Amazon Trade-ins: How To Take Advantage Of The Amazon Trade-ins  For Your Book Business

You must be considering to start taking advantage of the Amazon trade-in program and make some extra money. You must be coming across these free money program offered by Amazon. And yes it is an opportunity not to sit back and not take advantage of.

I always refer to the Amazon trade-in program as free money. Free money in the sense that, it is just the simplest way I have ever seen to make some money. You can literally make thousands of dollars just doing nothing but simply sending your books to Amazon to be paid instantly. I have been able to make $986.00 in a single day during a peak trade-in period.

I am going to share with you the importance of the trade-in program to your book business, how so many people are still not taking advantage of the Trade-in program offered by Amazon. I am going to break the steps for you and point you to the systems you can use to fully enjoy online sourcing and trade-ins and what you can do with the money made from your successful trade-ins.

What Is Amazon Trade-in Program?

The Amazon Trade-in service makes it possible to trade the stuff you no longer want or use to Amazon for a specific fee. Amazon will pay you instantly after they have received the item you traded into Amazon.

The Amazon trade-in is usually open for products such as Kindle E-readers, video games, smartphones, and many other items. In our case, it will be for books.

Do you know many booksellers don’t even have the idea a program like this is being offered by Amazon?

It was surprising when I realized this. Here is how I realized many booksellers are still not taking advantage of the trade-in programs. I for one, I never go by a day without scanning through Amazon pages searching for books I can trade-in to Amazon.

By the way, I have my private Facebook family (group) of booksellers so from time to time, I will always go in there to share profitable trade-in opportunities I come across for the members to take advantage of. But I was surprised by the responses I got. They kept asking what does trade-in mean? and I was very surprised many still don’t have a clue Amazon trade-ins exist.

How does the trade-in process work?

Since we will be searching for books on the Amazon platform with profitable trade-in opportunities, below are the exact steps to follow;

First, you will need to spot a trade-in opportunity. Here is a clear example of a profitable trading opportunity.

From the above trade-in, you can get a copy of this book for $98.99 and trade it over to Amazon for $125.25 making a profit of $26.26.

Well, trade-in opportunities don’t just usually show up on Amazon pages, you have to go deep and search these opportunities. I use about an hour every day to scan for trade-ins. It is easy for me because I use an online sourcing program which comes with a plugin and I can just run on a specific page, it will bring out all the profitable trades available on that page.

I will just go ahead and buy the books and ship them to Amazon. There are days, you won’t be able to get any trade-in opportunity and there will be days just on a single search you will find a full page worth of trade-in opportunities. So remember every day won’t be Christmas. I have been able to make close to a thousand dollars in a single day just from trade-ins. I could even do more but I ran out of cash to purchase books.

Secondly, once you spot a trade-in opportunity, it is important to purchase the book, then claim and submit the trade in the Amazon system immediately. To confirm a trade you just need to click on the link “Trade in yours for an Amazon Gift Card up to $125.25” like from our example above and you will get to the following page with some questions to describe your book conditions.

Note: Amazon will reject books when the cover and binding are not intact, water damage, having notes and names on the cover and books with excessive writing or highlighting. Make sure before you purchase a book for trade-in, it meets the Amazon Trade-in requirements.

Once you complete and select the right answers for the question to best describe your book,  you will be directed to confirm the ISBN of the book and continue with your submission.

Make sure to confirm the ISBN is correct and click continue. Once you click on continue, you will be directed on the final confirmation page which will look like the image below;

Once you have done your final check to make sure all is fine, you can click “Confirm Trade-in” to submit your trade-in. Once that is done, you will be provided with a shipping label to print and use to ship the book directly to Amazon for free. An email will be sent directly to your inbox with the same shipping label.

Amazon offers free shipping but you will have to take full responsibility for the packing. You should always remember to pack your books securely to avoid the book getting damaged in transit. You can use a bubble wrap, kraft paper or some soft filler to pack securely. You can also use a double box packing method by placing a box inside a box and use packing tape to seal securely.

That is how simple the process is and that is how you can make some quick cash in just no time.

