Online Bookselling Is Still A Profitable Business Model

Do you realize that you can sell your pre-owned books via Amazon.com? You can also sell books that you obtain at yard sales and from thrift shops.

Well, it's likely that is not news to you, especially if you've been researching different ways to make money online. Amazon.com's sellers program is a well-known venue for people to list and sell their used books.

What might be news to you is that it is possible to make a respectable second income or even, with effort, a considerable first income by becoming an Amazon-affiliated bookseller.

Now that statement could be difficult to believe if you got trapped, as I did, in the great sellers’ glut that struck Amazon a few years ago.

It’s so easy to become an Amazon bookseller that hundreds and then thousands of people started doing it. The inevitable result was to drive down prices so far that some books were being sold for pennies – hardly worth the time and expense of packaging and mailing them to customers.

Yet, as I just recently learned, it’s still possible to find books that you can buy for 25 cents, 50 cents or at most a dollar, and then resell them (using Amazon) for $10 or $30 or occasionally a hundred bucks or more.

Here's the secret that makes this possible: You should get one of those handheld portable digital assistants. You attach a barcode reader to it, and download Amazon's product database onto it. Then, simply carry your PDA/barcode device along with you on your book hunts. You can use it to check the current fetching prices of the books you find, and then only purchase those that you can see will fetch a good price when you list them on Amazon.

Using a PDA with Amazon’s data right at your fingertips is the smart way to run a used-book selling business. Its biggest advantage is that it will keep you from wasting time and money buying up books that no one will buy, or else will pay only pennies for.

There’s a good ebook available on how to make real money selling used books through Amazon, using the PDA secret. You can read a detailed, independent review of it here: Can You Still Make Money Selling Used Books on Amazon? Or, you can go straight to the book’s web site to check it out.

Amazon isn't the only game in town when it comes to selling books online. Four additional, completely different methods are outlined on this special Squidoo page.