Building a business on the internet sometimes has a way of sneaking up on you. I was a long time eBay seller but had not given books much of a thought as a product. I have always had a love of books and do to this day. My journey into the books on line business started while on a vacation in Arkansas with my wife. For some reason, I still don't know why, we bought an old looking book about Indians at a flea market for fifty cents. The title of that book has long ago escaped my memory. We put the book on eBay and it sold very quickly for $35.00. This got my attention.
We began searching for information about on line book selling and at the same time searched for places where we could get information about current prices and demand for books. We discovered the magical site at AllAll which is a website that lists most of the current books for sale including the prices and number available on line. It proved to be a major research site for us.
One Saturday morning I was trying to find a good source of used books we could buy at good prices. We had of course searched many ebook thrift stores. I thought about all the books those stores had in stock that they sold for fifty cents or a dollar a piece. Many of those books were worth many times those prices but how to get access to them before all the competition. On a whim I printed up some business cards and inventory sheets and we visited a local thrift store. This was surely a "what the heck can I lose if they throw me out", kind of a venture.
I asked to see the manager and explained that we were book sellers and offered to go through all the books they received before they went on sale. I explained we would give them an inventory sheet of each book we took. we would sell these books on the internet and return 40% of the sale to the store. There would be no cost to the store and they would receive much more for these books than selling them as usual in their store.
To my surprise he took us into the back room and introduced us to a mountain of books and suggested we should start right away. After a few weeks working with this store he recommended us to other stores and very quickly we had 6 stores and an inventory in our warehouse of over 5000 books. Our warehouse was or bedroom, kitchen, front room, car trunk and various other places I have forgotten about. We did this for a number of years at a very nice profit until we tired of the labor involved.
The point of this story is if you have a passion for books as I do. If you find that you can't resist straightening out a folded corner of a book you are viewing at a sale or library than maybe you have a passion and should consider buying and selling used books online.
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