Last week, I gave you some tips for maximizing your profit at the Amazon Marketplace. Then, I showed an odd case where used DVDs are selling for more than new ones.

This week, I just have some random thoughts. Sorry it’s not sexier, but I am including hard numbers on this. I hope that will help.
Most of the items I’ve sold have gone on a weekend. Sunday night seems particularly busy. During the week, the orders I get tend to be at night, also. Whereas lots of people seem to shop and buy things during the work day, the Amazon Marketplace seems to work on a complementary schedule. I hear eBay is similar to this schedule — you want your auction to end on a Sunday night.

Shipping a DVD is easy; shipping a comic book is a pain. It’s almost not worth the trouble. You have to be so careful with comics for fear of losing that near mint status and outraging the buyer on the other end, that the shipping costs skyrocket. I’d stick to hardcovers, just for their durability, but I don’t have many of those to sell and they have big weight issues. I sold a trade paperback last week. It was a lightweight thing — 144 pages or so. I stuffed it in a plastic bag, sandwiched it inbetween two pieces of corrugated cardboard, and taped the whole thing together to keep it from knocking around and potentially damaging the edges of the book. Amazon takes a $3.99 shipping fee for these books. It cost me $4.50 to ship it media mail. Live and learn. Maybe it IS time for eBay, where I’ve noticed most people pay the extra for Priority Mail, which the USPS gives envelopes away free for.

It’s particularly annoying when a book isn’t listed on Amazon. In those cases, go to eBay. I’ll be looking into that option again soon. Some of the stuff I might consider listing, though, hasn’t been sold on eBay in a while. There are no “finished auctions” to check prices on. That makes me nervous.

Expect to lose at least 20% to Amazon. I just looked at my pending statement, for items sold in the last two weeks. It’s been a very profitable time, particularly with higher cost DVDs. Amazon took just over 20% of the total dollar figure in fees, and then I have to pay shipping afterwards. Out of the $222 worth of stuff sold, Amazon took $46.71 in fees. Those nine items probably cost me about $20 in shipping fees at the post office. So I sold $222 (granted, about $27-$30 of that was shipping fees Amazon charged the buyer), and I’m netting about $156.

It’s all a numbers game, and I can probably massage these in other ways to make it sound great. For example, if I didn’t have the ease and convenience of Amazon, I wouldn’t have sold any of them and I’d have made $0 while boxes lay around in storage and in the backs of closets, taking up valuable space.
Everything is a tradeoff. The convenience of having Amazon handle all the money for you and of receiving that money as store credit, in effect, is a wonderful thing. eBay might take less fees, but then you’ll have to deal with PayPal.com fees, instead, which are awful. And you’ll have to deal with tracking down buyers. And you’re paying to list an item that might never be sold. These are all things that add up. I have about 40 items in the Amazon Marketplace right now, and I’m fairly certain that half of those will likely never sell. (I’m a realist.) Those fees would have added up something ugly.

You can transfer your owed payments at any time. Amazon disburses your moneys to you every two weeks. At least with when you’re using the Amazon Gift Certificate option, you can opt to have the moneys transferred immediately without an additional fee. It takes the usual couple of days for the transaction to complete, but it’s better than waiting out the arbitrary two week period if you need it now.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 7:00 pm and is filed under DVD, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.