Update 1 to our popular Selling Cassette Tapes on Amazon FBA: A Case Study blog post
OK – SO, I finally received all 4 huge boxes of cassettes from the eBay sellers that I won the auctions from. The 929 cassette lot is a nice mix of pop, classic country, classical music, heavy metal and comedy. The 110 ethnic cassette lot is going to be a challenge to list. Some of them have UPC codes and will be easy to list on Amazon FBA. Many of the others are in a Middle eastern language that is very difficult to read, so it will be hard to make new listings for them on Amazon. Still, at the price I got them for, it was a great deal.
I decided to get ship these cassette tapes to Amazon FBA in small to medium sized packages, instead of a couple of huge heavy boxes. The main reason is that I am listing these in my spare time and I want to get them in to Amazon as quickly as possible so that we are making money on cassette tapes as soon as possible, rather than waiting a month to get a large package together.
Also, it breaks up the monotony of getting FBA shipments out to ship in medium sized lots. Listing the cassettes and seeing what they are worth is fun. Prepping and labeling the tapes for shipment is pretty boring!
We will talk about the actual process of listing and shipping cassette tapes to Amazon FBA in a future post.
Listing and Shipping Cassette Tapes to Amazon FBA
For this post, I will be talking about the value of the tapes and some issues that came up while selling cassette tapes.
So, what I decided to do was list all of the cassettes that were sealed in shrink wrap first. The benefits of doing them first should be obvious.
- They will be the highest value cassettes, as most of them can be listed as New on Amazon.
- They are already shrink wrapped, so there is less prep time to get them ready to ship.
- There were not a lot of New tapes, so I got a shipment sent out fairly quickly and the shipping cost was low.
I ended up with a shipment of 80 cassettes. I think that there were about 75 that were listed as New cassettes. About 5 of them had cracks in the cases, so those cassettes had to be listed as Used-Like New or Used-Very Good condition, depending on the size and amount of the cracks.
The Results Are In… Potential Profits from the Selling Cassette Tapes via Amazon FBA – Shipment 1
Here are the actual numbers from the initial shipment of this case study:
- Number of Cassettes Sent to Amazon FBA: 80
- Total Listing Price on Amazon: $1425
- The ‘Per Cassette’ Price for the Cassettes: $17.60 (at 22c per tape)
- Projected Profits After Amazon Fees: $997.50 (Approximately 30% of Sales Price in Fees)
- % Profit – 5660%
- Shipping Cost to Send in to FBA: $6.90
- Time Spent Listing Tapes: About 2 hours
- Time Spent Labeling and Packaging Tapes: About 1 hour
Let’s break it down a little bit.
Of the 80 new tapes listed, about half of them were rare tapes where I had the only listing for that particular item. Some of them were not even available in other formats, like CD. Many of these tapes I listed for $35-50. $35 is a magic number when listing items on Amazon, as $35 is the price trigger for the Amazon Free Shipping promotion. $35 seems like a lot of money for a cassette tape, but remember that I have sold a number of used tapes for $35. I am confident that a lot of these tapes will sell for $35 and the new tapes will sell considerably faster than used copies. When you have the only copy of a rare tape, you can ask premium prices for them!
For the other half of the new cassette tapes, I listed a lot of them in the $15-20 range. These were mostly tapes that had competing New offers from Merchant-Fulfilled sellers in the $5-8 range, but there were no competing offers from FBA sellers. Bingo! These are also great for me, because many FBA sellers qualify for Free Prime 2-Day shipping. Many Prime members only buy items from FBA sellers, so they can use their free 2-day shipping. New FBA offers also almost always have the Amazon Buy Box display, which leads to significantly quicker sales and higher profits.
About 15 of the tapes had a lot of competition. These were the newer pop and pop country tapes, where there were existing FBA offers to contend with. Most of these tapes ended up being listed at $8-9 and they were the cheapest offer for New FBA tapes in each listing.
We will talk about how quickly these cassettes sold and the profits earned in a future post. FBA is still processing the shipment now, so I have no sales to report yet.
Stay Tuned and please leave comments below, so other sellers can discuss this post.
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