Amazon Market Place

Couple of months ago I was going through my old books and realized I am not using them and haven't touched them in years and can either donate them or sell them to some place like half price books. The half price books rules were so weird and they offered me really meager amount and I ended up bringing all the books home.

I started looking at alternatives where I can make some reasonable money. The first thing that came to mind was eBay but after having heard from a friend on how he was not able to sell his stuff on eBay I stopped thinking about eBay.Then there is half.com but the prices quoted are so ridiculous I gave up on that.

The other alternative that I found was Amazon market place, the catch though was I can only sell items that Amazon.com itself sells, if they don't sell then I cannot list the item independently. All I had to do was create a seller account and link a bank account for future money transfer (whenever I make a sale). We can name our price but shipping is fixed by amazon.com (unlike ebay where item costs $2 and shipping $20). The commission is also a bit higher than eBay.

Initially I listed a few books and CDs online and to my luck I sold around 5 items in 1 month (beginners luck) and made way more money than I would have if I had gone to half price books or similar. Encouraged by the initial success I went through the whole apartment and listed all possible things that I don't need or use. Yeah the sales became slower after initial gain but it is not completly dead.

Somethings I don't think I could have sold for a decent price anywhere else I sold them here, for ex: I had a circular polarizing filter that I had bought for my old Olympus C2100 and rarely used (bought in 2001) and I managed to sell it a few weeks ago. Another example is that of a DDR266 memory stick, I listed it on eBay and no bids but managed to get a decent price on Amazon.

Things are not all that rosy either, the shipping cost is fixed and many a times the cost of shipping is higher than actual amount I have collected from buyer. As said before their commision is higher, for the books they charge by the weight. Lastly there is the competition, some item I may have listed for $10 and there will be some one else who would list for $3. I truly recommend Amazon market place for people who want to get rid of items that they no longer use like books, CDs, cameras, lenses and so on and so forth.