Selling Used Books on Amazon: How to Prepare Your Inventory

You are going to want to keep track of what you paid for your books and encode it into the SKU for each book. We'll go over encoding your SKU's in the Accelerlist article.

Rather than tracking the price of each and every book it is easier to average the cost of a group of books that are in the same lot. After each sourcing trip you can group books together by source and divide the total cost by the total number of books in each category. 

If there are books where you paid significantly more than average of course you can keep those separate but this way of tracking prices saves a lot of time for all the books that you buy between $0-$3 dollars.

You will be restricted from selling certain books and brands on Amazon such as some textbooks, some books from brands like Marvel, D.C. Comics, and American Girl.

The ScoutIQ app sometimes will tell you that you are restricted. This will look like a big red circle with an R in the middle of it where the book cover is usually displayed. You may also get a notification that you are restricted from selling a certain book when you try to list it with Accelerlist.

You can always check if you are restricted on any book by going to the “add a product” button under the inventory tab on the Amazon Seller website and searching the ISBN. While you are out scouting you can click the cover of the book in ScoutIQ to check it on Amazon Seller Central.

If you do end up sending off a book to Amazon’s warehouse that is restricted the book will become stranded and you will have to create a removal order.

You can still make money off of restricted books by selling them through a consignment partner. Reezy Resells offers 51% profit split which is a good option. You may also be able to sell them to buyback companies such as Sell Back Your Books

Make sure you remove all price stickers before listing books. Buyers do not want to receive a book with a $0.99 sticker on it. That is just offensive and they may leave you a bad review for it.

Other stickers may be okay to leave on. Some of it is a judgement call and it depends on how you are going to grade the book. For an acceptable book you can get away with a bit more.

You can use a Scotty peeler and some goo gone with a cloth to remove stickers. Isopropyl alcohol is great for removing permanent marker. You can use a disinfectant wipe or a cloth with a spray bottle to clean books that are dirty, dusty, or grimy.

You should flip through every book to make sure there are no bookmarks or inserts inside and of course to check the quality of the book for grading. You can fix dog ears by unfolding them and stacking a bunch of books on top of the dog eared book to try to correct the shape of the bent corners.

When you are cleaning and grading books and you come across books that are in really poor shape or have certain defects you will have to discard them. This includes workbooks that are already filled out, books with missing pages, books with torn covers where part of the text is torn off, books with heavy highlighting or underlining that renders some of the text unreadable, books with severe water damage, books where the binding is falling apart, and any other condition that would be considered poor condition.

Just remember, all the book’s structures must be intact, its cover, its page, and its spine, and all the text must be readable.

The articles within this blog contain all the information you'll need to start and run a successful book selling business. 

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