Reselling.club

IPI is Inventory Performance Index and it is a factor in determining how much Amazon will let you store in their warehouses.

The biggest factor in IPI is your Sell-Through Rate. To calculate this, take your sales per day and divide by your total in stock FBA inventory. Ideally, you want to be above 1% daily sell-through as a good best practice to keep moving inventory and have a good IPI. (Example: 100 sales per day with 10,000 items in stock in FBA = 1% daily sell-through).

On July 13, 2020, Amazon announced that the next IPI check will require 500 IPI for unlimited storage through the end of the year. This is much higher than in the past. The next checkpoint for IPI is August 16, 2020. If you are below 500 IPI at this point, you will receive restrictions on the amount of storage given to you in Amazon warehouses through the end of the year.

Currently, to see your Inventory Performance Index, on the Amazon Seller Central Dashboard go to the Inventory heading and then in the drop down menu, click on Inventory Planning.

Amazon lists some factors that can influence IPI but it all comes down to sell-through rate. For instance, if you removed all your stranded and unfulfillable inventory, it would reduce your total unsellable inventory in the warehouse and increase your sell-through rate since that inventory would no longer be calculated in your total inventory amount. Amazon will also list ASINs that can be restocked but that just shows an opportunity for you to increase sales. The fact that you have inventory that could be restocked does not directly impact your IPI but restocking those items could increase your IPI by increasing your sales. So, deleting the items you don’t plan to restock from your inventory will not directly increase your IPI (this is a common myth).

Tips to Increase IPI

• Repricers: Use a repricer to be competitive and move inventory. I recommend matching the Buy Box price as a general strategy. If no buy box exists, I usually match the lowest FBA offer (as long as it meets my minimum price I am willing to sell at) I personally use BQool as my Repricer. Aura and RepriceIt are two other popular options.
• Remove Stranded or unfulfillable Inventory: Sometimes you may no longer be able to sell items or they need to be returned, inspected, and sent back in. Make sure you are removing your stranded and unfulfillable inventory once a week at least to keep on top of it.
• Get Rid of Poor Inventory: Many times, an item will tank in price after you send it in. It is usually a best practice to cut your losses and move on by putting that cash into better inventory. If the item tanked so much you would lose money by selling the item, have Amazon dispose of it (or send it back to you).
• Ship in Fast Moving Inventory: Especially if you know you have a deadline to meet an IPI requirement, ship in some inventory you know you can sell through as soon as it hits the FBA warehouses. You might even be willing to accept lower profits in order to boost your IPI before a deadline hits.
• Note that deleting old ASINs from your inventory does NOT have an impact on your IPI. This is only shown as a factor because you could restock these items to continue selling them. Basically, Amazon is just showing you the opportunity to increase your IPI by restocking this inventory.
• Don’t go crazy over worrying about IPI. While we don’t know what Amazon’s plan is, they have said they will provide enough storage capacity for sellers even if they don’t hit this number. However, since we don’t know yet what they consider to be enough, I am trying my best to hit the IPI requirement each time a checkpoint comes up.

This chart shows you your profit at various buy prices for selling video games on Amazon FBA. I feel like seeing information at a glance like this helps me better understand the fee structure when making buying decisions.

One of the questions I get asked most often on Instagram what sales rank to stay under for video games on Amazon.com. This is a tough question to answer since it depends on how many of a video game you plan to purchase and how long you are willing to wait for the game to sell.

First, we need to understand how Sales Rank works on Amazon.com. Sales Rank is the popularity of an item on Amazon.com. We can use Sales Rank to get a general indication of how often an item sells. Each time an item sells on Amazon.com, the sales rank bounces up and then decays back down until it sells again.

From my experience in selling video games, here’s a general guide to how often a game sells:

Top 100 – Best Selling Games – Many sales per day
1,000 Sales Rank – Sells several copies a day
5,000 Sales Rank – ~1-2 sales per day on average
20,000 Sales Rank – ~1 sale per week on average
35,000 Sales Rank – ~1 sale per month on average
50,000 Sales Rank – ~1 sale per quarter on average
80-100k Sales Rank – ~1-2 sales per year
> 100k Sales Rank – ~1 or less sales per year

Quick Tip: If you are familiar with sales rank in books, multiply a video game’s sales rank by 100 for a good general equivalent. 1k in video games =~ 100k in books, 10k in video games =~ 1m in books, 50k in video games =~ 5m in books.

