Lessons Learned from Selling $600 of Used Books in 6 Hours

Since selling used stuff is sometimes a topic on this board, I thought I'd share techniques I used in my Moving Sale the other day. The techniques could apply for many different items besides books.

I'll be moving in a month, and remembered that the last time I moved, my boxes of books and papers took up just about as much space in the truck as furniture and took more time to load and unload. So I thought I'd try to sell as many books as possible that I will probably never look at again, no matter how much I might have enjoyed them.

At first, I tried selling the books on Amazon.com. This could work well if I had more time. But it was really time-consuming to enter all the books into their system and figure out how to rate their condition and how to price them. Some books have just about no value there because there are too many copies already for sale there at a low price. I sold five books overnight on Amazon.

Then I had the brainstorm of running a bargain book sale for subscribers of my weekly email newsletter. This is what moved $600 of books in 6 hours. Here's what I did.

I classified the books topically into "Bundles" and gave each grouping of 6-10 books a catchy yet descriptive name, such as "The Branding Bundle," "The Web Business Bundle" or "The Inner Creativity Bundle." Then I rounded off the estimated resale value of the books and added a shipping price, also in a round number.

Each bundle contained one or two items that would probably not be salable on their own, but added something to the value of the overall group.

The bundles began going within the hour! I posted "sold" signs as quickly as I could, which seemed to make the remaining bundles go even faster. A few buyers bought several bundles. One subscriber in England even called a friend of hers in Switzerland to tell her to go look at what was still available, and the friend quickly bought a bundle. So that my west coast subscribers wouldn't feel they missed all the great opportunities, I added some more bundles to the site late in the morning.

(By the way, I've added a few more Bundles this morning, so there's still good stuff available.)

Lessons:

1. Bundle related items together to move a lot of merchandise in a small amount of time, including items that wouldn't be of much interest on their own.

2. Name the bundles.

3. Letting people know in real time that things are going quickly quickens the sales pace.

4. Tap your subscriber base, as they have already developed trust in you. (One buyer explicitly mentioned this as a factor in her purchase.)

5. Make the process fun and easy. People didn't have to fill out any online forms, just email me to reserve their bundle, then I arranged payment through the method easiest for them.

Good luck with YOUR moving sale!

Marcia Yudkin


Marcia's Monster Moving Sale is Still in Progress Here...