of inventory to Amazon in preparation for back to school and those fees took net profit down for May.

I may have started purchasing textbooks a bit too early, so we’ll see if that bites me in August. Worst case scenario I think I’ll still break even on books I bought too early. That would suck but would not be the end of the world.

Let's check out the numbers:

Profit and Revenue for May 2025

Total Revenue: $5,760.70

COGS: $2,853.81

Biz Expense + AMZ Fees: $2,077.05

Net Profit: $829.84

Profit per item: $6.01

2025 Net Profit: $12,552.72

Even though I had higher Amazon expenses than normal, I was still able to get close to $1,000 net profit. I’m trying to get to at least a $6 profit per item sold for general arbitrage items. I’m glad we were able to hit that number for profit per item sold.

I tried to exit out of inventory that didn’t pan out like I thought it would. I had a lot of orders that broke even or gained / lost a small amount. Happy to get my money back and try again on new inventory.

I also sold some retired LEGO sets for >80% ROI. I probably could hold until Christmas and get a better return. But my logic is that I can take a good profit and keep my Amazon account in good standing within the toy / LEGO category. Seems like a smart play to me.

Now it’s time to get ready for back to school and buy a lot of textbooks. I predict revenue will probably be 2-3k for June and July before things go crazy in August. We’ll see what happens.

Part of that is because I got reimbursed for a bunch of inventory that Amazon lost. I’ll discuss that some more later because the accounting confused me.

And if you’re interested in reading the previous month’s income report, check out the March 2025 income report.

Profit and Revenue for April 2025

Total Revenue: $7,558.45 (includes eBay revenue but not the inventory reimbursements)

Items Sold: 193 (does not include inv. reimbursement)

COGS: $2,810.25 (includes reimbursement)

Biz Expense + AMZ Fees: $2,771.18 (includes inv. reimbursement)

Net Profit: $3,318.90 (includes inv. reimbursements)

2025 Net Profit: $11,722.88

Pretty sweet to cross the $10k net profit month before the year is halfway over. My goal for this year is to hit $25k net profit (which would be over six figs in revenue).

My accounting got weird when trying to figure out inventory reimbursements.

Amazon did an initial reimbursement batch. But then they sent a bunch of individual reimbursement transactions. I had to do some addition. As I write this now it does not sound that hard but it was confusing when I was doing it. You had to be there.

As far as I know, these numbers are accurate. But this is a one man show and there’s a good chance I messed something up.

Inventory Sold

I sold out of a lot of my good OA inventory and I have not replenished due to a few factors:

The first was a gut punch and that the brand ended the deal I was using to source.

I was doing 200% ROI on a bundle in addition to 15% cash back from TopCashback. But nothing lasts forever and I’ll be checking on the website to see if the deal ever comes back.

In hindsight I wish I had bought WAY more but I was able to do a few thousand in sales off each of the two ASINs that the deal gave.

Only 10% of my sales were from books. I think May will be a quieter month since I’m switching gears and focusing on seasonal textbooks. I’ll also be selling some of my Legos that have appreciated to a 50% or greater ROI and hopefully stay ungated for Q4.

April Reflection

I thought sales would slow down but it was another good month. But I am convinced that will see some slow down in May - July.

Part of me thinks I’m doing well and the other part of me knows I could be doing A LOT more on the OA/RA side of the house to get some year round deal flow going. Depending how the textbook season goes in August I’ll have to recalibrate my approach.

I have a few hundred ASINs that I’m going to be manually sourcing for the textbook season. I don’t really know the best way to look through them other than throwing it in Keepa product viewer and just staring at charts for a few hours.

I am categorizing the listings between high, medium, and low demand. I don’t really know what that will get for me but we’ll see. I should probably write some code to automate this part for me.

This is a great business because it’s a dumb business. By that I mean you buy low and sell high.

No algorithms or complicated technology architecture required, just pure left side of the bell curve “buy if price low, sell when its high”. If you put in effort sourcing you’ll probably see results. Some days I feel great about what is going to come and some days I feel like a huge ding dong and a failure blah blah blah.

