hello again hey it's ken from park hill
auctions and today i'm here to spend
some time with you showing
how to sell books on ebay
my wife robert and i run a business
called park hill realty group and estate
services as part of our business model
we have an auction gallery here in
fitchburg and we've been selling for
about 25 years we specialize in estate
liquidating
so the question is is what do you do
with all these books is selling books on
ebay worth it
what are your best options for selling
books should you use ebay should you use
amazon
for us selling books is one of the
categories that we sell but it's not the
only category we sell is it worth it
well for us it is we have enough volume
to be able to separate uh books that are
worth taking the time to listen to sell
versus some of them that really aren't
where do you source your books from
there's a good question well there's a
ton of places that you can source books
from
you can thrift you can visit salvation
army in goodwill
that's one way if you do that you are
going to be paying for your books
there's ways to get books that
are very profitable that uh that that
we'll do from time to time which is get
yourself hooked up with a charity
and get books donated
you know full disclosure let people know
that you are selling some of the books
to help raise money for the charity not
just donate books um and then you know
you can contribute a financial donation
to the charity uh to show support that
way and you can
you can cherry pick so to speak some of
the best books or best book bundles um
that you can sell for profit and these
may be books that the charity wouldn't
typically sell anyways another way to
source books is to just run these little
ads in
things like facebook marketplace or
facebook groups or
your local town
social media groups um just advertising
that you are looking for books you'll
buy books you're looking for books to
donate some towns have
these drop centers where um people will
exchange
things at the local transfer station in
the landfill where um you know you if
you have a window that you don't need
you bring it there you leave it in the
barn and
maybe you take a box of books out it's
always worth checking at the transfer
station too to see if people have
donated or left books estate sales are a
great way to find books when you go into
books you can either you know just buy
one or two that are on the floor on the
table at a yard sale or you can just
make them an offer for the whole thing
and not even get too involved with
titles just buy the whole thing i can
tell you this if you're buying books and
you want to make money at it one thing
you absolutely can't do is pay a lot of
money for books yes maybe there might be
that one antique book that you know
maybe a 60 100 200 300 500 book do you
want to step up to plate with that well
sure that's a different scenario i'm
talking about everyday run-of-the-mill
books
books that that people are just looking
to free up space those are the ones you
want to pay short money for and you can
bundle them up into book bundles that's
something we haven't really talked about
much so far but you know a lot of the
book sales that we do
are selling book bundles
what's a book bundle let me show you so
in our inventory room where we store all
of our books you'll see like this book
bundle here these are all tom clancy uh
soft cover books there's
oh i don't know six or seven or eight of
them here and you know list price is
about 20 25
on this
um you know those will sell um
here we have a book bundle of joan
johnston
those probably sell about twenty dollars
fern michaels there's just four of them
here but you know if you try to sell
these individual books
for four or five dollars a piece they
just don't sell you're competing with
some of the big big companies that do
volume what we want to do is give our
customers
value by buying
more books in one lot
here's another bundle by stuart woods
now here we've combined both hard cover
and soft cover
could we split this into two lots yeah i
think we could we could bundle this into
two but in this case because the resale
on stuart woods wasn't as high
we decided to put him in one big giant
bundle
here's a hard covered book bundle by
james patterson there's a whole bunch of
different random titles
something like that we might list up for
maybe 35 dollars
here's seven steve barry
hard covers we're bundling those
together um buy those and we'll throw in
this soft cover for nothing i'm not even
including this in the listing they're
just going to get a surprise in the box
when they get all the rest of them
all of the books that we sell singularly
we all have them filed by
the system that we use um
once the books sell and once the shelves
empty out at some point we just sort of
consolidate them all down and we just
have a continuous numbering system
here's a book bundle of some older books
these are all soft cover um
random titles
but
they're all um sort of military based or
military stories pt 109 enemy within
uh we don't ask much for these maybe
twenty dollars condition is you know
good to
fair i would say
you always want to make sure that when
you're grading
or giving a condition on your book
bundle that you always go by whatever
the
book that is in the worst condition go
go with that because i guarantee that if
you put they're all in good condition
someone's going to complain and you're
going to end up with a return or a
refund
one of the things you've got to ask
yourself when you're listing books is
what's the sell through how long am i
going to sit on this does this make
sense to sell us as a bundle does it
make sense to sell it by itself for us
the cutoff is probably somewhere between
20 uh 15 to 20 dollars if the book is
going to sell for more than say 15 more
than 20 dollars it's strong enough to go
by itself um my favorite platform for
listing books is ebay but
we've also used amazon we've also we've
done fba uh and that's that's content
for another video so we'll we'll chat
about that another time something else i
want to touch on
is if you use one of the multi-platform
listing
apps
uh i think the one we're using uh was it
called lists perfectly i think
anyways what it'll let you do is it'll
let you
uh post your your your book or your item
or whatever you're selling on ebay it'll
also let you cross-post it you can
cross-post it
to uh makari and to facebook marketplace
and
that's a really good tool especially for
items that
are going to be in your inventory for a
long time
what's the danger well the danger is is
that
there's
some glitches where
scenarios situations where you'll sell
the item
in this case a book you'll sell the book
on
uh facebook marketplace
and you don't get over to market
in ebay
and the other platforms that you use as
sold and you end up selling it twice now
this really beats the crap out of your
score
um
on on all the platforms because whenever
you have to cancel
because of non-performance on you know
on your end um it goes as a bad mark so
you're going to be really really careful
with that what's my favorite way to
source books my favorite way is for
someone to call
and to say
hey i saw your ad and i've got
i'm moving and i've got all these boxes
of books and i don't know what i have
but i i just want them to go to a good
home if you can reuse them or sell them
or do we don't care if you can give us
something for them uh that'd be great i
really appreciate it and i go out to the
house i take a look and you know there's
a few books that i like and a few books
that aren't worth much and this and that
but i end up filling up my van with 15
boxes of
random books
for
20 bucks or 50 bucks even you know if
they're good titles or if i know i have
a lot of books that
um
are themed like you can you can bundle
they don't have to be by the same author
so
you might want to bundle together like
10 books uh how to cook in a crock pot
where they're cookbooks but they're a
little bit more specific that those tend
to sell a little bit better
you know sometimes in your garage sale
hunts and your yard sale fines you can
come across a book like we did recently
uh julia childs the art of french
cooking and a good clean copy first
edition i think it's 1961
will will bring you 200 300 400
in fact some of them are signed and if
you find a signed one um that could
bring you double that
so what's the secret well
if your mission is to
either have a really profitable side
hustle or even make a full-time living
books can be a category or a niche that
will help get you there
there's a whole bunch of resources that
you can use that'll help you determine
whether a single book or a book bundle
is worth listing and selling on ebay
check your completed ebay sales if you
go under your drop down menu and you
look under advanced settings you can
find one that says completed sales check
your completed sales see see how many of
that book have sold see
what the prices were what they were
selling for and uh priced accordingly
fba scan is a tool that amazon and
amazon sellers use to determine sell
through and how popular an item is and
help you determine value
you can also use an app called terapeak
terapeak will help you determine value
help you determine sell through and also
help you figure out whether it's worth
it so it's been our intention to sort of
unpack this youtube channel
out of mothballs and start to post
weekly on informational videos such as
this
to help our customers our clients and
our youtube viewers with an educational
approach to the resale business
my wife and i robin have been running
the park hill auction gallery and estate
services for over 25 years if there's
anything at all that we can do to help
you with your family's estate
or even help you with getting your
business off the ground please give us a
call the telephone number is down below
in the comments and you can reach our
website through the url that's listed
below
if you have found value in some of the
things that i've told you please
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