January 2025 Income Report: $5,900 Net Profit

Wrapping up my second busy season

Checkout the previous December 2024 income report

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.