The best way to crush those feelings is to pick up the phone and start dialing (source deals).

Because I use a prep center, once I order the book the only remaining items are to tell the prep center to send the books to FBA and then to set repricing limits.

Please check out the income report for this month or the inventory report from last month.

Thanks for reading

Inventory Breakdown

Units purchased: 209 (123 OA, 86 books)

Units sent for FBA: 205

Cash spent: $5,370.62

Nearly $25 per item spent last month. I’m a little worried some of the OA items won’t move and I’ll have to take a loss, but we’ll see what happens

Scatterbrained

I feel a bit in limbo right now because I want to save cash for the upcoming busy back to school season. But I also want to compound capital as many times as possible. I will probably end up saving cash since I am more confident in my textbook skills than my OA skills right now.

I’m definitely feeling scatterbrained and spread too thin. I’m having a hard time even writing why I feel like that, but I think I’m just trying to do too much between OA, books, and then just regular life. Climbing route beta (the sequence of moves) takes up a lot of RAM in my brain.

I think what I should do is get really good at sourcing books (improve my automated software + spreadsheets for tracking), document everything so I don’t have to remember how or why I do things a certain way, and then repeat that process for other niches.

But when I see other sellers hitting six + seven figures doing OA/RA I think I need to stop selling books and drive over to Marshalls and scan every item in the store.

I will go take a double dose of creatine and collect my thoughts.

Thank you for reading.

Despite some life craziness in March, the Amazon machine kept churning. Here are the numbers.

Profit and Revenue for March 2025

Total Revenue: $7,302.10

Items Sold: 147

COGS: $3,855.08

Biz Expense + AMZ Fees: $1,487.27

Net Profit: $1,885.50

2025 Net Profit: $8,403.98

I am pretty shocked with how March went. I was expecting another quiet month but sales took off towards the end of the month.

I also made some improvements in my reporting. I found the transaction report that detailed each sale along with fees under their Payments / Report Repository section. I was previously using a report from the “Reports” category that wasn’t giving me exactly what I wanted.

How many reports sections can one website have?

The data is accurate to the best of my ability. I’m a one man shop here. But going forward I am going to build out software I have written to improve efficiency and accuracy in the accounting department.

Custom Software

Going forward I’ll be able to get more accurate numbers using that report. I have a manual webscraper I run in the browser to generate my list of orders by month. Now I can join that data with the Amazon report on the order id and get my revenue, fee, and profit totals.

Once I have that figured out, the next step is to automatically pull that report from the Amazon seller partner API, insert that data into my google sheet, and run VLOOKUP all day.

Report Date Lag

There is a bit of lag between the orders I scrape manually and what the Amazon report shows. Meaning that an order I scrape from my “orders” page won’t show up on the Amazon provided transaction report.

ex) Customer orders something on 2/27, but the payment doesn’t go through until 3/2.

I have been considering this as revenue for February (would be included in a February P&L post) but I would not technically have the fees for it until March. I’m not sure how I’m gonna handle that yet. I don’t think it makes a huge difference in the end, but it does make these reports not 100% accurate.

Deal Finder

No new progress on my deal finder python tool. I have it running in the background right now and will check the deals before I close up.

I had some big dreams of adding in a web ui and updating the scraper to consistently run, tweaking the deal parameters to try and get new buys when needed. But I haven't made any progress there yet.

March Reflections

I had some other priorities pop up in March and had to put my OA sourcing on the back burner. I focused on books because I have a prep center and don’t have to worry about logistics once I buy the book.

But now that life is settling back down, I can focus on OA again. I think I will see sales drop in April because I did not send items in for OA. It will be frustrating but I know how to fix it. Source more and send in more inventory.

Upcoming Articles

• March inventory report

• One year Amazon selling reflection

• A tale of two replens

• Back to school season prep

• My first retail arbitrage adventure

If you’re interested in reading the first inventory report I’ve done, you can check it out here:

And the February income report is listed here

Inventory Breakdown

Units purchased: 238 (161 OA, 77 books)

Units sent for FBA: 199

Cash spent: $2,680.38 (I haven’t yet reconciled a majority of my book buys yet so this is much higher)

Thanks to some inspiration from some other top notch sellers, I started developing my own python tool to find good book deals from Amazon.

