Scanning for Used Books to Sell on Amazon

Once you start scanning you want to scan every single book with a barcode. Top to bottom you want to scan every single item. 

Ninety five percent are going to be duds so you just need to get in there and get through them as fast as possible. You would never be able to guess which books are the valuable ones by looking at their covers. 

Once you’ve done this business for a while you will have a better intuition about which might be valuable but you still only want to use that intuition if you only have ten minutes left in the store and you can’t come back the next day. The only books that you won’t want to waste your time with are mass market paperbacks. Nonfiction books do have better accept rates than fiction books but there are plenty of gems in fiction too.

It’s up to you if you want to look at the screen while you scan or rely solely on the audio cues for rejects. There are two schools of thought on that. If you choose to look at the screen you may be able to pick up a few extra books that you determine are good that weren’t picked up by the triggers. Maybe the price was just one cent lower than the trigger settings but you still want to grab it. However this may add several seconds to each reject and could double the time you spent in the store. It's your call, if you don’t have a lot of places to source at then you may want to take the extra time.

Whether you choose to look at rejects or not you definitely need to at least glance at accepts. You need to press the live button on the ScoutIQ app and check that the cover matches. If the book has a high eScore there are rarely any errors with the highlighted price that the app is basing its analysis off and you can usually just chuck it in the cart.

For books with a low eScore you want to check the Keepa chart to make sure that the highlighted price is supported with historical sales. The more you practice the better you will get at quickly reading the ScoutIQ data and the less buying mistakes you will make.

Using a scanning software such as ScoutIQ is absolutely vital in this business. 

ScoutIQ is an app that was developed by another book reseller to quickly analyze the value and profitability of a book. The app calculates the Amazon fees for each book, adds the shipping cost of the book and with current prices and sales history of the book gives an almost instant audio and visual cue to tell you whether or not to buy it. 

It also displays the relevant information, such as sales rank, escore, and current offers on the screen for further analysis as needed.

Paired with a Bluetooth scanner this app allows you to scan through books extremely quickly which is so important in this business since the vast majority of used books are not profitable for resale through Amazon FBA. 

This is the only way to get through the 95% or so of books that are duds fast enough to make this business profitable.

See this article to learn how to use the ScoutIQ app.

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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