How to remove all stickers from books and give the jacket cover a beautiful "new" look

July 9th, 2020

How to safely and effectively remove all stickers:

1. Get the following sticker remover on Amazon: Motsenbocker’s Lift Off Tape, Label, and Adhesive Remover #2, 22oz, Spray Bottle, 40701 ($14.99 including shipping)
2. Slightly dampen a regular paper towel with a couple of spritzers of the above Adhesive Remover. The paper towel should be slightly damp, not wet.
3. Put the book on a table and the slightly damp paper towel on top of the sticker(s) you want to remove
4. Use a regular hot iron (for ironing shirts) on the LOWEST temperature
5. Put the iron on top of the flat paper towel covering the sticker
6. wait between 15 and 30 seconds depending on the quality of the label glue (U.S. labels come off fastest, Japanese books might have labels that need 45 seconds)
7. remove iron and paper towel and use a regular plastic scraper from Uline to gently peel off the sticker
8. Wipe the whole jacket cover with the slightly damp paper towel to remove residual glue and to give the whole jacket cover a shiny new look

In general it's a good idea to give all books you sell -no matter whether they are from us or not- a quick wipe with a slightly damp papertowel wetted with  Motsenbocker’s Lift Off Tape, Label, and Adhesive Remover as long as the jacket cover. It makes the colors pop, removes even fine particles of dust, and gives the customer the feeling of receiving a beautiful clean book!
It's also a good idea to keep a small handheld vacuum cleaner on your shipping station to remove fine dust from the spine which might have collected there during storage. 

How quickly do our lots sell?

June 1st, 2020

We inform our regular buyers of upcoming lots in their area of interest by email before we advertise and market the lots through other channels. 

How can it be that a lot has already sold when you just got our email announcing it?
​
Certain buyers know that our lots move fast and/or they have been waiting for us to list a lot in their category of choice. These regular buyers are usually professionals who check their email frequently during working hours. Once they receive our email -which goes out to all regular buyers at the same time- they just check out the pictures and description and then ask us for the invoice. 
Since we usually have all their information such as receiving address and type of receiving location (commercial or residential, truck height loading dock or curbside delivery) on file this might happen pretty quickly. Once they have received the invoice, it's only a couple of clicks to initiated an electronic transfer or to pay by credit card. 

If we have two or more buyers interested in the same lot at the same time we will first go with the buyer who buys more than one lot and then with the buyer who has a truck height loading dock (because it saves us ~ $200 in shipping). 
Having said all that it's generally a good idea to email us with things you are looking for and also the date when you would ideally buy a certain lot. Sometimes we can put the word out that we are looking for certain items or we might have been aggregating a lot in the specific category without listing it yet.

As always it helps if we know as much as possible about your business, your product mix, and your location. 

The best way to let us know about your business is by using this contact form.

The case for Amazon FBM instead of Amazon FBA

May 14th, 2020:
​
​The only people left hyping about Amazon FBA are the scan artists who are pitching "get-rich-quick" courses to newbies on YouTube.
Here are our top ten reasons to go FBM (Fulfilled by Merchant) instead of or in addition to FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon):