For me, if I have only one copy of a game, I usually am comfortable sending it in up to ~50k sales rank. Beyond that point, there really needs to be a very strong price or lack of offers for me to send the game in. I very commonly send in games (and many times multiple copies of games) with a sales rank of 20k-30k.

If I am buying a game through Online Arbitrage or Retail Arbitrage, I’m usually picking up many copies at once. If the game is a top 100 best seller, I generally am comfortable picking up any amount I can get my hands on at a decent price. If the sales rank is starting to get a little bit high in the ~3,000-~5,000 range, I may limit myself to about 20-30 copies. These are general rules though and sometimes the sales rank can be deceptive. For example, in Q4, a 3,000 sales rank video game will sell much more often than in July when video game sales are much slower.

I believe books are one of the best things to sell on Amazon FBA when first getting started. I get questions all the time from people asking how to sell books. I wrote this guide based on what you need to know to get started selling books on Amazon FBA. I tried to make this as short as possible just going over the basics if I were to restart my FBA business. And if I were to restart my FBA business, I would 100% start it over again focusing on books first.

Why are Books Cool to Sell

• Most people don’t value their books when they are done with them. They just want to get rid of them. It is very common you will source books for free or $1-$2 a book. You can make a lot of mistakes when your inventory is so cheap!
• The textbook industry inflates the price of all textbooks. You receive some profit and provide books at a discount to students.
• Almost every thrift store has a book section. You can spend 5 minutes scanning the new inventory and pick up some easy profit each time you visit.
• Books are a mostly ungated category on Amazon. You can build account history for ungating in harder brands by getting started in books. Amazon started as a book store and is the number 1 site to sell books on.
• Especially during textbook season, customers pay much more for a Prime book because they need it right now! They can’t rely on a merchant fulfilled seller who might be a drop shipper and take 3 weeks to cancel their order because their book went up in price. (Which has happened to me before as a regular customer and made me furious).

Suggested Items:

Amazon Seller Pro Account ($40/month)

Scanning Software ($10-$45/month – recommend the $45/month option)

Bluetooth Barcode Scanner ($40-$150 one time – recommend the cheaper option for getting started)

Listing Software $50/month

Dymo 450, 450 Turbo, or Twin Turbo ($75-$150 one time)

Labels ($10-$30 depending on what you want to go with)

USB Scanner for your PC/Laptop ($15-$20 one time)

Brother Laser Printer or some other printer to print shipping labels ($80-$100 one time)

Wow, that’s a lot of money! Well, a big reason I wrote this guide is to break down what all of this is used for and whether/how you can skip these costs if you want. I do recommend everything listed above but you may just want to try out books at first without a big investment and that is totally okay. A big part of this guide is going to break down ways you can get started with less.

Very Quick Guide:

I’m just going to write this to be as basic as possible without much extra info. This is how I would restart my business if I was starting over.

