How to Price Used Books on Amazon For Maximum Profit!
Pricing a course in miracles on Amazon can be an art and can be very confusing due to the vast number of different attributes you need to look at when listing one. Pricing is one of the most important strategies you need to look at when listing books on Amazon. Good pricing can be the difference between no sale at all, a sale but not with not very much money made to a quick sale and the most money possible. Correct pricing of your book is key to a successful sale and, if you decide to pursue a business out of this, a successful business.
Pricing can be a very opinion oriented strategy. Every individual or business has their own way of pricing. Some people price their book to sell immediately by “lowballing” other prices so that their books sell very quickly, people on the other extreme deciding that they don’t necessarily need a sale right away but want to wait for that one person to come along and buy their book at a very expensive price for one reason or another or somewhere in between. There are, however, a certain few things that everyone needs to know in regards to pricing. These things may not be the 100% correct solution for your business, but they will help you learn a thing or two about the basics of pricing and help you decide how you want to price your books.
Your Pricing Goal
The first thing you need to decide for yourself is how do you want to price. Do you want to price for a quick sale, high price or middle of the road? This is the number one question you need to answer for yourself. If you can’t answer this question, your prices will be all over the place and not make any sense whatsoever. This is very important.
Sales Rank
Second, you need to understand what the sales rank is in Amazon. If you’re not familiar with the sales rank, it is a number that every book receives on Amazon that tells you how often it has sold. Amazon is very secretive about the algorithm that they use for this, but there is a basic understanding. Just remember that a book that has a lower sales rank will usually sell faster than a number with a higher sales rank. I say usually because there are some circumstances where that is not true, but for now, just remember that a book with a sales rank of 10 will sell much, much faster than a book with a rank of 7,000,000. Coming from my personal experience and to give you an idea on how fast a book will sell a book with a sales rank of 10 is selling hundreds of copies a day. A book with a sales rank of nothing or 7,000,000+ means that the book has either never sold on Amazon or it has sold years ago. Those are the extremes and there is every book in between.
Take the sales rank into consideration into pricing by estimating how fast you think the book will sell. If the book is selling very quickly, this may mean that you don’t have to undercut anyone and can place the book in the lower end of the listings but not the lowest. All the book below it will be bought at lower prices leaving your book as the lowest eventually. If you’re on the other end and your book is 6,565,4356 then that means that it’s probably been years since it’s sold so I would probably recommend listing it at the lowest price.
Feedback
You also need to look at your feedback and your competitors. If you are just starting out and have no feedback you should probably make a habit of having the lowest price because buyers are essentially taking a small risk buying from you. They may not be at risk of losing their money because everything is going through Amazon, but if you are a seller that simply doesn’t ship anything out, they will have to hassle with filing an A to Z claim or chargeback from Amazon. If you’ve been selling books on Amazon for awhile though and have a 99% feedback rating with a few dozen or hundred ratings, you will look much better in the buyer’s eyes. You now have some authority to price a little higher because people will skip over the lower prices to go with someone that can offer better customer service, faster shipping or more communication.
Total Books Offered
You will also have to look at the total number of books offered besides yours. You can see this by simply looking at the number of used or new listings on the main page of the book. This is important because you hit the law of supply and demand. If the supply is lower, the demand will typically be higher and vice versa when the supply is high. This is why you see many new fiction novels at $0.01. There are millions of these published that have saturated the market forcing the price down to a penny. This is also why you see a book that is “Currently Unavailable”, but on the Pre Order list through Amazon that people are simply waiting to pay hundreds of dollars for. You will have t list the Danielle Steele book for a penny and you’d be lucky to sell it or you could list that mint, first edition Hemingway for thousands since no one else may have a copy listed on the Internet.