1. The complete dependence of FBA sellers on Amazon's policy changes killed the business of many FBA sellers during the Covid-19 lock down, a period that turned out to be the strongest selling period in decades for e-commerce. In the second half of March, Amazon blocked the replenishment of inventory deemed "non-essential" and gave customers shipping estimates of up to 30 days for non-essential items. FBM sellers had no problems restocking their inventory or shipping on time. Despite an Amazon announcement lifting some of these restrictions for FBA sellers on April 5th, things haven't been back to normal for many FBA sellers at the time of this writing in mid-May. Bottom line: it pays to keep control over your warehousing, inventory management, and shipping!
2. FBA sellers have a much higher break even point for their products because the exorbitant fees and inbound shipping costs imposed by Amazon. This means that FBA sellers have to scan large amounts of inventory to find a few items that make sense for FBA, while FBM sellers can monetize all parts of available inventory. 
3. Since the introduction of Amazon FBA in 2006, Amazon has continuously raised the fees for FBA. The fee increases announced for Spring 2020 accelerate this yearly trend further. If you sign up for FBA today and base your business plan on the current fee structure, your calculations will be outdated within 6-9 months. 
4. The competition for sourcing FBA product is constantly increasing because of hundreds of YouTube videos luring inexperienced folks to try their luck at FBA (after buying a "training course," of cause). This leads to a constant stream of people who believe it just takes a scanner, a scouting software, and a sales rank below 1,000,000 to make a killing on Amazon.
5. Most people don't understand "sales rank:" Sales rank is a retroactive measure, i.e. it shows you how an item has sold in the recent past. Especially with back catalog items, a relative small number of purchases can completely distort the sales rank. Sales rank is relative to other items in the same category, i.e. it also depends on the total number of items in one category (which by definition is increasing every year). Sales rank matters less if the online seller has only one item per title than several dozen or hundreds of copies of the same title. An item with a sales rank > 2,000,000 and 50 copies is a bad purchase that will just take up storage capacity for years. But one copy of the same item at a decent price will always sell, no matter whether that will happen in a month, six months, or a year. That means that the successful FBM seller needs a lot of cheap storage space and a storage system that allows for maximum space utilization. 
6. The shipping discounts available to FBA products benefit only Amazon because the company can use the additional inbound- and outbound shipping volume to get better volume discounts with carriers. The FBA seller gives up the possibility on negotiating his or her own favorable shipping rates with expediters such as Asendia, Globegistics, UPS Mail Innovations, and DHL (to name just a few). Professional FBM sellers with a certain shipping volume make an additional dollar on shipping (much more in the case of international orders) which allows them to list their products at a lower price point. Once a seller has reached an inventory threshold of ~20,000 listings, it is usually much cheaper to do one's own warehousing and shipping as a FBM seller instead of paying Amazon's exorbitant FBA fees. 
7. FBM shipping allows to brand an e-commerce business through packaging material with the company's logo, postcards asking for feedback, or coupons for future purchases. 
8. Experience has shown that the amount of inventory that is destroyed or misplaced in Amazon's FBA warehouses is higher by multiples compared to what happens in the warehouses of FBM sellers. Yet Amazon reimburses FBA sellers only a fraction of the value of the destroyed inventory. 
9. The "anti-Amazon Alliance" is gathering momentum: politicians are considering a break-up of Amazon for antitrust reasons. Google has just announced that sellers don't have to be advertisers in order to list their products on Google Shopping. FBA sellers give up control over their inventory and they limit themselves to selling on Amazon. FBM sellers preserve their flexibility to list their inventory simultaneously on Ebay, Google Shopping, Discogs, Etsy, and other sites and to monetize extremely low priced inventory by selling it through other venues such as Dollar Stores, flea markets, collectors fairs, pawn shops, and warehouse sales. 
10. Once inventory is inside a FBA warehouse it is prohibitively expensive to ship it back to the seller and switch back to FBM. Let's just repeat that: once you have gone FBA with your inventory, it is impossible to switch back to FBM. 

Bottom line:
if you want to grow your Amazon business, the most important decision is between FBA and FBM.  

How will "living with Covid-19" affect online resellers in the media category?

May 12th, 2020

1. A gradual reopening in different geographic areas according to different phases won't mean a return to normal. Even if manufacturing, landscaping, construction, and other lower risk industries will reopen, social distancing will stay with us for at least 1-2 years. "Reopening" doesn't mean a "return to normal," but the adjustment to the new reality of "living with Covid-19." 
2. It doesn't make sense to think about "the economy" when calculating the economic impact of the new living with Covid-19 environment. Airlines, hospitality, tourism, movie theatres, restaurants, nightclubs, Broadway shows, sports- and concert events will be affected in different ways than industries that are suited for work-from-home and videoconferencing such as accounting, publishing, wealth management, etc.
   
3. If one thinks about the impact of Covid-19, one should think about it in an industry specific way instead of looking at the economy as a whole. ​

What's the impact on online sellers in the media category?

​Live entertainment is one of the industries hit hardest by Covid-19:

1. No more Broadway shows and therefore no new Broadway productions for the time being.
2. Closed movie theaters have led to a halt of new movie production.
3. No more in-store author events and readings even if bookstores will reopen to the public.
4. No live concerts, festivals, and band appearances in clubs and bars.

Because people will spend less or little time at social events, with friends, at entertainment venues or traveling they will have money left over that they would usually spend on concert- or theater tickets while they will have a greater need for entertainment at home. The supply of live entertainment has imploded while the demand for high quality entertainment at home has dramatically increased.
Consumers worried about infection risks might never return to their old shopping habits.  
Through the closing of malls and retail outlets the consumer has been forced to shop online which has accelerated the growth of e-commerce. The last two months have been habit forming: if you need or want something, searching online is your only option. 

What's the impact of Covid-19 on different media categories?

