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Selling On Amazon

3 Month Post Challenge Update

Video Transcription (unedited):

Hey Matthew Osborn here with The 100 Book Challenge giving you a very overdue update of the wonder of challenge numbers. If this is your first time on the channel or hearing about the 100 Book Challenge., my name is Matthew I started with a challenge back in March, ran it for 90 days. And the goal of this challenge was is to go out to libraries and thrift stores every single day for 90 days, and try and list 100 books a week on Amazon, and see what the sales would be and see how long it would take.

And so today, I'm giving a breakdown of how many books have sold what my revenue is a little bit close to three months after the challenge little bit over three months after the challenge. So we'll be going over these numbers today. And I'll show you the good things and also some of the bad things that happened. And some things didn't go quite as planned just to be over and honest with what happened throughout the gentleman. So let's dive into the numbers. So books listed two items listed as 1377 total items listed. Since then, unit sold is coming at 765 to 765 of those books that were initially listed have been sold this far. nailed the first shipment showing up I think around three weeks after the challenge started, which would have been towards the end of March.

So some of the books have been in there as long as a little over five months now. And nothing's that that six more yet. But little over five months now in the books list at the end of may have been in there just over three months. So some of them haven't been in there too long. Some of them have been there almost the six month mark, where I might start incurring some long term storage fees soon, if those don't start selling, so 1377 listed 765 sold. And 562 still in stock 562 which leaves about 57% have sold.

So I was hoping this number of books sold to be a little bit higher by Now granted, like I said some of them have only been in there about three months. But I was hoping to have the number closer to about 65 to 70% by analysis a lot of those have been in there quite a few months. But 57% isn't too bad. So I'm okay with that will repriced sometime soon and see if it drops a little bit more. But that's where the status of those books are. Now one of the things that did change was different than what I initially expected was, is I don't really have a way of explaining why but for some reason June sales just tanked sales were extremely low. If you guys remember from previous videos, I think my revenue from for me the last month of challenge was somewhere around 4400, something like that. For some reason, June dropped about $1,000 or 1200 dollars in sales total. Now granted, I wasn't listening anymore booked in from the challenge in June. But for some reason sales kind of tanked in June, it is a slow month normally, they started picking back up in July, towards the end of July, I had an issue where all of a sudden 200 books from the challenge went into stranded inventory, no idea why it said there were incomplete listings, it took a long time to try and figure out why those books were talked to a bunch of customer service reps, they couldn't figure out why.

So 100 of these books, many of them being extremely high priced books. So a lot of the lower price books were selling, bringing down the average sale price. We're sitting there stranded in inventory for almost an entire month. So I think middle of August, I finally got in touch with the customer service rep that understood what was going on, even though he couldn't really describe it to me. But long story short, took about 45 minutes to an hour in person, they went in and fixed all 100 of those books. Those books all went active and they went active, the most popular textbook day on Amazon. So sales that day after there's 100 books were fixed, I think my sales around $815, just that day, and they were fixed till about nine or 10 o'clock in the morning. So the last half of the day, the busiest textbook season that I did about $815 in sales just from the books from the 100 book challenge.

So that's why some of the books probably could have sold little more that didn't because they're sitting there stranded for a long time. But that $800 day was encouraging to kind of get back on track after the books have been stranded for so long. So revenue so far for the challenge is 12,430 $1,431 in revenue. Now profit is a little bit lower than I was expecting to be normally profit went on said and done, which is still 90 close to that damn the challenge. Once most these books that sold I mean, would be around 48%. So out of all of your revenue about 48% will end up being profit. But lower price books, of course, are gonna have a lot lower profit margins, because the amount Amazon takes out of those lower price books is a lot higher.

So my profit so far is $4,180. For those one, and $8 revenue, which is about 33%. Yeah, 33% ish profit on the actual total revenue number. So the 4100 as a little bit lower than liking hopefully now that all those more expensive books have been back listed on Amazon, my average sale price will be going up until the average profit margin for every single book that's sold will also go up. So I'm hoping to get that number, that percentage increase a little closer to that 48% that we initially are that I initially expected to sell in these books. But ROI is 172%. Now wondering, 70% is still really good. So three months of time it took to get all these books and the amount of money that I invested on that money up to this point. As 172%, which is a really good profit margin, that's not something you normally can get going through the stock market, anything else like that having a return of 172% on the initial money invested, and I still have 562 books that can be in there that can be sold, which will hopefully bring this much higher once all those books or good majority of those books actually sell out.

So the ROI, I'm really happy with 170%. But what I'm more interested in is, given the amount of time I spent during this challenge, what would it have equaled out to per hour of work? In other words, if I did all this work for the challenge is again equal to what I could have made it I just got another job, for instance and worked at a job instead of listing books. Or what would that hourly wage to go out to so about 144 hours are spent in total for the challenge, my average I think was about 12 hours a week for 12 weeks, hundred and 44 hours. profit so far was 4108.

And if you died divine learning 44 by 4188, $28 and 52 cents $20 and 32 cents an hour. So $20 22 cents an hour is what a equals out to right now, how much I would have made the amount of time that I spent in the hundred book challenge. And remember, I saw 462 books in stock that can still sell so this number is no keep going up. So I'm still happy with that even if everything were to stop right now even if these books weren't to sell which they well don't get me wrong. But even if they weren't to sell $20 an hour is pretty good wage for just going around to thrift stores five books for 12 hours a week and listing them on Amazon. It's only been a couple months after the challenge ended.

So this is one of the numbers I was most interested in. And that's one of the numbers I'm happy with. Even though everything else hasn't turned out exactly like I wanted it to so far. $12,400 isn't bad in sales up to this point, especially given how many books are left to sell. So I'm happy with what's happened up to this point in the challenge in a couple months, I'll do another update showing you where the rest of these numbers have kind of falling into place. And I'm really interested to see after about eight, nine months, what percentage total of books have sold, because normally is about 80% of books have sold out of all the ones you put an Amazon 80 to 90%. So we'll see how close to that number I get and how many more of these books sell. So thanks for being here for this update.

Let me know if you have any questions or numbers that you wanted to see up to this point that I didn't share with you. I'd be happy to let you know!

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Matthew Osborn
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