Simply Feng Shui

Here's my first example of a stupid price on a book. At $2.99 the seller of this book loses 35 cents if the book sells for the current asking price. The cost for him to destroy the book (assuming Kenn is a male) would be 15 cents. If someone doesn't buy this book he will also be paying inventory storage fees. The book has a very low demand, with nearly 3 million books outselling it. I'm not sure who might be looking for this book, but I suspect whoever is would be willing to pay a few dollars more to have one in this condition shipped to them in two business days.

Introduction

In my online sales business I sometimes stumble upon prices that just puzzle me because they are so low. My business is built around digging through lots of books at book sales and trying to find the ones that have enough value and demand that I can make a usually modest profit and generate some income by selling a few of these books every day. The market I focus on is Amazon Prime. Therefore the stupid prices I point out best benefit people who have an Amazon Prime membership.

When a seller ships and sells their own items, certain categories have a standardized shipping fee. With books that fee is $3.99 so a large proportion of seller fulfilled books come from clearing houses that sell as many books as they can for a penny plus shipping ($4.00 total for standard shipping). Those sellers make their money in shipping and handling fees and are often massive scale recycling companies who receive their books for free or for pennies per book.

When a seller chooses to have Amazon fulfill their books, the standard shipping fees don't apply to Amazon Prime members and those members can usually get their items within 2 business days rather than allowing 7-10 days for the standard shipping time. This is where stupid prices can happen because now the seller can actually drop their prices as low as they want below the $4 minimum total price. The reason I call these prices stupid is because the cost to the seller generally destroys not only the profit on these items, but in the end they are paying Amazon money if their items sell at that price.  The most stupid thing about the prices is that sellers can actually have their items "destroyed" by Amazon for 15 cents, though I suspect the destruction method is really a transfer of ownership.

At times I have been guilty of stupid prices myself. I am not stating that the people selling a few items at stupid prices are stupid or that they are not stupid. The money lost when an item sells at a stupid price is usually quite insubstantial. The links I will use can generate money for my business, but the reality is this is a stupid use of affiliate links because I'm using them to point out cheaply priced used books that might generate pennies in commissions and I'll never get those pennies unless they add up to more than $10 someday. If you want me to make any money from this, buy anything but the items I tell you about, otherwise this is free entertainment for me.


Michael "Jason" Bush is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com