I was excited to use the tool and spent more time looking for books than I expected. I didn’t source any OA deals for about 10 days in February.

Despite sending 199 items in to Amazon for FBA, there are 69 (not nice) items that are still waiting to be checked in. I’m trying to be patient, but I have a feeling those items were lost or damaged. Worst case I’ll have to submit receipts to get reimbursed.

When I sent in textbooks for FBA, I had a really good run of 100% check in rates for shipments. Maybe I need to use the heavy duty moving boxes to send in my OA inventory. Right now I have been using the boxes that my inventory gets delivered in and resending that back to Amazon.

Strategies

I’ve been working at manufacturing margin. Find an item that’s profitable or close to profitable, use the reseller exempt on sales tax, find a discounted gift card and a coupon code and create a profit margin that didn’t easily exist before.

This is the meta for reselling right now. I read about this strategy a lot from the big guru sellers. We’ll see how long it remains a viable strategy. But for now it has been working for me so I’m gonna keep doing it.

Coming up

Next thing I need to do is build a UI for the scraping tool and improve the price history comparison.

There are a ton of sale opportunities coming up (St patricks day, Easter, Mothers Day, Memorial Day etc.) Lots of opportunities out there.

So far into March I’ve been trying to FBM more products. It’s more time consuming for me but I want to try and churn faster returns. We’ll see how that goes in the March income report.

A much quieter month than January. Still trying to get general online arbitrage going.

Let’s take a look at February:

Profit and Revenue for February 2025

Total Revenue: $3,775.64

Items Sold: 87

COGS: $1,906.22

Biz Expense + AMZ Fees: $2,872.53

Net Profit: $618.46

2025 Net Profit: $6,518.48

About 30% of these sales came from generic online arbitrage. That is just a fancy way to say I am buying everyday products from other websites and selling them on Amazon. I use a combination of tactics to manufacture some margin and then resell on Amazon.

Some of those sales are only netting $4-$6 profit. But I had a realization that even just a catalog of 20 products that only do $50 monthly profit is a store that is doing $1,000 net profit. That’s an oversimplification but that logic has been a light bulb going off for me.

Automation Tools

One big development this past month was that I created a python script to automatically scrape deals off Amazon.

I bought a lot of deals but I’m a bit worried now that I was pressing too hard to make the new tool worth it. I’m going to keep developing it and probably set up a UI soon to make viewing the deals easier.

I don’t think any of these deals were worth buying. The tool is only looking at the last three months and using that average used sale price to determine the ROI.

I also am working on a chrome extension to fix a few things that I like to see differently on seller central. Any manual repetitive action I’m taking I want to automate as much as possible.

More to come on this soon.

Upcoming Articles

• February inventory report

• One year Amazon selling reflection

• A tale of two replens

2025 Outlook

I have failed a bit at sourcing for OA. This needs to be a consistent and daily action. But life gets in the way, I get tired and lazy, and honestly sometimes I just forget the good ways to source.

I enjoy writing this newsletter, but even just figuring out my monthly P&L by each item was a pain. That is another task to automate.

My plan for now is to continue trying at OA and using the CLI tool to find some easy book deals. Build more capital and blow it all on used textbooks April - June.

I’ll try to cover everything related to inventory: units bought, cash spent, categories of products etc. I’m hoping this will help me think about sourcing better because I suck at it right now.

Let’s take a look at the numbers for January 2025.

Inventory Breakdown

Units purchased: 151

Units sent for FBA: 88

Cash spent: $1,859.31

Avg cost per unit: $12.31

Out of the 151 units purchased in January, 12 were books while the other 139 were general arbitrage items.

I sourced 12 different websites. Most of the units were within the Beauty & Personal Care category, but we had some in sports, grocery, and video games.

Discounts ranged from 15% to 20% off. And I utilized a BOGO in combination with 15% off code twice.

