It’s hard to beat the margins on books. If a bookseller sells $100,000, there’s a good chance he’s making 30,000 - 40,000 take home. Most other Amazon business models operate below at 15% margin.

Selling books on Amazon is incredibly easy to start. All you need is your phone and an app that looks up prices on Amazon like ScoutIQ and some books to scan. Once you find out all the places that books exist (thriftstores, libraries, college campuses, posting on Nextdoor, Craiglist, Facebook marketplace, eBay to amazon flips, large library sales from booksalefinder.com, and a myriad of other places) all you need to do is scan the heck outta the books to find the good stuff.

If you can commit to finding and listing 1000 books every 30 days, you’ll have a business that cranks out $5,000-10,000 profit monthly. The catch is most people don't want to put in the work (sweat equity) to make that happen. 

Books are super easy to prep because they require no prep other than putting a label on them. Use a listing software like Go2lister (shameless plug) to get them active on Amazon at lightening speeds and boom you’re making money.

Books are harder to scale because you can only find so many books. You can’t walk into a thrift-store and spend $10,000 on books, but you can easily do that in a day with online arbitrage and wholesale. This makes it pretty difficult to get above $10,000 per month in profit selling books. I can only think of a handful of people making that much a month selling books, and they operate pretty large operations. However, I know tons of OA and wholesale guys cranking out $10,000+ profit months. 

Books sell slow (compared to other items). You should expect to sell 20% of your inventory every month with books. This is incredibly slow compared to the 50-100% sell-through that online arbitrage and wholesalers see on their products. Because books sell slower, they occupy more space in Amazon's FBA warehouses. Amazon doesn’t like this, so often times booksellers are stuck at their capacity limits and need to pay to get more space. Amazon can also deny the ability to grant you more space... so I highly recommend only sending in faster selling books with low sales ranks. Removal fees are $2+ now, so you really do not want to be sending crap books to Amazon these days.

If you decide to pursue bulk books, that is buying books by the truckload, you will need to pay a team to process all your inventory. You cannot delegate this to a 3rd party prep center as you can online arbitrage and wholesale because it would not be profitable. You can run an incredibly profitable book business at scale, but you must master the art of running a lean operation.

Books are probably the best way to get started selling on Amazon because they are super profitable, require very little prep, and have an easy learning curve. However, books do not allow you to scale to 10k/ profit months without getting your hands dirty and hiring a big team. Let's move onto the business models that do allow for this.

Online arbitrage is interesting. You can do it from anywhere in the world. I sold $300,000 doing online arbitrage last year and the majority of the time I was in Cali, Colombia drinking espresso at small coffee shops around town listening to salsa music.

If you have a prep center you never have to touch the product. And if you prep your items fast you can sell all the inventory you buy in just 15-60 days. This is exciting because if you spend $10,000, you can expect it to come back to you and then some in a couple months max. With books, you’d be hard pressed to spend $10,000 on a couple months because they’re just so damn cheap. It’s hard to run up inventory spend on a book business. I recommend oregonprepcenter.com if you are looking for a good prep center. Use code Romer10 to get a $.1 per unit discount. I trust this prep center because my friend Makayla is an owner. If you don't follow Makayla, you should. She started online arbitrage last year and now is consistently selling $100,000 per month on Amazon. Follow her here. 

Because you are making all your purchases with credit cards, there is a huge opportunity to stack up credit card points. have friends that live off cash back. I’m not quite there yet, but I made over $10,000 in cash back year. The reward points you get are tax free if you use them from the portal of your credit card. Tax free money is the best. 

If you spend $10,000 on books, you are probably making $40,000- $100,000 back. If you spend $10,000 on online arbitrage products, and you operate at an 8% margin (that’s what I did my first year), you’re only making $10,800 back. Sounds pretty crappy, right? It’s not as bad as you think because #1 the money comes back super fast, and #2 you should be making about 6% extra off of cash back and rewards. So really you’re closer to a 15% margin if you include that. Plus, if you do it right you’ll be spending 100k plus a month once you have confidence and making 15k plus profit. 

There are exceptions to the low ROI.

