Selling on Amazon: Cheapest Priced Items Don't Always Win

I often buy textbooks online because there are more choices and better prices than the campus bookstore. The other major reason is that I take online classes and the campus bookstore would also.

I buy a lot of textbooks from Amazon.com. Recently I started buying from Amazon.com’s Market Place. I also tried selling my books on Amazon’s Market Place. I sold just as I think…I buy the cheapest book possible, so I sell the book as cheap as possible. Using that theory, I sold 7 books in the first 3 days. I have sold textbooks on eBay for years, so I thought I knew how selling textbooks worked.

As sales slowed down, something interesting happened; I was selling books that were not the cheapest listed. I didn’t see a trend, but I saw it happening. Any good analyst would ask why a majority of my books were sent to the surrounding region.

I had an idea of what was happening, so I tested the theory with my next book order. I looked for a used textbook, but this time I looked for the cheapest book that was located near me. My theory was correct. There were several books that were the same low price, or very close in value, and some of these books were located closer to me than others.

The answer is a simple one and it is mailing time vs. expedited shipping costs. Standard shipping for books means USPS Media Mail; it is cheap, slow, and you can ship almost every book for less than the $3.99 the buyer pays Amazon (Expedited Shipping costs $4 more). If the book is only a few hundred miles away, then it will arrive in just a few days—saving you the $4 expedited upgrade cost.

I know I don’t like to wait a week for my order to arrive via USPS Media Mail, so I can upgrade the order for only $4 OR just order a book that is closer for $0.50 more…I will opt for the 50 cents. As a seller, this could be mind boggling, especially if you really need to unload some books for cash. Knowing what I know now, I would need to worry about adjusting my book prices to be the cheapest, because I know that someone will chose me just because I am close to them.