A lot of used books from EBay

I alluded to the fact that I had something in the works to jumpstart my Amazon Marketplace used book selling business (to supplement the off-season income that the personalized books are not bringing in) in my last post. Well the something in the works was that I was bidding on a lot of used books that someone was selling on Ebay. The lot was over 2000 books, supposedly from an ex-Amazon book seller that had gone on vacation accidentally leaving her inventory up for sell on Amazon - the books were selling and she wasn't shipping and Amazon froze her account, or so the story went from the guy that was selling them on EBay. I went ahead and bid on the books site unseen and ended up winning the bid for a little over $200. I had been looking for something like this - that is a bunch of books for a low price from a local seller (they were stored in a shed some 40 miles from my home.)

So I rented a Van and picked up over a thousand of the books on the first Monday after winning the bid, and paid off the seller in cash (and recieved no receipt, not so smart I know). And have since picked up another 1000 or so from the shed - all that I deemed worth taking.

My total expenditure was about $350.00 (buying price plus van rental plus gas), and what did I get? Of course I haven't looked at every one of them yet but I can tell you what I've seen so far. The general condition of the books is not that good - most of the ones I've listed, I've had to list as "acceptable" the lowest rating Amazon allows (you are not allowed to list "unacceptable" or "poor" or "piece of trash" books - don't ask me why, I don't know...) And many of them have the back blank page suspiciously ripped out (this would be the page that the library would put its pocket or electronic signal thingy in - I don't want to think too hard on why they would be ripped out). Of the 2000 books I'll probably be able to list about 200-500 of them for an average price of $10.00 or more - so say $2000.00 to $5000.00 worth of books - so a decent profit, though a lot of work in weeding out and discarding the junk.

Would I do it again? Maybe, but probably not site unseen...