Strategies

Mainly just storefront stalking. I don’t think this can be the only strat I use because a) everyone has access to each other’s storefronts and b) I’m already late to the listing if I’m finding it through someone else.

I’m already seeing the seller count skyrocket on a few listings.

Not a great feeling.

But I have been trying (unsuccessfully) to manually source websites that have sales and always tweaking keepa product finder when researching a brand to find products with increasing sales and decreasing seller counts.

This is still hard and it kind of sucks. My book buying was quiet in January but I am buying deals as I find them.

My seasonal buy tracker only has a few listings for February. But in March that count jumps up to 30 books to monitor. Hope to get a few good listings for the May/June mini season.

What a crazy month. I was nervous going into January that I had bought a ton of bad textbooks and I was going to be stuck holding a lot of inventory.

But everything worked out and I was able to get a 50% ROI on my investments.

Let’s check out the numbers:

Profit and Revenue for January 2025

Total Revenue: $23,310.99

Items Sold: 249

COGS: $11,694.84

Biz Expense + AMZ Fees: $5,318.49

Net Profit: $5,900.02

2025 Net Profit: $5,900.02

Awesome month and a great way to wrap up the January busy season. Going back to the start of the textbook busy season in December we easily went over $25,000 revenue and got close to $30,0000. These numbers include a small percent of non-textbook sales.

In January we did 50.45% ROI and 25.75% profit margin on sales. Awesome start to the year and now we have more capital to buy more inventory to sell on Amazon.

I have been trying to dial in my accounting. I am still managing everything on spreadsheets and now that I am introducing high volume online arbitrage sales to the business model, things are getting difficult to track.

The numbers I posted above are accurate to the best of my ability, but I know they aren’t 100% accurate. I need to get to 100% accuracy and I think the only way I’ll be able to do that is hiring outside help.

Busy Season Highlights

Purchased for $12.01

And sold for $79.95 less than two months later.

400% ROI. Looking at the keepa chart I could have held a little longer and sold for close to $90

I purchased five copies of this book for $154.50 ($30.90 per copy) in mid October

And then sold each for $79.95, a 100% ROI a few months later.

For the fall season, I want to find more books that I can go deep on (buy more copies). Even if I only expect a 30% ROI, I’m willing to allocate a percentage of capital towards that if I can deploy more on the inventory.

Busy Season Failures

My plan to go deep on copies doesn’t always workout as intended.

For one ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) I allocated close to 7% of all the capital I was deploying on textbooks this season. I thought it was a sure thing to do greater than 30% ROI.

I ended up doing 2% ROI on them. Glad I was able to break even but I was disappointed it never panned out.

The new price is the ceiling for used books. And the new price just never increased to where I needed it to go. In retrospect, I should have been exiting on and around January 1. But I decided to hold instead and see if the price would grow.

It didn’t workout and in the end I got paid 20 bucks to learn new data points that I can use going forward. Oh well.

There were a few other books I lost money on. I did -12% to -25% ROI on a few copies of some ASINs but they only cost me $10 - $15 to buy. Not a huge loss at the end of the day.

2025 Outlook

The hard work starts now. I have to relearn an entire new niche on Amazon.

My plan now is to do generic online arbitrage on various products for the rest of the year. But I will still be buying seasonal textbooks as the deals come in. I use a spreadsheet to track seasonal ASINs that I think will be good buying opportunities over the next coming months.

I hope I can consistently do 30% ROI on these OA sales and create more capital to buy more textbook inventory in May, June, October, and November. Easier said than done, staying organized and consistent will be crucial.

My goal is to hit 100k revenue and 25,000 net profit. We’ll see what we can do this year.

I read this metaphor online somewhere and it has been echoing in my head.

What actions can I take right now to keep the ball moving down the field towards the end zone?

Sourcing is the lifeblood of the Amazon business. If you’re not sourcing, you’re not obtaining more inventory. If you don’t have inventory, you have nothing to sell. If you have nothing to sell, you won’t make sales. Obvious statement when written out.