Once you have completed the submission process, you will have 14 and up to 21 days in some cases to send the book over to Amazon.  You can always check the status of your trade-in via your Amazon account as below;

Once you are directed to the next page, scroll down towards the bottom of the page to search for your trade-in account as with the picture below;

In your account, you will be able to view all your submitted trade-ins and know when they have been confirmed and payments made.

Once the book you traded in gets to Amazon you will receive the payment in a gift card balance.

NB: It is very important to always check from time to time the trade-in value for all trade-ins you have submitted. This is because Amazon sometimes increases the value of the trade-in and you can just cancel your current trade-in and claim the increased trade-in value if you have not already shipped the book to Amazon.

I have had this experience countless times and I have been able to get an additional $50 for a single trade-in just by reclaiming a new trade-in value.

What can you do with the gift card?

You can always use your gift card balance to shop on Amazon or exchange it for cash which is a service offered by the platform I use for sourcing books.

Also, not only Amazon offers trade-ins for books. There are other platforms you can find on book scouter who also offer trade-in for cash via Paypal. You can look out for trade-in opportunities out of Amazon to get cash into your Paypal account. This can be done by purchasing books from Amazon with your gift card balance and trade it to a third party program out of Amazon for cash.

But as a bookseller, I only use my gift card balance to buy books directly from Amazon to re-sell. I have been able to use trade-ins to largely grow my inventory.

Some advantages for trade-ins and why I do the money dance when I spot one.

I really love to do trade-ins as they are very easy to process. It doesn’t take any hard work to process and submit a trade-in with Amazon or any other third party sites out there. As for me, I only buy the books and ship to the prep center of the program I use since I am not based in the US.

They pack and ship the book to Amazon for a $2 fee per book. So I do not have to worry about packing and shipping. All I need for my book business is just my laptop and the internet, then I can be anywhere in the world and still be cashing in.

One of the reasons I love the trade-in program is because the payment is made immediately the book is received by Amazon. Unlike selling books FBA, you will have to wait until an interested buyer purchases your book from your store. It can take some time before you make the sale.

Another important aspect I really like with trade-ins is you can also get instant payment as soon as you submit a trade-in. When you start sending books for trade-in you won’t be able to enjoy instant payments immediately. Amazon will have to trust your account after some trade-in transactions before you can start benefiting from instant payments.

Also, as I mentioned earlier I can use the gift card to purchase books and grow my FBA book inventory with payments and profits from trade-ins. You can start your book business with little or no capital and make use of the trade-in program to raise some capital to start buying and selling books FBA.

I know of many people selling thousands of books FBA today who started with the trade-in program to raise the capital for their FBA business. You can read an article I wrote why you should sell books on Amazon FBA, or read my free complete beginner’s pdf guide which you can also get from my private facebook group by joining and checking the “files” section, that is if you are really interested to start your own book business.

The Platform I use to scan Amazon pages for trades.

Going through Amazon pages and looking for trading opportunities can be really boring and time-consuming. By all means, you will need a system to facilitate the scanning and sourcing process for you.

The program I personally use is the Text Book Money (Book Arbitrage) system which was the first platform to offer an extension for trade-ins. It will save you time and make the process very easy for you. The program is expensive compared with the other programs which I only realized after I had invested in it so I decided to stick with the program rather than jumping around.

You can use the program to scan pages in real-time and it will select all profitable trade-in deals available for you to make a purchase. You can also use the program to source profitable books to buy and sell via Amazon FBA.

Recently, I realized the Zen Arbitrage added a trade-in system with its platform. I can’t tell you much about it since I have not used the system. So I have no experience with their platform.

EndNote

Taking advantage of the Amazon trade-in program especially if you are in the book business space is a very good idea. You will be able to make some extra cash to fuel your book business on Amazon and make some extra profit. Sometimes trade-ins are rare to find but it is worth it to spend at least an hour just going through searching for books every day. You will be amazed by what you will find on certain days. If you have some experience with trade-ins, you can share it with us in the comment sections. I will be more than pleased to learn more.