High and low historical pricing data, and how to profit from it with
Part 4 in a 5-part series on
In Part I to III of this series, I covered a lot of ground:
- How
Amazon ‘s trade in program works. - Upsides and downsides to mining
Amazon for trade in opportunity. - The three ways to profit from
Amazon trade-in credit. - Top 5 tricks to profit.
- Only two major mistakes you can make.
- Using a prep service to streamline trade-in mining.
- How to make cash off trade-in by using trade-in values to identify underpriced books.
- How Textbook Money inspired me to copy their software for 1/20 the price. (Update: ZenTrade is live. See everything here.)
In this article, I’m going to reveal something I’ve never talked about before
The premise is a simple one, in two parts:
Premise #1: Trade in values are fluctuating all the time.
If you can hold your books and trade them in when you know historically trade-in value is highest, you can get the highest return.
Premise #2: Prices of third party offers on
If you buy your books when you know historically they are lowest, you can pay the least.
It’s gets better…
What if you could both buy books when they’re cheapest and “sell” when trade-in value is highest? What if you could increase the gap between the buying price and the trade-in price to the widest possible spread, by knowing historical pricing data?
There is a little-known pattern to trade in values – both when they tend to go up, and when they tend to go down. If you know what these dates are, you can time both your purchases and trades to buy low and then trade in when the prices peak.
Yes, this can be done.
How awesome would be it be if we knew the exact date books were cheapest, and the exact date trade in values are highest? Then we could do all our buying on one day, all our trading on another day, and make a killing?
It’s almost that simple, but not quite. Because pricing trends affect various books differently, we can’t just memorize a couple dates and exploit this trick to the fullest.
While textbooks tend to have peaks of trade in value and valleys (no pun intended) of price in the same windows of time, there are many textbooks that don’t follow these rules. Certain textbooks have different peak sales and low sales windows, and naturally that affects their trade in value and price.
One example to illustrate the complexity: Test study guides for the “Multistate Bar Exam” (MBE). At a glance these appear to be regular textbooks, but they peak (and valley) at totally different times than other textbooks. This exam only happens at the end of July and January, which affects their pricing fluctuations. Trade in values tend to peak a little before the test, and prices tend to plummet after.
Every book has its own pricing history. So there’s way more than can be shared in one article (or one book).
The best you can hope to memorize is the broad strokes. Which I’m about to reveal…
How did I get acquainted with
I mentioned this in a previous article, but over at Zen Arbitrage we have a massive data harvesting system churning through tens of millions of products on
When the Textbook Money scandal hit, I began looking more closely at the data to assess just how profitable (or not)
A year later, here we are – with some cool data to share to help you get the highest returns on your
Historical pricing history gold #1: When
Highest trade-in values for textbooks:
First 12 days of August.
Analysis: The numbers here are sightly weird in that there is no single “big date” within the first two weeks that is far and away the one where trade in values spike to a crazy degree. It’s mostly even across the beginning of the month.
Second place: December 26th.
Analysis: Trade in prices the day after Christmas surge to levels 70% above normal. As far as single days of the year, December 26th is THE day to submit books to
Both of these windows / dates makes sense, because textbook sales peak shortly after each of these ranges, and
Sidenote: As a quick example of how wildly this varies depending on the type of book, I noticed with “Gift”-type books (box sets, etc) trade-in values are highest the first week of December
Historical pricing history gold #2: When
Trade-in credit mining and arbitrage is not just for textbooks. But the
In our database, we store pricing data a little differently than trade in, so I pulled up the top 30 dates where textbook prices were lowest.
Lowest textbook prices: 11 of the 30 lowest days of the year were in December.
Before pulling these numbers, I suspected December had the lowest prices (sales of textbooks are also lowest in early-to-mid December) but I didn’t know it was so severe that 1/3 of the examples of a book’s lowest price were in a single month.
What does this mean?
Two actionable (and profitable) takeaways here:
If you’re buying textbooks, the time to buy is:
Mid-december
If you have a textbook, the times to trade it in are (usually):
Early-August.
December 26th. (More generally, late-December).
If its not obvious already, I timed this series of articles on
December is the best time to hunt for
So there you go, you can make a lot of money with that one.
S/he with the best data wins.
-Peter Valley
Now for a mini-annoucement
In the last article, I announced that I’m releasing a new
What I didn’t mention (in much detail) was one of its features that makes it better than Textbook Money:
(Update: ZenTrade is live. See everything here.)
ZenTrade will be packed with historical trade-in value data
For every book, this will include:
- Amount and date of 12-month highest
Amazon trade-in value - Amount and date of 12-month lowest
Amazon trade-in value - 12 month average
Amazon trade-in value average - Percentage of deviation the current value is from the average (how much higher or lower is it than normal).
- Amount and date of 12-month highest
Amazon sales price - Amount and date of 12-month lowest
Amazon sales price - 12 month average sales
Amazon price - Percentage of deviation the current
Amazon sales price is from the average (how much higher or lower is it than normal).
This will allow you to time your trades to get the highest return.
(Get on the early bird list and we’ll send some cool free videos)
A recap of ZenTrade if you missed it…
How Zen Trade works:
- Install in your browser (one click).
- Go to the
Amazon Trade In Store (any category). - Surf the trade in store for opportunity (find trade in opportunity on
Amazon or 3rd party sites). ZenTrade embeds trade in value (+ more) on theAmazon page. - Find books cheaper than their trade in value.
- Lock in the trade in value on
Amazon . - (Alternately, scan over 40 book buy back sites for the highest instant cash offer)
- Buy the cheap book.
- Ship it to
Amazon (or the third party book buy back site). - Profit the difference in
Amazon trade in credit.
ZenTrade Features
(Prediction: “Textbook Money” will try to steal or copy these as soon as this post goes live)
- Current trade-in value
- Current
Amazon price. - Instant
Amazon -to-Amazon trade alerts. - Historical highest trade in value + date.
- Historical lowest trade in value + date.
- 12-month average trade in value.
- Percentage deviation from average (is it higher or lower than average?)
- One-click scan of over 40 other bookselling sites for cheapest copy.
- One-click scan of over 40 sites for highest instant buy back value.
- “Price Proximity Alerts”: see if
Amazon price is close to trade in value (to find severely undervalued books to sell for cash) - No-scroll trade-in mining: Profit totals displayed at top of every page.
- Email alerts: Find out instantly when the trade-in value of any book goes up.
- A video library on every trick for trade-in credit arbitrage.
Stay tuned for announcement in a few days…
(Update: ZenTrade is live. See everything here.)
PS: Look for tomorrow’s article on
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I wonder about the fact that the cheapest books are all in the acceptable condition category. Won’t Amazon trade in reject these?
Why trade the book in when you can sell the book for bigger profit?
I addressed this in a couple other articles in this series. I agree, but trade-in appeals to a certain type of risk-averse seller.