Source by Steve Johnson

More and more people buy used books online, making this niche market the perfect home-based business to start with little money and low risk. People want information. They don’t really care that a second hand book has a few handling marks, the owner’s name is printed on the inside front cover, that some of the pages are dog-eared. They expect this. Ultimately, what they really want is to save money. And this is where you can help… and make a profit at the same time!

When you sell books online you will enjoy a lot of advantages over traditional used book stores by starting out selling at the most popular website offering used books for sale, Amazon Marketplace. These advantages include:

You don’t need to write a business plan. You don’t need to pay expensive overhead like rent and insurance. You’ll work from home in your spare time. You can just jump in and start the same day!
You can start small just offering the books you already own, the ones taking up space on your bookshelf that you haven’t read since college.
Speaking of college, there are lots of people searching online for good quality, current textbooks. Maybe your school textbooks still have some value.
You can set up your Amazon Marketplace seller’s account for free and list books at no charge. Amazon only takes its cut when a book sells, so you’re not out anything to list books.
With practice you can list a book for sale in less than 2 minutes.
You can start with what you have. You probably already have what you need to get started right there in your own home. If not, you can buy most of the items at your nearest discount store cheap.
You get paid cash within 2 weeks of starting to sell books on Amazon.
Used books are plentiful. You can find good quality used books and CDs at yard sales during the Spring and Summer months.
Supply is constant. Thrift store and library book sales offer quality non-fiction titles at low prices. Wait for final day and look for bag sales to stock up on product to earn even more profits.
You don’t need a lot of room to get started, as you can store over 1,000 books in a hallway, alcove or spare walk-in closet in your home.

Selling books on Amazon also saves you time. Since Amazon has branded itself as the top destination on the Internet where you can save money on books, they can deliver the most traffic of ready and willing book buyers to your front door. But you’ll also save time because the Amazon Marketplace does most of the work for you.

It posts the picture of the book, provides a description of the book, shows the sales ranks of books, and even reveals what others are selling that used book in like condition for, so you know if you have a winner to list online or a dog to put out at your next garage sale. They have a variety of simple listing and social media sharing tools to help you make money, learn the business, and offer ways to scale your business into a full-time national or global used book online store.

But while this is indeed the perfect home-based business, there are some things to know to keep from losing money and buying the wrong books to sell.

You will need to do your research early on, focusing on the most profitable, fastest selling books, while avoiding the slow movers. These probably won’t be books that you would buy for yourself, but that doesn’t matter. You’re buying second hand books that customers are wanting to buy online.

And even though the Amazon Marketplace is the perfect place to start your used book business from home, you’ll want to keep learning and expanding your knowledge of where to sell used books at other websites to grow your home-based business.