1. Create an Amazon Seller Account if you haven’t already. Make it a pro account for $40/month because to get ungated for brands you need a Pro account and without a Pro account, you are charged an additional $1/item you sell. So if you sell 40 or more items a month, you pay for the account. There is usually a free trial for your first month. Yes, you technically can sell books on other platforms, but Amazon is by far the best marketplace to sell almost all books.
2. Buy a bluetooth scanner: https://amzn.to/318K6Yq This is a ‘good enough’ scanner at $40-$50. I use a more expensive one that is smaller but this one will work fine for getting started.
3. Sign up for ScoutIQ. There is a free trial available. I prefer a different scanning software but we are going to make this as easy as possible and ScoutIQ is best for newbies in my opinion.
4. ScoutIQ works on your smartphone. The settings are fine for getting started. The only thing you may want to change in settings is change the audible beep to a vibrate just to not annoy other people you are scanning near.
5. Pair your Bluetooth Scanner with your smartphone. It should work pretty much right away. If your scanner is beeping when it scans a barcode to start, you probably want to turn that off once again so you don’t annoy people near you. Your scanner should come with a command sheet you can scan to turn off the beeping.
6. Go out to a thrift store and scan stuff with your scanner and phone. The default settings in ScoutIQ are fine. Just set the price you are paying per book in the ScoutIQ settings. As a newbie, you probably want to limit yourself to books that cost $1-$3 in case you make a mistake.
7. Getting started, if ScoutIQ tells you to buy the book, buy it. The default buy triggers are fine for getting started. As you learn more, you can question what ScoutIQ tells you or buy when you think it is worth it. Getting started, you may pick up a bad book sometimes but the winners should more than make up for the losers. Plus, you really aren’t paying much anyway.
8. If your thrift store has a scanner that frequents the store (almost all stores do), it is very likely you will find a lot of unprofitable books. The best books are the books that have just been put out. Many scanners go to stores daily scanning just the new books that are put out. You may feel overwhelmed at first because you will find so many unprofitable books. You have to get used to going to stores and just scan the new books. As you learn books, you will also get a feel for books that are more likely to be profitable and go straight to them.
9. Once you have enough books, it is time to send them in to Amazon. When I first started using Amazon, I listed through Amazon’s web site. This isn’t the best way to list but it is free. Almost all sellers move on to listing software like InventoryLab. However, when you are first getting started, Amazon’s web site is okay. You will eventually want to move on to listing software like InventoryLab though as it will make the listing process and accounting much easier.
10. How to List through Amazon’s web site: Scan or type the UPC of the book into Amazon’s search bar. You should be brought to the book page (you can confirm it is the same book based on cover or other info). There should be a link in multiple places on the page to sell your own copy. This will bring you to a page you can list. There’s many things we can go over here but we are trying to be basic. Select a condition for the book, add some notes on the condition, and set a price (more on these later). The default SKU is fine to use (that’s a more advanced topic). Then click submit and add to your FBA shipment.
11. Once you have added enough items to your FBA shipment, you can submit it and see where they want the books to go. If those places are acceptable to you, accept it and confirm the shipment. If you don’t like it, you can add more items to your shipment to try to change where it wants the items to go or wait as where Amazon wants a shipment to go changes over time.
12. Print labels and pack your boxes. Getting started, use whatever box you want. I prefer the Home Depot 16x12x12 small boxes for my book shipments though. Don’t pack over 50 pounds because Amazon doesn’t allow that. For printing labels when getting started, I used 30-up Avery labels and a regular printer.
13. If you need to pack multiple boxes to the same warehouse, you will have to do box contents. This is why you want listing software because you will hate doing box contents without listing software. What is box contents: Box contents is when you tell Amazon what is in each box. It is not required if you are just sending one box to one warehouse because obviously everything is in that one box. If you send multiple boxes to a single warehouse, you need to tell them what is in each box. This sucks if you don’t have listing software to make it easier.

Okay that’s the basic way to do stuff. Now we will look at how we can improve this process.

• You want a Dymo Labelwriter 450, 450 Turbo, or Twin Turbo.
• For Dymo Labels, you want 30334 labels. You usually don’t want to buy labels from Dymo because they are very expensive. I like these labels: https://amzn.to/2ZMG77c (12,000 labels for around $35-$40). You can buy in a smaller quantity if you want just search for 30334 labels.
• You want a USB barcode scanner for your laptop or PC or whatever you list in. This one is fine: https://amzn.to/301wIE4 It should only cost around $15-$20. This will just speed up your listing process a lot by not having to type in the barcode when you list. 
• You want InventoryLab. Accelerlist is another option for listing software but I prefer InventoryLab. InventoryLab is the standard for FBA sellers, almost everyone uses it that is a big time seller. InventoryLab is $50/month and will also do all your accounting for you.
• When you list in InventoryLab, you are going to get a label printed out of your Dymo every time you list a book. This makes it 10x easier because you just list your book, get your label, and put the book aside. When it comes time to make a shipment, you scan each book to tell InventoryLab what box you are putting it in. This makes box contents super easy. Without this, it basically sucks to do box contents. You can get around box contents in a few ways like only listing a small number of books at a time. However, if you have 100 books to list, it is going to get annoying real fast if you have to do box contents manually.
• InventoryLab is great in a bunch of other ways. It saves your condition notes for each condition. So you just say this book is Used – Good and it autofills in some notes based on Used – Good condition items. Also, you put your cost in for each book and it gives you your profit super easy. You can also tell InventoryLab what store or how you sourced the book and break down your profit for different ways of sourcing. For example, my categories for sourcing include OA, RA, Thrifting, Prep Center, etc. This means I can see exactly how much I made each month from Thrifted items if I want to and separate it from my OA. This helps you better understand what you should focus your time on.
• InventoryLab is intimidating at first but it actually is super easy once you understand it.

