I finally made my first sale on Amazon.
And in the ten days since my last post, we have had six sales come through. All are books that have a BSR of less than 500,000 and are priced aggressively to sell.
First Sale
The first sale was a Geometry textbook on March 12th. I originally bought it off Amazon for $45.57. Amazon took $34.45 in fees which left me with a profit of $12.16, not shabby for my first go. I think my ROI and % profit figures are correct, correct me if not.
I still have one more of these textbooks sitting in my inventory waiting to be sold and there is competition with another seller. Neither of us have the buy box so I may need to cut my price eventually to sell and get this book out the door.
I may have been bailed out on this sale. The buy box is not prime shipping but it is half the price of what mine sold for. I am thinking about selling this at a break even price to get it out of my inventory. Since I’m still new, I don’t know how harmful it is to keep my inventory sitting at the fulfillment centers.
Next Five Sales
Screenshot of the additional sales that happened between March 15th and March 22nd. Some notes:
The first two $40 sales were for the same book. Buy box was $5 below my minimum price but still managed to sell out my inventory
The third sale and last sale (with no ROI or % profit shown) are because one book I already owned and the other I received a full refund from the ebay seller due to the condition of the book not matching the description (I received used when promised new)
A 19.79 % ROI sounds much more impressive than saying, “ I made five dollars”
This business isn’t going to scale like a software company. Income will be limited by the number of hours I put in and how many books I can source.
But that’s ok. I knew going in that this wasn’t a scalable business, but instead a way to learn and make money. I want to grow this business to a point where I can consistently make an extra $1,000 a month of profit. Even if it means I put in some hours on nights and weekends.
Sometimes you have to do things that don’t scale.
Worth Celebrating?
This is a win, but it’s not worth celebrating. Yes it’s cool I made sales on Amazon, learned how to become a prime seller, set up an LLC etc. But at the end of the day, I’ve only made 59 American dollars.
That is not worth celebrating. There is still a ton of work to do. Trying to flex that online to internet strangers for likes is a loser move. With that last sentence in mind, does writing out this entire Substack post make me a loser?
Maybe.