Selling books - seeking tips on workflow
Inspired partly by another post but mainly because as i’ve started to scale my business i’ve realised that i haven’t really stopped to look at how i manage the process of sorting & listing books and i think it’s probably a bit clunky.
For context i am currently solely FBA on Amazon so any titles that weren’t suitable for FBA i would largely donate to charity or recycle depending on condition since i didn’t have room to store them. I now have plenty of room so will be using ebay for those that aren’t “FBA worthy”. I’ve considered FBM but have decided i’d rather stick with FBA for Amazon.
I took delivery of 500 books on Monday and the workflow was basically to scan every book to find those that were suitable for FBA (scanned with software that a lot of booksellers seem to dislike). From that i ended up with 3 piles: suitable for FBA, not suitable for FBA and then a “no idea yet” pile, which is anything without a barcode, a barcode that won’t scan or maybe books that are in the wrong category on Amazon etc. All in all that was around 4 hours.
Today i started on the FBA pile and in around 2 hours i listed 40 books, which includes scanning and finding the correct listing, grading, writing any description, setting a price and adding them to a shipment. So about 3 minutes per book and not using a bulk upload tool.
So with a similar amount of time spent tomorrow i’ll basically have listed and have ready to be shipped to Amazon around 80 books which are basically the “quick wins” - which leaves 420 still to be assessed as either being listed on Amazon or ebay.
I’d be interested to know how much quicker using an upload tool might be per book and whether there are any pitfalls to listing that way that should be looked out for,
More generally, if you already either sell in bulk or took delivery of 500 books tomorrow, what would your process be for getting them in front of potential buyers in an efficient way?
11 replies
Seller_QVpjrN1BsybDT
I wish I could do 40 in 2 hours.!! I could do about a quarter of that at most.
At the risk of sounding really silly what are you scanning for?
What about photos?
Seller_VoqEfZDxAYsk5
When I used to do FBA we could scan, grade, list WITH a description, not a generic one and make a box ready to ship to Amazon in about 30 mins using an upload tool. If you actually want to scale you can’t be listing 40 books in two hours, it’s way too slow.
Edit, that box would usually have between 35 and 40 books.
Seller_VoqEfZDxAYsk5
You must have missed the part where I answered your question. 
Seller_P9WE9DmQhKbaT
It’s pretty hard to compare efficiency access sellers and models. I buy my books one at time rather than in bulk, so I don’t have the presorting processes that you do
I’m FBM only, although I did do FBA for a short time, but for various reasons it didn’t seem right for me. I would find listing directly on to Amazon way too slow and use AMan Pro from space ware (and of course a barcode scanner)
This is quite unsophisticated particularly in terms of repricing to the programmers that the megas use, but works for me as an excellent inventory and listing tool . All my books are individually described and graded but work off a lot of preset descriptions with individual tweaks. (the program allows for quite a lot of these tweaks to be available in presets as well) In terms of the listing process only (that is sitting at the PC) I can get through about 80 books per hour which is slow compared to the real bulk sellers but as above all books are individually described.
I find listing onto to ebay much slower than Amazon so in your situation would supplement FBA with FBM
