why not use book scouter to get the best buyback/sell price, and bigwords.com to get the lowest buy price?
Show HN: Solid side income from market inefficiencies
11–16 of 16 posts
Re: Show HN: Solid side income from market inefficiencies
#12why not use book scouter to get the best buyback/sell price, and bigwords.com to get the lowest buy price?
Are you suggesting that Flippiness should use those services or are you saying that a person can use those services for free without paying?
If latter, yes we could use those but we don't know how frequently they update their prices. If there is a mismatch between their prices and source prices, our data will be inaccurate. We get prices continuously in a cycle for all books that we have (almost a Million). This ensures we remove stale records.
If you meant Former, the issue is a person can't manually check prices for a lot of books every day. Even if they did it will cost them more timewise than our membership dues.
Re: Show HN: Solid side income from market inefficiencies
#13why not just do this trade yourself and keep all the money?
This is a valid point. The reason is that there is a manual process of getting the book shipped and then shipping it. This cannot scale very well. I can may be trade 50 books a day but that is the upper limit. I don't want to invest too much time into something that can't scale. By opening it up to the world with a monthly membership, I can take a vacation and still make money from this. Does that sound good enough?
Who takes the risk of buyers not paying and sellers not delivering? What about the risk of prices changing in the middle of a flip? I'm afraid I know the answer already...
Re: Show HN: Solid side income from market inefficiencies
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a valid point. The reason is that there is a manual process of getting the book shipped and then shipping it. This cannot scale very well. I can may be trade 50 books a day but that is the upper limit. I don't want to invest too much time into something that can't scale. By opening it up to the world with a monthly membership, I can take a vacation and still make money from this. Does that sound good enough?
Who takes the risk of buyers not paying and sellers not delivering? What about the risk of prices changing in the middle of a flip? I'm afraid I know the answer already...
Since you are buying and selling from/to businesses instead of people, there is a low chance of things going wrong.
You sell the book first and get a quote. The quote is good for at least a week and in a decent number of cases for 30 days. As long as you can get the book shipped to you within that time period and ship it to the buying website, you should be good.
I understand the skepticism and that is why we have the free plan to test it out at low level.
Re: Show HN: Solid side income from market inefficiencies
#15I like this a lot. I thought about doing something similar for used cell phones, where you could find price discrepancies between Craigslist, eBay, Amazon, and some others.
Re: Show HN: Solid side income from market inefficiencies
#16I like this a lot. I thought about doing something similar for used cell phones, where you could find price discrepancies between Craigslist, eBay, Amazon, and some others.
Thank you for kind words.
That is where we are planning to extend this. Also, eBay and Amazon dropshipping are a good target for this.