My first big score with Profit Bandit!

It’s not often that I actually buy something to sell on Amazon.

But a few months ago, while scanning with Profit Bandit I found a book that I just couldn’t resist trying to make a profit on. Keep reading to learn more about what I found and how much I eventually made.

Here at SellerEngine & Profit Bandit headquarters, we have a huge Goodwill store just a few blocks away. We often head down there to test Profit Bandit.

One day over the summer, we spent the afternoon scanning books without much success. Finally though, while scanning  a stack of books in the sociology section, I found a paperback copy of After the Ball.

I was excited! At the time there were fewer than 10 offers and all of the offers were above $100! Sales Rank was about 300,000, but according to the CamelCamelCamel graph, it had been spiking fairly often to around 100,000 indicating pretty frequent sales.

I paid $3 for the book and listed it on Amazon using Sellery. Our initial pricing strategy was to match the lowest offer in the same conditionProducts can only be listed on Amazon if... More as ours (we conservatively graded it as Very Good).

But we were also willing to wait in order to get a big profit (and didn’t want to constantly check that our offer was dropping too low), so we set a lower limit on our price of $100 above our item cost. So no matter what the lowest offer was, we’d never price below $103.

This ended up being a great strategy, because something strange happened. Other sellers started to come out of the woodwork. What we thought was a fairly rare and valuable book ended up having nearly 40 competing offers appear in just a few months. And the price tanked.

By October, just a few months after listing the book, there were many offers in the single digits. The price was down more than $100! For a brief period, a pricing war among the new sellers dropped the price to a penny. It settled around $10-$15, much less than I was hoping to sell it for.

But thanks to my Pricing Rule in Sellery, my offer continued to sit at $103. I didn’t have to do anything and never worried about accidentally selling for just a few dollars. My offer was one of the highest offers on the page and I knew I didn’t have a chance of selling it as long as others were selling for $100 less.

In late November I (got impatient and) decided that I probably wasn’t going to get $100 for the book anytime soon, so I dropped my minimum price to $40. Before too long, the lowest offers had sold and all of a sudden, I was the lowest priced offer at $40!

Within a week, I had made a sale!

After shipping and Amazon fees, I’m looking at a return of nearly 1000% on my initial investment!

I can see why Profit Bandit users say this is addictive!

+Paul Cole