Ultimate I don’t want to commit but kinda want to try books but don’t want to spend much section

First, I realize I just listed a lot of expensive tools that are a big commitment. You might not like books, think they are too hard for your area, or not think you can actually do well with them and want to try for a smaller investment. For someone who wants to try this getting started, this is the minimum I think you need:

• Technically you can use the Amazon Seller App and use your camera to check books to avoid buying ScoutIQ or a barcode scanner. Yeah, I actually did get started this way when I wasn’t sure about books. This is a ton slower than other methods but it can work at a thrift store getting started. Do not do this at a book sale you will get smoked by scanners. If you are going to use this method, you need to cherry pick books by looking for books that look interesting like textbooks, trade paperbacks, or the new books that your thrift store just put on the shelf.
• I totally recommend buying that $40-$50 scanner getting started by the way (https://amzn.to/318K6Yq). ScoutIQ has a free trial so you can use it for free at first. However, you do need ScoutIQ if you buy a scanner because a scanner will not work with the Amazon Seller App. So basically, you want to go ScoutIQ + Scanner or Amazon Seller App + Your Phone camera.
• To be honest, if you want to just test this for a while with your smartphone + Amazon Seller App + Your Phone Camera, that’s fine. Like I said, I did that at first too and did find some good books that way. But once you realize books are cool, get the scanner and scanning software!
• Do you need Listing Software getting started: Nah, but it will make it easier. I avoided listing software for quite a few months getting started.
• Do you need an Amazon Pro Account: Almost certainly. If you plan to sell less than 40 items a month on Amazon then yeah I guess you can go free. But you are paying an extra $1/item and also Amazon tends to be much stricter on free accounts than Pro.
• Do you need labels: You do need some form of labels. You don’t need a Dymo. If you are going to list through Amazon, don’t bother with the Dymo. When I started, I used Avery 5160 (30-up) labels. If you create your shipment through Amazon, they will format your labels in a way that you can print on 30-Up Labels. However, yes you do have to label every book since they are Used condition. For printing 30-up labels: I used my Inkjet printer getting started. Amazon says don’t do this but you totally can if you really have to. I graduated to a Brother Laser Printer for about $80 later which was nice but not required for getting started. If you are going to list on Amazon, you will not have access to your labels until when you are ready to ship. So you will have to label your books at the end of the process. This is pretty bad and why I like to use InventoryLab because I can label right away as I list each book.
• Is listing on Amazon really as bad as I make it sound: No, I did this for a long time getting started. My recommendation to you: List only what you think will fit in one box at a time. Make separate shipments for each box. Because when you start involving multiple boxes to the same warehouse, it gets super complicated without listing software. So for example, if I have 20 books that weigh about 30-40 pounds, I would list those 20 books and not add more to the same shipment because I want all 20 of those books to go to one warehouse. If 1 or 2 books are going to another warehouse, Remove those books from the shipment and put them in your next one. This is how I listed for my first year on Amazon, just weighing out enough books to fit in one box and creating one shipment per box I sent off.

In Summary, the absolute minimum requirements are: An Amazon Seller Account, a smartphone to check prices, labels and some way to print them, a box to pack your books, a way to print your postage to Amazon’s warehouse.

