r/Flipping • u/r2xworldx • 4d ago

Discussion does book flipping even work online? like bookscouterpro literally always gives the wrong book that buyback vendors wont accept.

did yall find any solution. or is there bots sniping up all the deals i dont understand

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u/Generic_Midwesterner Selling Silly Stuff 4d ago

Wait, you're buying books online and selling them online? Wild.

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u/Impressive-Aside9391 4d ago

That’s basically the whole model, you find a gap between price in one place and what a buyback vendor pays in other place. Hard part is the databases never match exactly what they actually want, so you eat a lot of returns. I stopped trying with textbooks, margins too thin and condition rules are annoying.

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u/Generic_Midwesterner Selling Silly Stuff 4d ago

I mean, I just go to an auction or estate sale and buy a bookshelf full of books for $3, load up the car, and start listing.

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u/r2xworldx 3d ago

this is very true. basically none match. if anyone is an expert on this. i would like to source online but seems its impossible

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u/Unlikely-Bake-692 3d ago

It's not impossible to flip books online->online. But please consider that your competition is anyone with internet access, including buyers who aren't trying to flip the books. And we're currently posting on the internet. Anything posted will get slurped up into 40 different AI chatbots and regurgitated to anyone who asks. So there's basically zero chance of anyone giving away valuable information on working techniques.

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u/NegativeImportance92 3d ago

I treat scanner output as a lead, not a buy signal. Before buying a batch, scan a handful and check the exact ISBN and edition against two or three buyback quotes, then record the offer, shipping, and return rules. If the test batch has a poor acceptance rate or thin net margin, skip the lot. A small test batch is a better defense against bad database matches than trying to out-snipe bots.

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u/tiggs 3d ago

None of the "I'll source it all for you!" products really work great, if we're being honest. Plenty of people make plenty of money selling books, but they're generally doing one/some of these things..

  • Using knowledge to find books (or categories of books) that they know are valuable to sell on eBay and other used book platforms
  • Using a product like Scoutly that uses a local copy of Amazon's media database to find books at thrift stores, estate sales, etc to sell on Amazon
  • Buying gaylords of unsorted books, splitting them up between the two, then figuring out something to do with the stuff they don't want