Selling Your Stuff on Amazon Part 11 - Advice for newbies in first two posts

rare_stuff

tsharp wrote: »

I just sold a book on amazon for £1.50, amazon's fees are £1.41, plus 20p for VAT.
!!!!!!? If it wasn't for the postage credit, I'd make a loss!

Have I missed something, they've charged me £1.41 from a £1.50 sale!!!!

80 odd pence of that will be amazons standard fee for non-pro-merchants. about 50p is deducted from the 'postal credit' so in reality the fee for selling the book at £1.50 is only about 10p. I just hope it will go as a large letter or you'll be making a loss!

Those without a pro-merchant account do need to watch their profit margins when selling low value books. I came across a new seller undercutting by £4 on a largish hardback the other day, they obviously hadn't done their sums as the amount they would get from amazon would not even cover the cost of posting it!

tsharp

After Amazon have taken their 95% cut of my £1.50 sale, with the postage fee my cut comes out £2.64, so I should make 60p to £1.50ish profit.

I haven't noticed it being this high before, 95% of the sale cost takes the p!ss.

soolin

Always double check when listing that the sum you receive is sufficient to bother listing the book. The final page you get before you confrm listing shows the total amount receivable after all Amazon fees.

Out of the last 500 books or so I received I have probably listed only 100 as the others would have not been worth listing due to either weight/costs and/or sales ranking. That takes into account the fact that I am a pro merchant so end up with 83p extra a book than a non pro merchant.

tsharp

Yeah, I always check it before I list the item, and adjust the amount if the return looks poor. The postage fee makes it worth listing, in a way Play.com is more straightforward in this respect, altho they charge you for withdrawing your cash!

rare_stuff

It's also worth preparing yourself now for the Royal Mail price increase in April, non-pro listers will be listing stuff now that will close after this price increase so may well be caught out! (If I'm wrong about the length of time non-pro listings last I'm not out by much! )
Prices for RM from 1st April -
Large Letter
101-250gm = 78p First Class (up 8p), 66p Second (up 6p)
251-500gm= £1.08 First(up 10p), 90p second(up 8p)
501-750gm= £1,57 First(up 15p), £1.31 Second(up 11p)
Packet
101-250g = £1.45 first(up 7p), £1,31 second(up 11p)
251-500g = £1.91 first(up 7p), £1.63 second(up 11p)
501-750g= £2.51 first(up 13p), £2.08 second(up 16p)
751-1000g= £3.08 first(up 16p), £2.49 second(up 17p)

These changes are going to hit hard the non-pro sellers who are listing cheap books, so you may see over the next few months a lot less penny listings. Though on the other side - as the prices for RM account holders are changing at a different rate on the whole only by 2 or 3p those with RM accounts will not have to adjust their prices to remain in profit.

And for those who think that amazon may be increasing the postage credit as a result of this latest price rise from RM, don't hold your breath. Amazon have never increased the postal credit, the only change they have made to this was lowering it from by £1 several years ago. They will expect all sellers to adjust their own prices to take into account any rise in costs. With competitors like Play on the market now offering 'free postage', and with competition from ebay where sellers set their own postage amount Amazon would be foolish to make themselves uncompetitive by pushing the buyers prices up.

soolin

The one price hike I was interested in is the one for second class (parcel) post from £1.52 to £1.63. Most modern paperbacks fall into that bracket and they are starting to look uneconomical to post at all unless they are rare.

I've aslready started removing all my last few videos and today I am planning to delist some of my heavy but cheaper books as there is no point in storing something that takes a lot of room if the profit is going to be less than £1.

boston_uk

Here's where my spreadsheet kicks in - can do the postal changes in advance on a copy and see the total profit - and take out those that are no longer economical in one easy process! Well apart from finding them that is ......

wilf55

boston you have obviously copied my filing system then

boston_uk

it used to be like yours Deb, but I spent a happy half a day with the OH putting the fiction into alphabetical order

soolin

Oh the joy of a system that works. I actualy have to close down my Amazon listings when I am away even though my sons are old enough to run it for me and they stay behind. It is mainly because I never intended it to get so big so my first few hundred books have no SKUs and are all over the place, then even some later books that do have SKUs are coplicated as some of my storage broke. So I have early books with a sku like 'bluebox1' that are now nowhere near a blue box, but I have a seperate list saying what the blue box has become..it made my OH cry when he saw the system!