Sourcing

Critical thinking has never been my strong suit. Honestly, I think I am kind of dumb. But I am ok at doing repetitive tasks.

I’ve probably looked at thousands of Keepa charts by now. Hours and hours spent going through Amazon listings at 3 am when I couldn’t sleep, 6 am when I woke up excited to find deals, and sneaking a quick sourcing session in before dinner or going to the gym.

Throughout all that time, I’ve realized I’m on the lookout for mainly one type of book.

Seasonal/cyclical textbooks.

These are textbooks that have extremely high demand during January, August, and sometimes May.

I think the life cycle for this kind of used textbook is that a student will buy this book and use it for the semester. When the semester is over they sell it back to a textbook buyback business. These businesses just care about doing volume and don’t want to hold the book until the next semester. I can buy the book from them during the offseason and hold that book until the demand comes back and sell for a profit.

The other approach to this game is to find books and textbooks that are in high demand and set tracking notifications to catch pricing errors. This is a volume game and you need to track a large number of books AND keep these tracking notifications updated.

I have struggled to keep my tracking in line, I have about 11,000 unread emails from Keepa right now. But every Keepa email notification should solicit an action: buy the book, read the new data and update tracking if needed, or delete tracking since the book is no longer profitable. This is something I need to work on in 2025.

Distractions

Refreshing my sales page does not move the ball down the field. It’s cheap dopamine and is not helping me build anything. It’s the same feeling as when I have spent a day refreshing SEO stats multiple times or refreshing stock prices multiple times.

That is just checking in on results. It’s not focusing on inputs that will give you better output.

I’m trying to expand my storefront past books now. I have a lot of sourcing to do and more inventory to buy if I want to hit my 2025 goals. I am 100% convinced they are possible and obtainable, but it’s going to require daily action and consistency.

Read the previous November 2024 income report

The month started out slow but picked up closer to Christmas. I made about 23 FBM sales on a few toys and lotions. And then January textbooks started selling around the 20th and really picked up at the end of the month.

Here are the numbers (including Ebay sales):

And hit the like button and ask any questions in the comments. I can dive deep into any questions in future posts.

P&L for December 2024

Total Revenue: $7,095.64 (ebay sales included in the below numbers)

Items Sold: 68

COGS: $3,181.75

Biz Expense + AMZ Fees: $1,656.83

Net Profit: $2,257.06

2024 Net Profit: $5,826.34

I’m excited to have finished up year zero selling on Amazon. I’m surprised with how much I did and extremely optimistic for the future. I learned a ton this year and it has honestly been the most fun I have had “working”.

It’s still a small business, but I have learned a lot from just flipping textbooks. When I enter my course guru phase, I’ll sell a course and call it “the textbook MBA”.

A review post on year zero will come at the end of February.

Accounting

The year zero celebration ends now. While I was reviewing the figures for this article I realized how bad my accounting system is.

I have been tracking all buys and sales on spreadsheets and that has worked fine up until this busy season. But in October and November went deep on a few ASINs that I was confident would be profitable. And as they have been selling I’ve been fumbling over what has sold and which hasn’t.

I was previously using Inventory Lab and they did a good job for tracking profit & loss and auto importing Amazon transactions. But the customer support sucks, every SKU has additional inventory added (the devs are “looking into it”), and every CPA I’ve talked to has said it’s not a legitimate bookkeeping system and they don't accept it.

So I decided to go back to quickbooks again. Every Amazon Seller CPA I have seen says to use it. And a lot of the big sellers use it. It’s the gold standard for a reason.

I need to figure out a system that works with QB. I want to be a legit biz and having poor accounting standards is a recipe for disaster.

Winter Busy Season

January sales are already picking up. But I did lose a little bit of sleep the other night thinking about the upcoming season.

I was confident, maybe even cocky, heading into the Jan season that I was going to make a good amount of sales.

So far it’s been good, but I have seen a few listings that aren’t panning out like I thought they would. I’ve been monitoring prices and adjusting where I can. But a few tankers are on my listings. Not much I can do but play the cards I’m dealt.

