Sell your used text books online
There are several ways to sell your used text books online but they all boil down to two main ways: 1-Sell it through a buyback program or 2- Sell it yourself to a customer.
There are pros and cons for both but in short, if you sell it through a buy-back program, most companies pay shipping and will send you a check or put money in your PayPal account fairly quickly. You won't get as much as you would if you were to sell it yourself directly to a customer but you'll have to plan on doing a lot more work. For example, instead of printing a label from your computer and dropping it at the nearest UPS location, you'll have to post it with a description, answer questions and ship it. Shipping may be a big pain depending on whether you have access to a UPS/FedEx account or not. Most sites that facilitate selling will also have rating and some kind of protection for sellers and buyers. Regardless of where you decide to sell it, you'll still feel like you overpaid and aren't getting as much back but you may feel less so if you sell it yourself.
In short, if you're looking for a quick buck, sell it to Amazon or another company that will buy it back and be done with it. You won't have to worry about the dropping value or the time it takes to sell it (both transaction time and the hassle of doing the work). Below is a partial list of companies that will buy your books and resale them taking the hassle out of your life. I sold all of mine on Amazon.com because they tended to have the highest trade in value because they give you money via online credit. Since I love shopping on Amazon, I don't mind spending my proceeds there.
Amazon (they will give you trade-in credit): http://www.amazon.com/tradein
- http://www.bookbyte.com
- http://www.betterworld.com/buyback.aspx
- http://www.sellbackyourbook.com/
- http://textbooksrus.com
- http://www.bookjingle.com/
- http://www.cash4books.net
- http://www.textbookrecycling.com
- http://www.firstclassbooks.com/
- http://valorebooks.com/
- http://www.webuytextbooks.com/
- http://buyback.collegebooksdirect.com
- http://www.textbooks.com
- http://www.chegg.com/
- http://www.textbooklink.com/
- http://www.powells.com
I highly recommend that rather than checking the price at each of the above sites to find out where you could make the most, just go to www.bookscouter.com and they'll search these sites and tell you how much you'll get and where.
Here are the top markplace sites that enable you to sell it directly to a customer:
Ebay's Half.com site: www.half.com is probably the best and biggest marketplace for used textbooks followed by Amazon.com.
The challenge with DIY is that if you don't sell regularly online, you could end up with the books after they have lost even more value.
Also, you may consider trading your books: BookSwap.com and BookMooch.com
Finally, instead of buying your text books, you could lease them for much less. Check out www.chegg.com for details.
If you know of other DIY sites, please let me know.
Amazon Outage 6/29/10
Looks like Amazon is having technical issues. Their site and their premium stores are down. I take solace in that it happens to all of us at some point. If Amazon, with their redundancy and star-studded employee list goes down occasionally, don't be surprised when one of your favorite sites goes down too. Just be patient. It will come back up.
Today's outage has lasted for at least 2 hours and is till continuing. If you think about it, given Amazon's revenue of $26.7 billion (according to their financial statements), each hour represents ~$304K in sales. Using 22.47% gross profit margin from their financial statements, that's roughly $68K in profit for each our that it is down. I'm sure EVERYONE at Amazon is aware of the issue and they are doing everything they can to restore service.
Here is a site that currently uses Amazon's store software and they are also affected by the outage: DVD Storage company.
Here is a link to an article that goes into more details: Amazon outage.
How to Calculate the Most Effecient Order Quantity or Economic Order Quantity- EOQ
Here is the scenario. You're considering how much inventory to buy for an online business. You know how much you've sold in the past so you're able to calculate the Average or Mean monthly or weekly sales (aka Demand). You are also able to calculate the Standard Deviation for this demand using your actual sales numbers. (If you don't know what your Demand and Std. Dev are, you should probably use your best guess.)
There are multiple configurations for this scenario. Is this a one-time event, e.g, you're ordering for the holidays or is this something where you have constant demand and you just need to establish an efficient Re-Order point that takes into consideration service level agreements, lost opportunities, ordering costs, and liquidation costs?
Here is the basic formula for Excel: =SQRT((2*DEMAND*ORDERING_COSTS)/(CARRYING_COSTS))
Where Demand= Number you expect to sell
Ordering Cost = The cost of placing the order (this is NOT the unit cost)
Carrying Cost = The cost of carrying inventory-this includes things like shrinkage, warehousing, etc. This should be calculated as a percentage of the unit cost. For example, if it costs me $10 for a widget and 10% to maintain it, the inventory carrying cost is = (10 *.10) = $1.
For a more detailed explanation, please see this website: Economic Order Quantity- EOQ
Also, see this Spreadsheet with some examples of One-Time event ordering. One Time Event Ordering.
I'll post some additional examples as soon as I get more time.
(Disclaimer- this is material adapted from an Operations Class at the University of Utah and not my original material)
Calculate DPMO for Six Sigma
If you have the short term sigma score, you can enter it in this spreadsheet to get the DPMO.
If you have the DPMO and need the short term sigma score, you can enter it in this spreadsheet.
Six Sigma- What is it, how to use it, etc
This is NOT my material. This is from an MBA course at the University of Utah.Six_Sigma_Introduction
Here are the key steps for Six Sigma's DMAIC (they are further defined in the PDF).
- Define
- Measure
- Analyze
- Improve
- Control
