I have a lot of books that I doubt that I'll ever read again, so I decided to try Amazon's reseller program. I offered two books for sale.
The first was a hard cover edition of a recent bestseller that is about to come out in paperback. My copy was in excellent condition, so I offered it at ten dollars, which was about four dollars below the next seller. The advantage of having the lowest price is that it appears at the top of the list.
The book sold within a couple hours.
Amazon provided a shipping label and packing list for me to print out; so I went to the Post Office this morning and mailed it off. Amazon even let me send an email to the buyer, to let her know that it was on its way.
Using standard shipping Amazon adds $3.99 to cover postage; that proved to be not enough. I ended up paying about five dollars to mail it; that included the cost of the mailer and a 75 cent charge to track the package.
So factoring in the mailing costs, after Amazon takes its cut, I will only clear five dollars on the sale.
The other book was a paperback edition of a book that is temporarily out of print. Some resellers on Amazon are asking well over a hundred dollars for it.
When I listed it, the lowest price was about 69 dollars. I offered my copy for $39.99.
This morning I saw that three of the other resellers had lowered their prices to $39.97, i.e., two cents below my price. Obviously they wanted the top spot on the list.
So I lowered my price to $34.99. Within an hour one of those guys lowered his price to two cents below mine.
Well, it didn't do him any good. It looks like my copy has already been sold!
