Small business blog / starting new bookstore / profitability / organization / rankings of a sane man

As I me mentioned before, I have a small retail store, I am switching to probably primarily selling books though. I will still sell what I have been selling, there are a few things that make it annoying. One is they are mostly smaller items that are easy to steal, another is they are difficult to display, it’s not feasible to individually price everything, and the things I can price the tags don’t stay on well. I also have a bunch of money tied up in high value items. Generally also the higher the value item, the lower the profit margin. I buy an item for $1.00 and it’s easy to sell for $2.00. Buy an item for $100.00 and it’s less likely to sell for $200.00. But of course the overall dollar amount is more.

Still though it’s looking like books are high profit margin items (used books that is). Talking to one person and they say they pretty much get books for free. But even buying a paperback for $0.20 or a hardback for $0.40, sell for $2.00 / $4.00 each, that’s 900% profit margin. If before I needed to sell $200.00 in a day to make $100.00 profit, now I need to sell about $110.00 to make $100.00 profit.

The downside is I imagine there are less high dollar books out there. I price checked online and few books I currently have are even listed for more than $20.00. But there is at least a price floor for books, media mail is $3.19, with 13% Ebay fee that’s $3.60. Well maybe I am a little wrong I do see some paperbacks listed for $2.00 with shipping, I guess if they are light enough shipping without media mail is less than $3.19. But still that falls in line with selling paperbacks for $2.00.

The god news also is if the books fail I still have the other goods, if the other side picks up I can do less books. The downside is sometimes it’s better to pick one thing to be really good at rather than two things you are average at. But as I was saying managing inventory for the other side is annoying. But say 200 of an item wholesale, you don’t know sales will be for it. You have 20 sales of it a year, now you have a bunch of money tied up in something that doesn’t sell well. Repeat that 10 times, 20 times, and you have tons of stuff that doesn’t sell. That means you need new things and need to risk buying more that doesn’t sell.

Back to profitability, some of what I sell I am only making 40-50% profit. One product I just got in I paid $18.00 each, sells for $30.00 each.

But, I don’t know that the bookstore that closed was busy to begin with. Maybe I have too high of an opinion of myself, but I am always looking to improve on things. Like people I used to work with, if I can do a better job than you (quicker, better quality, more efficient), and you have been doing the same job for 5 years, that means something is wrong. You’ve just been doing the exact same thing for 5 years without any effort to improve the process. Just off the top of my head I can think of dozens of possible ways to try and make the process better. So the same thing here, if the closed bookstore was doing the exact same thing for 40 year, then I can’t imagine there’s not room for improvement. I will try to source books cheaper, organize them better, advertise better, maybe have a computerized inventory you can look up online.

That’s partway why I am so obsessed about finding the optimal bookshelf system. The space I have isn’t huge but I could be looking at a bookcase that has 10 shelves for just small books, or 6 shelves so it can hold books of any size. My current thinking is some bookcases that have 8 shelves so they can hold small - small medium books and some with a mix of heights, that would have 7 shelves. 7 shelves vs 8 shelves doesn’t seem like much though, maybe it would be better to go down a size, 9 shelves vs 7 shelves. I don’t really know, with things in two places, might as well go smaller. I don’t know why I am doing all this anyway when things really need sorted first. No need in building a shelf that holds 12” tall books if it’s in a section that doesn’t even have any 12” books. This means getting everything sorted first. But to get everything sorted means that I need shelves to put them on. Maybe I will just build the 10 shelf bookcases and that will get all of the small paperbacks out of the way. This would be easier if I knew what was what. This is why I don’t get things done. I am going back and forth the best way to do things and they don’t get done. If I only have A and B size might as well put them together, if I have A,B, and C and C needs it’s own shelf, A can be smaller because B can go with C.

I think one goal should be clear out the back room, get everything sorted by subject. Figure out what will fit best after things get sorted. Maybe I can make shelves that while not adjustable are easier to modify if I choose to do so in the future. Get all the paperbacks organized and on shelves first and that will be a large piece of the puzzle that’s out of the way. But once everything is done I will have space for 12 small bookcases. What if I don’t have enough books to fill them and then I make them too small to fit larger books? Even if I do make things optimal for what I have now, things will change in the future. New, new plan. Gather all small paperbacks and see how much space they will take up. I can at least see how close I am. If they will all fit on 6 cases that have 10 shelves each then it would be clear I can make the case for cases that hold larger books but less overall.

This is the price you pay for being disorganized. I even could have planned this better even though I was 100% rushed in the end. I was getting ready but I wasn’t ready ready. Then I had to move everything in a few days. Before I can stack all the paperbacks I need somewhere to put them. So that’s the new new plan. Make an space where I can stack all the small paperback books.

Thanks steemit blog, step 1 make space, step 2 stack paperbacks, step 3 figure out how many shelves they will fit on, step 4, decide on height of shelves. It was a snow day today so that’s my excuse for not working right now. I may have taken a bunch of time to write this but I like to have a plan. If my plan was to just organize the books as I went I have a feeling it would just end up being a mess. This way I can optimize at least one big part of the puzzle. So this was more my stream of consciousness than an attempt at any kind of post that was readable, so if you did read all of this, I realize it probably made no sense as I didn’t really explain any of it. I am hoping this will make myself accountable, I have a plan I just need to follow through on it.

And to add onto it, if I have a bookcase with 10 shelves vs some of the standard shelves I have now with 6 shelves, that means I can fit 40% more product into the same space. (This won’t work for everything because the 12” books will have to go on a 6 shelf case).

I went to a bookstore the oner day for ideas, it really wasn’t very big. It was probably smaller than my store and my store isn’t huge. But my obsession with efficiency isn’t for nothing. 40% more space means 40% more product means 40% greater chance someone will buy something. (Over simplified, but you get the idea). Maybe that’s another reason I like the idea of books more, they stack nice and are easy to keep track of inventory-wise. When you have 1,000 items and they are all small it’s kind of a pain to keep track of them all. Why am I still talking? Maybe someday I will make posts better designed for people to read them and less me just talking to myself.