Timed trades: profiting off Amazon trade-in price fluctuations

High and low historical pricing data, and how to profit from it with Amazon trade-in arbitrage

Part 4 in a 5-part series on Amazon trade in credit arbitrage.

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. Amazon is one giant algorithm, and that algorithm is constantly adjusting trade in values based on numerous factors.

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 Amazon are fluctuating just the same. Going up, going down. Not because of Amazon algorithm, because of normal buying and selling activity.

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 Amazon pricing and trade in history?

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 Amazon daily. Among it all is trade in data for virtually every book in Amazon‘s trade in store, not just at the moment but going back over two years.

When the Textbook Money scandal hit, I began looking more closely at the data to assess just how profitable (or not) Amazon trade-in arbitrage could be.

A year later, here we are – with some cool data to share to help you get the highest returns on your Amazon trade in mining (should you choose to venture into this world.)

Historical pricing history gold #1: When Amazon trade-in value are highest.

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 Amazon‘s trade-in program.

Both of these windows / dates makes sense, because textbook sales peak shortly after each of these ranges, and Amazon wants to stock up just before (not during) the sales rush.

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 Amazon textbook prices are lowest

Trade-in credit mining and arbitrage is not just for textbooks. But the Amazon trade-in store leans heavily towards textbooks, so historical textbook pricing data is of chief relevance to trade-in.

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 Amazon trade in around these dates, because they point to one thing:

December is the best time to hunt for Amazon trade in opportunity: Prices on textbooks are lowest right now, and trade in values are highest at the end of the month.

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 Amazon trade-in mining tool called ZenTrade (at less than 1/20 the cost of the “Textbook Money” program that inspired it).

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:

1. Install in your browser (one click).
2. Go to the Amazon Trade In Store (any category).
3. Surf the trade in store for opportunity (find trade in opportunity on Amazon or 3rd party sites). ZenTrade embeds trade in value (+ more) on the Amazon page.
4. Find books cheaper than their trade in value.
5. Lock in the trade in value on Amazon.
6. (Alternately, scan over 40 book buy back sites for the highest instant cash offer)
7. Buy the cheap book.
8. Ship it to Amazon (or the third party book buy back site).
9. 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)

1. Current trade-in value
2. Current Amazon price.
3. Instant Amazon-to-Amazon trade alerts.
4. Historical highest trade in value + date.
5. Historical lowest trade in value + date.
6. 12-month average trade in value.
7. Percentage deviation from average (is it higher or lower than average?)
8. One-click scan of over 40 other bookselling sites for cheapest copy.
9. One-click scan of over 40 sites for highest instant buy back value.
10. “Price Proximity Alerts”: see if Amazon price is close to trade in value (to find severely undervalued books to sell for cash)
11. No-scroll trade-in mining: Profit totals displayed at top of every page.
12. Email alerts: Find out instantly when the trade-in value of any book goes up.
13. 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 Amazon trade-in before the release of ZenTrade in a couple days: “How to turn Amazon trade in credit into cash.”