Book sellers

Daz2009

There's various  hardback books on sale for just over £2 with free postage .
The sellers are businesses.
How do they make any profit ?
Packing and postage costs more than that surely .

RFW

Daz2009 said:

There's various  hardback books on sale for just over £2 with free postage .
The sellers are businesses.
How do they make any profit ?
Packing and postage costs more than that surely .

You can have an account with Royal Mail where you pay an average post price. So they could be paying 80p/£1 postage depending what else they're sending. Still fairly tight on any profit but if it goes in to a larger pot and just part of their turnover then they may be doing ok.

It depends on the items too. Some sellers list an item they have a lot of at a loss so they get traction and start selling at a higher price. So if they have 5000 of a book that will sell well at Christmas they can list for £2 push it up the rankings and sell for £10 going in to Christmas. I doubt that is happening but without seeing the item(s) it's hard to give a better guess.

Spoonie_Turtle

^ the usual big book selling businesses, I assume they make their money on the less common books, particularly in more specialist categories and titles out of print.  E.g. I bought a couple that were ~£5-£6 each - bargain for me and several £ profit for them.  Multiply that by whatever order of magnitude, maybe hundreds of thousands on top of the millions* of £2 books they churn through and break even or perhaps make slim margins on.  All adds up!  [Most of those companies have their own website as well as selling through eBay and Amazon, so eBay isn't the full picture.]

*I wasn't sure if that might be an exaggeration but World of Books alone sold 28m books in 2022/23.

DullGreyGuy

Daz2009 said:

There's various  hardback books on sale for just over £2 with free postage .
The sellers are businesses.
How do they make any profit ?
Packing and postage costs more than that surely .

Its a volume business... World of Books for example is £106m of revenue, £33m gross profit, £10m of EBITDA in the UK.

The £2 books are likely to be negligible profit but you'd imagine they're buying secondhand books in bulk, most sold with minimal profits but 1 in 10 they can sell for £5, 1 in 100 for £20 etc etc 

the_lunatic_is_in_my_head

DullGreyGuy said:

Its a volume business... World of Books for example is £106m of revenue, £33m gross profit, £10m of EBITDA in the UK.

The £2 books are likely to be negligible profit but you'd imagine they're buying secondhand books in bulk, most sold with minimal profits but 1 in 10 they can sell for £5, 1 in 100 for £20 etc etc 

Pretty much this, they also all use software to price, that £2 book today could be £10 tomorrow if the other £2 listing sells out.