This is my second busy season and my strategy is similar to my first. Liquidate all textbook inventory at 30% ROI or greater. I don’t care if a book will spike to a higher price in August and I have to sell for less now. I want the money so I can churn it over the winter and spring. And I’ll probably be able to re-enter the position in May or June.

Online Arbitrage

Sent in 72 units, have spent ~2k on inventory. No sales (other than the Christmas items) yet and still don’t know what I’m doing.

Will be a little painful figuring this out.

Here’s how we managed to lose money this month:

Profit and Revenue for September 2024

Total Revenue: $1,052.89 (all sales, screenshot shows less in income because Inventory Lab subtracts refunds in the income category)

Items Sold: 15

COGS: $213.12

Biz Expense + AMZ Fees: $681.91

Net Profit: ($221.81)

2024 Net Profit: $3,343.95

Not a bad month revenue wise but had a lot of expenses. Business insurance and inbound shipping fees for the winter ate a lot of my profit. I also switched to using Inventory Lab full time and I am still getting a hang of my accounting.

Winter Busy Season

I’m writing this report late, but I have all my winter busy season textbooks sent in to Amazon. They aren’t all checked in, but I’m hoping that a majority will be by mid January. Right now I have about 250 books in stock.

Since the beginning of September I have bought 312 books. A majority of those are seasonal textbooks that I plan to sell in January and February. A few of the books have already sold.

Unfortunately, one of my boxes was lost en route to an Amazon FC. And I have to wait a few more days before I can begin the investigation process. I have all of my receipts and invoices so I’m hoping I can at least recover what I paid for the book. But I think I’ll still be out the prep center fees and shipping fees for it.

High Volume Arbitrage

In December I have been trying to figure out a higher volume arbitrage model. I’d like to figure out a system where I’m making sales consistently year round. My business will have high return book sales in August and January. And then the remainder of the year would have lower return but higher volume arbitrage sales.

So far I’ve been doing FBM and getting about 6 to 19% returns. Not great, but I’m still figuring out this system. Today has already had five sales off of one ASIN. I’ll do more volume as I add more inventory. I would like to eventually get a prep center and FBA these non book arbitrage goods.

What I’m looking forward to

• January busy season: aim for $10k net profit

• Christmas and spending time with my wife

• Building out the OA side of my business.

Mainly book sales with a few A2A flips. Here are the numbers:

October 2024 Profit & Loss

Total Revenue: $1,534.40

Items Sold: 13

COGS: $535.62

Amazon Fees (FBA selling, storage, inbound shipping etc.): $465.89

Net Profit: $532.89

2024 Net Profit: $5,072.69

I was expecting October (and November / December) to be slower months. But I am still pleased to have done >$500 net profit and >$1k revenue. I know revenue is a vanity metric but it’s still nice to see it over 1k instead of under.

Current Focus

My current focus since September has been buying textbooks for January and buying some lego sets that retire this year.

I have bought 231 books since September and I expect a majority of them to sell in January / February. Since I am still building capital, I want to sell all of my inventory out during the busy seasons.

My reasoning is that I would rather get 25% ROI in January 2025 instead of waiting for 50% ROI in the August 2025 back to school season. During the offseason in 2025 I am going to try and churn inventory that sells quicker but will have a lower ROI. And then use the capital generated to hit the August 2025 season strong.

Legos

I have been buying Lego sets that are due to retire in 2024. I have sold a few on Ebay and Amazon for small profit. I don’t really know what to expect from this effort, but it doesn’t seem like a huge time commitment: buy sets that retire, wait a while, sell them.

Simple process but we’ll see what happens. There is a lot of content out there on what sets to buy and that will lead to more competition. I only found out about selling legos through content people put out. There will be more like me.

One day at a time

I try to source books every day. I need to spend my remaining money within the next week or two so my books make it into Amazon on time for the busy season.

One day at a time. Don’t get caught up in distractions.

Here are the numbers.

