Amazon is a great platform to sell a variety of products. Your customer base is wide enough to cover any items you might be selling. Even as an author, reader, or book fanatic, you could use Amazon to sell and buy books.
Amazon FBA also covers booksellers thereby making your work much easier. This article will run you through how to sell books on Amazon and other issues surrounding the sale of books on Amazon.
HOW DO I SELL BOOKS ON AMAZON?
The first thing you must do once you decide to become a bookseller on Amazon is to find the books you wish to sell on Amazon. Do you want to sell used books or old books? Is it books by a specific author or books generally? Entertainment or educational? Once your stock is selected, you can go ahead and follow the following steps:
- REGISTER YOUR ACCOUNT
You can either open an individual seller account or a professional seller account. However, the professional seller account attracts a monthly fee of $39.99. The professional seller account is beneficial as it does not attract any other fees when you sell a book. If you would like to qualify for top placement on product detail pages, it is highly recommended that you use a professional seller account.
The individual seller account is free but attracts a fee of $0.99 whenever you sell a book. This account is highly recommended if you are selling less than 40 units a month or you are still deciding what to sell. It is also recommended for sellers that do not wish to use any additional selling tools or advertisement.
- CREATE YOUR BOOK LISTING
To create a book listing, you must log in to your Amazon Seller Central account. Once open, open your catalogue and select ‘add product.’ With books, you will have to insert the book’s ISBN into the search field.
If your book has already been listed on Amazon, which is likely to be the case, select the condition you are selling it, that is, whether it is a collectible, new, or used book. You can then enter your price and how many copies you are selling.
An important part that also comes in is you choosing your fulfilment method, this means choosing whether you will store your inventory yourself and handle your own shipment or use the Amazon FBA service. We will dive into Amazon FBA soon.
Once your fulfilment is selected, then you can select ‘save and finish’ and your listing would have been created.
- MONITOR YOUR SALES
When your listings have been created, it is important for you to monitor which of your books are selling better than the others. This helps you to make necessary adjustments to your listings, such as reducing the price for the books that are not selling as this will help you attract buyers. However, this does not mean you must price your books too low such that you do not make any profits off them.
HOW CAN I USE AMAZON FBA TO FULFILL MY ORDERS?
Choosing a fulfilment method is an essential part of deciding to use Amazon. This is because you must be decided on how you will manage your orders and deliveries. Amazon provides a fulfilment service that could store your inventory and ship your books on your behalf. All you have to do is ship your books to Amazon and everything will be taken care of on your behalf.
Here is how it works:
- CREATE YOUR SHIPMENT
In order to create your shipment, you must log into your Amazon Seller Control account and click ‘inventory.’ Once you open the inventory, select ‘manage inventory’ and open the drop-down menu so as to enable you to select the ‘send/replenish inventory’ option.
You can then select ‘ship from address’ to allow Amazon to know where to get the inventory from.
At this point, you can either choose ‘individual products’ or ‘case-packed products’ depending on whether you are sending different books with different ISBNs or you are sending multiple versions of the same book, respectively.
- LABEL YOUR PACKAGING
Since your books already have a manufacturing barcode, there is no reason to add other labels other than shipping labels on the boxes to be shipped. Therefore, once you are given the option to label, simply click ‘continue’.
Please note that your shipping labels will simply contain information of what is inside the boxes and their destination in order to prevent your packages from being taken to the wrong warehouse.
- CALCULATE YOUR COSTS
It is important for you to calculate your costs beforehand. This helps you select services that are within your means. For instance, you will have to pick a shipping service. For instance, Amazon’s partnered courier is UPS, however, you are at liberty to choose another shipping service that suits your pockets better.
Once you pick the shipping service, enter the weight and dimensions of your packages then click ‘calculate’.
- ARRANGE FOR DELIVERY
This is by either dropping your boxes with your courier or arranging for your courier to pick the boxes from your specified location.
It takes about 1-2 weeks for your boxes to reach the Amazon warehouse. Within three days after delivery to the warehouse, your books will be entered into their inventory.
You will then be notified when your books are ready to be sold.
CONCLUSION
Amazon provides extensive services that you can use regardless of the product you are selling. As a bookseller, you could simply prepare the books you wish to sell and let Amazon take care of storage and shipment of your stock through Amazon FBA. This makes it easier to conduct business especially considering the delicate nature of books. Regardless of whether they are new books or used books, consider signing up with Amazon FBA and conduct your bookselling business with a peace of mind as it offers great services at pretty reasonable prices.
All the best!