While the ROI is usually low for OA sellers, I have friends who have found products making 100% plus ROI. These products sold fast, too. When you find a product that sells both fast and for a high ROI… go all in (that’s what I’m currently doing with wholesale, which we will discuss now).

I am currently pumping out 20k profit months with wholesale... but it was not always that way. I'll start with the cons of wholesale because I honestly believe this is one of the hardest business models to start on Amazon. 

With online arbitrage and books you can find profitable products your first week selling on Amazon. 

Wholesale, on the other hand, takes time. I’ve tried my hand at wholesale 3 times over the years… the first time I paid a coach $3600 and contacted dozens of distributors. Set up a few accounts and then stopped because a giant opportunity arised (selling chlorine in the summer of 2021, IFNYK).

Side note: I made 30k profit in just 6 weeks buying chlorine from Costcos for $100/ unit and flipping them on Amazon for $220 +. I  got so excited I flew out friends and even girls I used to date to different cities that had stock at Costco and ran it up. It was amazing… until a U-Haul truck caught on fire from the chlorine outside of one of the Costcos. Luckily, it wasn’t mine… it was my friend's. Costco wanted $$ for the burned plants and to this day I don’t think he’s paid them.

The second time I tried wholesale I really "committed”. I put committed in quotes because if you truly commit to anything in life,  and really, like really put in the work, you will achieve it. My process was simple. I emailed brands to set up and account with them. If they said no, I asked them for a list of authorized distributors I could buy their products from. This landed me about 40 accounts and I got about 15 giant excel lists with UPCs (universal product codes). I purchased 2 products… they made me practically no profit.

To be fair I was doing like 7 other business models and salsa dancing 4 hours a day (2 hours in class at then I’d go out at night.) It was awesome and I don’t regret it, but take my failed 2nd attempt at wholesale with a grain of salt.

The third time I tried wholesale, I started making 10k profit months instantly. In fact I’m on pace to do 30k in profit next month.

The way I “landed” my wholesale account was a simple introduction from one of my friends who does wholesale also. Now we both buy products from the same distributor and make a ton of money. Life is easier with friends who sell on Amazon.

I also landed another wholesale account, inadvertently, when I was working out at Planet Fitness in Puerto Rico. I was wearing a Seller Amp shirt (my favorite OA sourcing tool) and someone approached me ecstatically and asked me if I sold on Amazon. We went to dinner that night and it turns out he does 11,000,000 a year. He asked his friend who sells similar products as I do if he could order some of the asins I wanted more stock in. He said yes and I placed a 30k order shortly after.

Selling on amazon is bizarre in that sense. You can put a bunch of effort into doing all the right things and get no results and then go on living your life and opportunity jumps in front of you.

The ROI is pretty damn high. Right now my ROI is over 80% and my margin is 40 after prep fees. That’s 32% higher than online arbitrage.

With wholesale you can spend $15,000+ on just a few asins. In the online arbitrage world this is harder to come by. And if you do come by it you’ll probably have to spend a few hours clicking around on retail sites because many sites have order limits of 10 or so.

When doing OA it always feels like you’re cheating the system. I’m 100% okay with this because I’m giving retailers my cash, but it is annoying having to use VPNs and new emails when websites ban you for purchasing too much. My wholesale guy loves it when I text him asking him to buy more product… can’t say the same for academysports.com

There are serious cons of wholesale. 

Sometimes you can’t use credit cards, you just wire (pro tip: if you use a service like Melio or QuickBooks you can pay with credit card for a 3% fee. This may be worth it if cash flow is an issue for you).

Sometimes with MOQ (minimum order quantities) you can stock too deep in some ASINs. You may have $30,000 tied up in inventory for 3-4 months. That’s $30,000 you’re not spending on other product. 

With OA this rarely happens. It’s much easier to stay liquid with OA and not overstock. Plus you optimize cash flow by using credit cards, getting cash back, and your lead time is usually 2-5 days because these retail sites are trying to compete with amazons shipping time. I am going to go crazy on OA this Q4, and I’ll probably take my foot off the gas a bit for wholesales