Selling your stuff on Amazon - Part 6- Advice for newbies in first post

funkyfunkymonkey

katchambers wrote:

Cazmeg - just had a look on amazon's help pages and can't find anything about them changing their prices, but I assume they probably will, if it costs them more to send books, on average, then their postage rates should go up and therefore the marketplace rates would also go up - although that is a total guess.

The general feel on the Amazon Discussion Boards is that the postage charge will not change.

I'm quite pleased that it won't change because the P&P does tend to cover the majority of books - I tend to avoid the very heavy books unless they are worth quite bit. At least you can build the cost of P&P (for heavy books) into the price of the book with Amazon (by increasing the cost of the book) - on the otherhand it's not really possible to reduce it - I don't like the offers of sending a 2nd class stamp etc.

The P&P @ £2.75 also makes Ebay cheaper for alot of books and I'm sure buyers sometimes go there in preference as the cheapest book on Amazon is £2.76 (inc P&P) whereas on Ebay you can sometimes pick them up for about £1.50 (inc P&P). How sellers make their money on Ebay for 'run of the mill books' I just don't know.

FFM

funkyfunkymonkey

katchambers wrote:

I have a question...I know that some of the people on this board sell on amazon and perhaps ebay as a a self-employed hobby/job and therefore are liable for tax, I wondered what you all do about the receipt problem in regards to boot sales.

I keep a small hardback notebook and enter the date, location and amount of money I have spent. I read it somewhere on the Amazon Discussion Boards that this is acceptable to the tax man as 'evidence' of your expenditure.

In this book I keep a chronological record of all my incomings and outgoings which really helps when I have to work out my end of year tax. So, other items include stamps, Viking stationery (labels & envelopes), parking, charity shops, Tesco A4 paper (dead cheap £1.94 per ream), pro seller fees, Ebay purchases, etc.

I keep as many receipts as I am given and feel confident that the tax man would be happy with my record keeping if he was to decide to 'audit' my accounts.

As an example, last week I spent £17.10 at a boot fair and listed 68 books on the same day, so at an average of 25p per book I don't think the tax man would have any problems accepting my records.

I'd be interested in anyone else's approach to lack of receipts.

FFM

katchambers

Thank you FFM, that is what I was thinking of doing.

Kat x

jo_b_2

As requested by a number of Amazon regulars, I've closed the 'chat' thread and this thread has now reverted back to its original function as a general Amazon advice and sellers support group thread!

Apprentice Tycoon has done a great job of detailing most FAQs in the first two posts so hopefully this thread should still be able to meet the two functions of being useful to beginners as well as a friendly mutual chat thread for old(er) hands.

katchambers

Thanks so much Jo_b ---yippeee the old thread is back----

I would also like to say to any newbie amazonians, (and maybe apprentice might want to put this on the first thread) please don't be put off by the length of this thread, don't think that we all have our own little world and that we will laugh at your questions or will be unfriendly, because we are not. We very much welcome all your questions and are happy to help and welcome you into our fold. So come along newbies, grab a number, join the club and next year we will all be millionnaires :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl: - well you never know!

I wanted to say that because someone on the other thread that was new (sorry can't remember the name) said that he/she would not have tried the thread if it was big because they would have been too intimidated. I hope that will not happen because we are a very friendly bunch.

apprentice_tycoon

It was Wanty that was a little overawed by our long thread. I'll add a note to the start of the thread a little later

katchambers

Well I hope he/she still comes back to this one, I felt a bit guilty because they wanted the threads to stay as 2 threads not 1 big one but everyone else (including me) wanted them to go back to one. I was thinking that if we added a message similar to what I wrote on the first page that encourages new amazonians to give us their questions, concerns and also share their good news then maybe Wanty and others that we don't know about will give us a try! I hate to think that new people are intimidated by us.

Kat x

princessmoneysaver

Still only 6 sales in 3 weeks but I'm not complaing too much as it means I don't have to go to PO as regular.
On ebay I say I post within 3 working days which means I can go 2/3 times a week & still be within that time frame, Amazon sales I post next day at the latest & it's getting a bit too much for me to go to PO every day with my baby due in 3 weeks.
As I have been getting emails from Amazon to say the 60 days are up I haven't been relisting them yet but still have over 100 listed on there.

Christina_F

I go on holiday on Wednesday - when should I put a hold on my Amazon sales and how do I do it?

apprentice_tycoon

Hi Christina - it can take up to 36 hours to activate your holiday settings, but is often less. You can find the button for this on the sellers account page, it's called 'update your vacation settings'

I'll put this in the first post because we might have a few people want to know this soon.