What a crazy month.
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.