Finding, prepping, pricing, and finally selling a used book on Amazon can be a very rewarding experience. Books are notoriously undervalued and someone with the right amount of drive will find hidden gems just about anywhere they look.

Even though book hunting can be fun, the fact is you’re still trading your time for money, and the value of your haul can swing wildly day by day. This fact has led me to ask the following question...

After a lot of thought and some trial and error, I’ve discovered that there is a way to do that and have found that it can be just as rewarding as the day to day hunt for new gems.

I guess this strategy can be categorized as online arbitrage and in the following paragraphs I’m going to teach you how I do it and how you can do it too!

The first step in this process is to create what’s called a book buy list. A book buy list is simply an excel spreadsheet that’s used to keep track of the books and book sets that you want to purchase and to keep track of orders that you’ve placed across different online marketplaces. I would also recommend that you create another page on the spreadsheet for tracking your active online arbitrage listings and what they’ve sold for.

Your book buy list will become a valuable asset as it will record all the valuable gems you’ve come across on your book buying journey and will keep vital records about what those books and book sets actually sell for, which will tell you if they’re worth buying again.

The best way to find new items to add to your buy list is to closely monitor the items you've sold. The reason I recommend doing this is because it let's you know what the item has sold for and you can use that information to determine what you can pay for that item in the future.

Please see the short video below for a demonstration on how to monitor your sold inventory from the Amazon Seller app;

Do this often and you will find valuable books and book sets for online arbitrage. 

1. Open the Amazon Seller app. 

2. Navigate to manage orders. 

3. Scroll though the days sales to find potential items for online arbitrage.

If you’re new and aren’t selling many items, then you can use Keepa and current market rates to validate valuable items you find during your day to day hunts. This way will not be as reliable as using your sold listings, so please be diligent when doing your research on the item.

When using this strategy I typically shoot for a 50% ROI on my investment. If I spend $50 on an item then I want to get a minimum of $75 back, after fees.

Please see the video below as I take you through how to find out the fees you should expect to pay on your sold item. I will show you how to do it on Seller Central as this will be the most accurate;

This will be the most accurate way to determine the amount of fees you’ll pay on a sold item;

1. Copy the ASIN from the item you sold. If you use the same SKU setup as we do then the ASIN will be in your SKU

2. Navigate to seller central. In the video I do this by opening ScoutIQ and then pressing the blank image in the bottom left corner. 

3. Navigate to manage inventory from within seller central.

4. Search the ASIN.

5. Look for the estimated fees column. 

If you have not sold the listing, then you can just use the estimates from ScoutIQ.

Once you find a book or book set that you would like to continue selling on Amazon FBA and have added it to your buy list, the next step is to visit other online marketplaces like Ebay and Mercari. 

Now it’s time to search for that item, buy the ones that are underpriced, and set up search alerts so you can be notified every time a new offer has been listed. Below is a list of marketplaces that I use.

Ebay is one of the largest online marketplaces in the world and there are undervalued items listed all day everyday. Simply do a search for the title or ISBN of the item you’re looking for and sort by lowest to highest. Once you have gone through all the current listings in your price range, be sure to save the search so you’ll be notified by email everytime a new item is listed. Be sure to ALWAYS make offers on listings that allow it, this will substantially cut your sourcing costs.

Ebay will only send you search alerts once a day and so I recommend using this free tool to get notified the instant your item has been listed. This free tool even allows you to set a price range for the item you’re looking for, which will save you time. 

Ebay is one of the best online marketplaces to find deals! 

1. Copy the book or book set title from your Amazon seller app. 

2. Open the EBay app and paste the title into the search bar. You can also paste the ISBN. 

 3. Sort by lowest to highest. 

4. Evaluate current offers. 

5. Save the search so that you can get alerts.

Mercari is a great place to find deals. They allow you to save searches and will usually send you a notification every time a new offer has been listed.

Mercari is a great place to find deals and have them delivered to your door. 

1. Copy the title of the book or book set from your Amazon Seller App. 

2. Paste the title into the search bar. 

3. Evaluate current listings. 

4. Activate the search alert.

Offerup is just like Mercari and I highly recommend setting up search alerts on this platform too.

Offerup is a great app for finding deals! 

 1. Copy the book or book set title from your Amazon seller app. 

2. Open the Offerup app and paste the title into the search bar. 

3. Evaluate the current offers. 

4. Setup a search alert so you can be notified about new offers.

Keepa allows you to create search alerts for items listed on Amazon. This is a great way to quickly snap up underpriced items that have been listed on Amazon, usually by merchant fulfilled sellers.

Keepa search alerts is a great way to find underpriced listings on Amazon. 

1. Open your Amazon seller central app and copy the ASIN from the sold listing. 

2. Open ScoutIQ and past the ASIN into the search bar. 

3. Press the link button above the image in the bottom left corner and navigate to Keepa. 

4. Navigate to track product within the Keepa page. 

5. Specify the price you’re willing to pay and set the tracking. 

You will now receive alerts via email every time a new offer is listed that is in your price range.

Facebook marketplace is developing into a very powerful platform. It offers search alerts and allows sellers to offer shipping on orders. Shipping is not yet available to all sellers and Facebook will not allow you to search more than a 500 mile radius of where you live, so you may want to use this free tool to search the entire country for your item and tell the seller that you are willing to cover the shipping on your order.

I use this strategy a lot and it’s been very profitable for me. I usually buy the media mail shipping labels from Paypal but you can also use a free service called shipping easy for heavily discounted shipping rates. You then email the shipping label to the seller and have them ship you the item.

I usually send payment through Paypal as they offer insurance on your purchase, but I’ve never had to use it.

Although you cannot set up search alerts on bookfinder.com, this is a very good way to search across all the major book selling platforms for the item you’re looking for.

As you can probably imagine, this strategy is much more capital intensive than going out to your local thrift store or yard sale. Your average buy cost on an item is going to be much more than the typical $1 spent at your usual sourcing spots, but the returns are great and it’s a clever way to invest the profits from your book selling efforts.

Now all you have to do is keep adding to your buy list, add search alerts on the relevant platforms, and buy those deals!