Profit and Revenue for September 2024

Total Revenue: $1,493.71

Items Sold: 15

COGS: $807.27

Biz Expense + AMZ Fees: $410.41

Net Profit: $275.32

2024 Net Profit: $4,539.80

Back to school was a rush. And to fall off the cliff like this is disappointing. You see a number like $1,400 revenue and think you’re a big shot but it’s a reality check when your net profit is only $275. 

That puts me at ~34% ROI on what I paid for inventory. When I first started doing this, I was aiming for 50% ROI. But I started to slowly drop that target number to 30%. 

I don’t know where I pulled 30% from. Spend $100 and get back $130. 

Millionaires are built by 30 dollar bills at a time right?

Winter Busy Season

Deploying all my capital for the winter busy season has been looming over me. I’m nervous I won’t be able to buy enough inventory and my Jan numbers will be a bust. I can’t let these feelings convince me to make bad buys though. Patience is key.

I want to start 2025 off with a strong month. And then spend the rest of the year playing faster flips that have a lower ROI. Then hit the 2025 Fall semester with everything I got. 

Seasonality

If you are playing the seasonal textbook game you need to be tracking seasonal books on a spreadsheet. It’s simple:

Create a google doc. As you look at keepa charts and see seasonality, add the ASIN (from the url amazon.com/dp/<ASIN-TO_COPY> to a page within the sheet. 

When it’s time to source, open the keepa data tab, click product viewer and copy the ASIN’s into the input.  Find the columns that show the sales drops by 1,30,90 days and sort by those to check in on how the price is doing. 

You still add your tracking notifications, but I think this is a good way to do larger buys for seasonal books.

When the month is over, you go back through each ASIN and add it to a new page in the sheet if it’s still a good buy. If it’s no longer a good buy, remove it.

Day by day

The prep center has been a great addition so far. 

I’ve bought close to 100 books since the middle of September. Going to have them send off my first shipment to FBA once the PC has received 40-50. I think that will be within the next week.

Other than that it’s just sourcing a bit every day. Within the next week or two I will strike on winter busy season books. I don’t wait to buy too soon and get bad buys. But don’t want to wait too long and miss out on all the deals & inventory.  

Just have to keep living and learning. 

Profit and Revenue for August 2024

Total Revenue $12,898.40 (after returns)

Cost of Goods Sold $7,101.19

Business Expenses + AMZ Fees $3,066.55

Items Sold 128

Net Profit $2,730.66

August was a great month:

• I went over $10,000 revenue for the first time

• Broke $1k and $2k in profit for the first time

• Validated the book textbook flipping theory

When I say that I validated the theory, I mean that I proved to myself that the business model worked. I have seen plenty of other people post their success for book flipping online. But you never know if they’re telling the truth.

I started prepping for this busy season in February. I didn’t know what I was doing but I kept buying textbooks. . By July of that year, I had spent around $12,500 on inventory and had already sold about 100 books on Amazon. There are monthly reports for the previous part of the year on my substack.

So after spending $12,500 on inventory over the course of five months. I now have $17,200 in my bank account. Pretty good.

Scaling

Last week I got myself set up with a prep center. And now I have 20 books being shipped to them right now. 

Previously, I handled all the receiving, packing, and shipping out to FBA myself. And it feels pretty good to not have to worry about lugging a 45 pound box of books out to my car and over to UPS. I’ve been doing this all from a 1 bedroom apartment. And it is definitely doable. But with the prep center I’ll be able to focus solely on buying more inventory.  

My goal for September is to keep buying inventory at good prices. Don’t succumb to feelings of desperation and make bad buys. Sometimes I just need to close the laptop, go outside and enjoy life.

Profit and Revenue for July 2024

Total Revenue $3,005.80

Cost of Goods Sold $1,466.74

Business Expenses $82.76

Items Sold 27

Returns 0

Gross Profit $862.42

Net Profit $779.66

My average ROI across all sales was 58.38% and average profit margin was 25.9%. 

Average ROI and profit margin were both down, but I’m still happy with them. This was my highest earning month yet and I am happy to get a 50% ROI and churn through my inventory. 

I was out of town for two weeks in and out of cell phone service. 