• CDs: As the Wall Street Journal reported on April 27th, 2020:
  • New releases by major pop artists are drawing fewer listeners than normal.
  • Without live concerts and talk shows, music labels' promotional machines are les powerful.
  • Listeners are returning to their "old favorites," e.g. back catalog music such as Bob Marley, Dixie Chicks, the Stones, etc. 
  • Back catalog music (defined as titles more than 18 months old) has been on the rise and hit a new high for the year at 63% of all audio streams
  • Many of these listeners will opt for the higher sound quality of CDs compared to seriously compressed streaming files, especially when it comes to "old favorites." 
  • Covid-19 has led to a shift to "comfort music," children's titles, and classical music. 
• Books: As has been proven in every recession and every snow storm: books offer the best "bang for the buck" in forms of entertainment. A $20 book might entertain a reader for a whole week. Now is the time to read the back catalog-book that you always wanted to read, but never found the time for. Public libraries, bookstores, and used bookstores are used. The only available shopping channel is e-commerce.  
• DVDs: Movie theaters are closed and/or consumers will be reluctant to visit movie theaters after they reopen. Movie premieres have been cancelled and the production of new movies has been postponed. At the same time, parents are stuck with their kids at home, and consumers want to recreate a high quality cinematic experience at home. Many of them will buy DVDs online. DVDs are reliable, high quality, and the consumer actually owns the product instead of licensing it from a streaming service.
• Collectibles: All kind of collectors -from classical music to historical magazines- have a lot more time on their hands thanks to Covid-19. This leaves more time for browsing and research which leads to an increase in purchases. 

How has Covid-19 affected the sourcing of inventory?

1. Public libraries and Goodwill/Salvation Army stores are closed. That means: no book donations to public libraries, no public library sales, and no scouting at charity stores.
2. People are afraid to let anybody come into their house, i.e. that acquisition channel has largely dried up.
3. The real estate market has died - and with it estate sales and auctions. 

Bottom line:

1. The demand for high quality entertainment has dramatically increased as a result of Covid-19. 
2. Sales of back catalog CDs, books, DVDs and all "old favorites" have skyrocketed.
3. The supply of inventory has dried up. Several traditional channels for the acquisition of inventory are currently unavailable. 

Online sellers in the media category have been provided with a profound opportunity to increase their sales - and the challenge to quickly source new inventory and replenish their listings. 

What’s the best way to wring the most money out of large DVD lots?​

​May 5th, 2020
​
​Anybody can make money by selling one rare Criterion boxset on Ebay, but it takes a smart business person to sell both on Ebay and Amazon, to find the best packaging and the cheapest shipping rates, and to squeeze the most out of this lot, including the lower priced stuff.

About lower priced items - the stuff we all hate:

• Some of our customers bundle the different individual movies of a series like The Matrix, Xmen, Barbie, Toy Story, etc. into a complete set of the movie which they then list on Ebay. This saves the customer a lot of money in shipping costs and allows the seller to make $3-$5 per item plus $1 on shipping for a previously low priced product. Especially parents love bundled sets because it saves them the $3.99 in shipping for each item in the set. 
• You can even buy some new DVD replacement cases and DVD shrink bags from Uline and shrink wrap these bundled sets for a nicer feel and better customer feedback. You might even get these supplies a bit cheaper if you do a Google search and source them from another, smaller vendor. All it takes is a regular blow dryer and some scissors to cut off the excess material. 
• Other customers sell everything above their break even point on Amazon and Ebay and take the lower priced items to a flea market or pawn shop where they sell a couple of hundred of them for $2 each. Not bad for a Saturday or Sunday ;)
• Never through anything away because of a low price: as soon as one of the big names will pass away, the movie will sell out in a couple of hours both on Ebay and Amazon. The same was true for all CDs by Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, and even George Michael: as soon as the news broke that they had passed away, former penny items shot up to $9 per item. 

​How should you position your Amazon- or Ebay business during the Coronavirus shutdown?

April 15th, 2020
​

1. If bookshops and libraries close, even more consumers will buy their books online .
2. The Coronavirus shutdown is like one long snowstorm: every online seller knows that sales spike when people are caught inside. This leaves a lot of time for searching and browsing, especially for collectors. 
3. Since Amazon has curtailed inbound FBA-shipments of non-medical and non-high demand items, third party sellers with FBM-abilities (Fulfillment by Merchant) will have a competitive advantage. Third party sellers who can store and ship inventory themselves have been unaffected by these limits and continuous. 
4. Third party sellers with FBM capabilities can carry high priced, slow moving long tail items like scholarly books or art books because they don’t pay additional FBA fees for storage. An art book for $60 produces a great profit if it doesn’t matter whether the books sells after 3, 12 or 18 months.
5. Third party sellers with FBM capabilities have a higher profit margin per item and a lower break even point. This enables FBM sellers to monetize inventory better while FBA sellers can only monetize items above their break even point (which usually ranges between $10 and $15 per item). As a FBM seller you can make money on almost every item you buy. As a FBA seller, you have to throw away most of what you buy. 
6. FBM sellers can take advantage of shipping discounts and scale their business as soon as they have achieved a certain size (usually 20,000 items listed on Amazon). Once these economies of scale for shipping rates, envelopes, shipping supplies, etc. kick in, FBM sellers are more competitive with megasellers and non-profits.
7. FBM sellers can increase revenues by simultaneously offering their inventory on ecommerce platforms other than Amazon, for example Etsy or Ebay for collectibles, Discogs for CDs and vinyl records, Ebay and Half.com for books and DVDs, etc.