Where to Source

• Thrift Stores: They almost always have books. Focus on the new inventory. Once you develop a route, you will almost entirely focus on the new inventory.
• Book sales: Go to http://www.booksalefinder.com to find sales near you. If you don’t have a scanner, you are screwed, don’t bother. Almost every good book sale will have 20+ other scanners there. Avoid book sales as a newbie IMO, they are super competitive. You will get to know what I like to refer to as ‘Book Sale People’. These are mostly crazy people. Good luck. I only go to a couple book sales these days but it is a good way to source at first as long as you can deal with ‘Book Sale People’.
• Garage Sales: The nice thing is you can probably take your time here and use the Amazon Seller app + camera if you want. This is going to be very hit and miss. You might find someone who put out their textbooks and you might find someone who put out their mass market trash fiction. I usually selectively scan books at garage sales now if it looks valuable.
• Free Books! When I first got started, I would go to my Used book store free books bin! Most bigger used book stores have this. There are of course lots of other ways to get free books because most people just don’t value books and want to get rid of them! There’s also always the free section of Craigslist and you can even put up ads saying you are willing to take books off people’s hands (because most people probably have a ton they want to get rid of!).
• eFlip/From other sellers: Yeah not going to go into this here, I’ll write something more advanced on this later. This is an advanced topic but you can buy textbooks cheap outside textbook season and flip them during textbook season when they spike in price.

Other Stuff

When I first got started, I was scared to scan books. I felt the employees didn’t want me to scan books and felt like I was doing something wrong. I tried to hide my scanning. It took me a LONG time to get over this. It is normal to be scared and think you are doing something wrong but you aren’t. They want to move their inventory and realize most people in thrift shops are resellers. Now, I get kinda mad when a normal customer spends too long looking at books and gets in the way of my scanning! This would be impossible for me to feel when I was just getting started ~3 years ago.

Final Thoughts

This isn’t meant to be polished, just some basic thoughts. Eventually, I might expand this into a longer guide or a video series. Stuff I intentionally didn’t cover yet because it would require more depth:

• How to price books/repricers
• Condition Notes for books/how to condition books
• Inventory Management/Storage Fees/Other Fees
• More depth on what books to buy – Just do what ScoutIQ tells you to do is fine for getting started though IMO.
• How certain thrift stores put out new books/getting to know employees.
• Probably more stuff I need to cover that I am forgetting.

Hope you found this short guide helpful!

When you subscribe to an eBay Store, you receive free fixed price listings. This is the biggest factor in determining when to upgrade your store level. Once you hit a certain listing amount, it pays for itself to upgrade your store. Here’s a list of the fees from each eBay Store Level and when it makes sense to upgrade:

No Store
50 Free Fixed Price Listings
$0.35/Listing After Free Listings

Starter Store $7.95/month
100 Free Fixed Price Listings
$0.30/listing After Free Listings
Pays for itself at 73 Listings

Basic Store $27.95/month
250 Free Fixed Price Listings
$0.25/listing After Free Listings
Pays for itself at 167 Listings

Premium Store $74.95/month
1,000 Free Fixed Price Listings
$0.10/listing After Free Listings
Pays for itself at 438 Listings

Anchor Store $349.95/month
10,000 Free Fixed Price Listings
$0.05/listing After Free Listings
Pays for itself at 3,750 Listings

Enterprise Store $2,995/month (yearly payment only)
100,000 Free Fixed Price Listings
$0.05/listing After Free Listings
Pays for itself at 62,901 Listings

So, if you have 167 listings or more, you might as well upgrade to a Basic Store because you will save more money by paying the monthly fee than paying the Listing Fees.

Some Notes on this:

• I used the Monthly Price when determining these numbers. You can save a little more on your store by switching to a Yearly Rate.
• Sometimes, eBay gives you free listings. If you take advantage of these free listings, it can make sense to stay at a lower store level for a little longer.
• There are a few other perks to store levels. For instance, Anchor Stores have special Anchor support. Also, there are more discounts available on shipping supplies and promoted listings as you go to higher store levels.
• This only takes into account Fixed Price Listings. If you use a combination of Fixed Price and Auction Style, you could make more use of your store level.

I created this site to host content related to reselling. I’ve been wanting to write some longer content recently to share knowledge about all aspects of reselling so created this site as a place to host that content. Thanks!