When I got to some WiFi I pulled up seller central on my phone and was greeted by my first $1k day. Pretty incredible to find that out in Grand Teton National Park.

This happened in August but I’m including it here anyway.

August Outlook

• Continue repricing as necessary. I am trying to sell out all my inventory and will settle for 30% ROI if I have to

• Monitor busy season trends. If I bought a bad book cut my losses and get rid of it this season

• Build list of books to buy in October to sell in the winter busy season

Lets keep the momentum going.

Here is the June income report.

The June report is nearly identical to May. We had 27 items sold and one return. But our average sale price was down and so was our revenue.

But I’m still fired up to have broken $2k in revenue for the second month in a row. I was not expecting that

Profit and Revenue for June 2024

Total Revenue: $2,117.46

Cost of Goods Sold: $869.63

Business Expenses: $133.03

Items Sold: 27

Returns: 1

Gross Profit: $701.30

Net Profit: $568.27

My average ROI across all sales was 91% and average profit margin was 30%. 

I’m still tracking this all on a google sheet, so there will probably be some errors. I tried out a trial of inventory labs. It was good software because it automatically synced with my Amazon seller account for inventory, sales, and fees. 

But it cost more than I’m willing to pay right now. I’m going to try out the quickbooks software next.

Winners

Great ROI and margin on the same book. First row was used and second row was brand spankin’ new still in the shrink wrap.

The ROI on this one is still great, but the profit is not as high as the first two. I’ve been trying to balance between buying expensive and inexpensive books. 

The expensive books may return a higher $ amount but the margins may be worse. While some of these inexpensive books have lower profit, but better margins.

The first two sales in this section are what I would like to get every single time.

Losers

I bought two books that I am hard gated on.

I don’t know if I just forgot to check if I could sell them before buying or if I got gated after I ordered them, but I am betting on the former. Sometimes I find myself rushing to buy deals and I have made a few bad buys because of this. 

I’m trying to sell these on ebay, but we’ll see if they ever sell. I may just be out the $92.55 it cost to buy them.

I mispriced this one and it sold at the wrong price. At least I didn’t lose any money on it.

July Outlook

• Send in the rest of my remaining inventory (34 books)

• Price all books to sell during busy season

• Start creating list of ISBN’s that drop in price in October/November and spike again in January

Lets keep the momentum going.

I was expecting a bump in sales due to summer college semesters and a bump we got! But when I was planning out the month, I was convinced that two books would sell. I thought it was a guarantee. 

One never sold. And the other one only sold after I low balled the price towards the end of its demand spike. I still got 50% ROI, but it was a good reminder that I don’t know what I am doing and the past doesn’t guarantee the future.

Here are the numbers.

Profit and Revenue for May 2024

Total Revenue:  $2,601.17

Cost of Goods Sold: $1,203.84 

Total Profit:  $768.84

Items Sold: 27

Returns: 1 

This was a great month. I was expecting a bump in sales but I did not expect to do nearly three times my previous month.

Winners

Great ROI on these two. The second one was one of the first books I bought way back in February. Hard to complain about 100%+ ROI.

This wasn’t a book, but a random arbitrage opportunity I found via Keepa deals. 

Love seeing that profit amount and we came close to 50% ROI. There’s a lot of garbage in keep deals, but this was a diamond in the rough. 

Predicting Sales

I was positive that these two books were going to sell in May based on their historical Keepa charts. 

But as we got to the last week of May. Neither book had sold. I started to feel impatient and manually updated prices to be the lowest price by a good margin. I use an automated pricer to match the lowest prime price for all my books.

The first book ended up selling at 52% ROI (I was targeting more) and the second book did not sell. I still have a chance in August to sell the second one. But looking back now it’s funny how confident I was that I knew what would happen. And I was only sort of right.

Good reminder that past performance does not guarantee future results. 

June Outlook

• Purchase $5,000 worth of inventory for the fall busy season

• Prep all inventory at home to be sent in

• Reducing my ROI target for new books to 30% since I am anticipating selling them in a month

Lets keep the momentum going.