Welcome back to Book Flipper University! Last week we covered how to condition and prepare used books for Amazon, and this week we’re going to show you how to separate your books by splits and weight, AccelerList’s Box Contents process, and how to box up your books. Let’s jump right in.
Once you submit your batch, Amazon will tell you where to ship your books. Sometimes you’ll get lucky and have no splits, but more often than not you’ll have to go back through your books and separate by which Amazon warehouse they’ll be shipped to. That’s why after you scan in and prep your books, it’s best to put them in shorter stacks with the spines and titles lined up in the order you scan them in. Go through the titles and separate your books by split.
Amazon will tell you how to split your books in Seller Central. Go to your shipping queue, click on the batch, and click the “review and modify units” button.
That will pull up your list with the book titles and unit numbers based on the order you scanned your books in. If you stack your books in scanning order by 10 or 20, for example, the unit numbers can help you find your titles faster.
Once your books are separated for the splits, if applicable, you’re ready to start Box Contents. For this demo, we’ll be using AccelerList software. If you remember from last time, we lucked out with a split-free batch, so we’ll just be making splits by weight or box size. Let’s dive in.
Go into AccelerList and select List > Box Contents from the navigation bar. Then, select the batch you’ll be working off of.
Once your batch list has opened, click the “add a box” button.
Click on the “Scan SKU to add to the current box” bar and start scanning with your desktop barcode scanner! For this step, we recommend starting with larger books so they go at the bottom of the box. As you scan each book, place it in the box.
Boxing up books is a bit like a game of tetris. You’ll want to do your best to fit as many books as possible in a box and as tightly as possible to prevent books from shifting around too much and becoming damaged in transit. Feel free to use dunnage, or box filler, if necessary. Just remember that you need to keep your boxes under 50 pounds.
If you need to use multiple boxes for a shipment, go back into AccelerList and click the “new box” button before you start scanning books into that new box. After you fill a box in a multi-box shipment, we recommend writing the box number and weight (we put each box on our scale and round up to the nearest pound) on one of the box flaps with a permanent marker. This makes labeling the boxes easier later, especially when you have more than just a few boxes.
Once you’ve finished scanning your last book, click the “print label” button and print the 2D barcode on a sheet of paper. Set this sheet on top of the box, and go back to the Box Contents Manager in AccelerList to print the rest of the labels for the rest of the boxes. Just click the “work on box” button, the “print label” button, and then set the printout with the box. You can also do this as you go after you scan the last book in each box.
Now, let’s head back to Amazon to the Prepare Shipment Summary. We’ll go step by step here, too.
This is the complete list of books in this shipment. Don’t worry that they’re not separated by box here. AccelerList will communicate that to Amazon for you. Just keep scrolling to step 2.
Select your preferred shipping partner, whether that’s UPS, FedEx, or another carrier.
First, select how your shipment will be packed. Choose from the dropdown either “everything in one box” for a single-box shipment, or “more than one SKU per box” if you have multiple boxes. Then, make sure to click the “use 2D barcodes” checkbox to utilize the labels you printed in AccelerList.
Troubleshooting Tip: If the use 2D barcodes option doesn’t show up, make sure to enable it in your account settings in Amazon Seller Central. There are instructions for how to do this in AccelerList.
If you have multiple boxes, you’ll be prompted to set the number of boxes and the weight for each one. This is where those numbers you wrote on the box flap come in handy. You can enter dimensions if you’d like, but it’s not necessary.
Here, your total shipment cost will be calculated. To compare costs from different shipping carriers, simply change the carrier in step 2 and scroll back down to this step to see the price differences. Once you’re ready to proceed, check the “I agree to terms and conditions” box and click “Accept charges.”
Click the “print box labels” button to print your shipping labels.
To finish up, complete your shipment on Amazon, tape your boxes shut, and tape both the AccelerList 2D labels and shipping labels on the outside of your boxes. We’ll show you how we label our boxes on the next segment of Book Flipper University. Before you finish this batch, make sure to update your data back in AccelerList.
Go back to AccelerList > List > History and view your completed batches. Click your most recent batch.
Export to the tracking spreadsheet and enter your shipping date and cost. Finally, click the “export to tracking spreadsheet” button. This will group all of your data together and provide you with a file you can put into your tracking sheet to monitor your costs, source, and other data.
And that’s Box Contents for you! See you next time on Book Flipper University.
Usually when we scan in our books, we put a box on the scale and fill it as we scan until the box is full or we reach 49.9 pounds. Then we hope for no splits so we don’t have to do box contents and handle the books again. If all goes well and we have no splits, all we have to do is close the box, slap a shipping label on it, and drop it off at UPS or FedEx. You may want to give this method a go if you find that you typically don’t end up with splits.
BOOK FLIPPER RESOURCES
This week’s video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c19crsWaPmg
Book Flipper Blog: http://bit.ly/2qFe31w
Book Flipper Facebook Group: http://bit.ly/2IYSKiU
Free Listing Spreadsheet: http://bit.ly/2vfMcud
Tracking Spreadsheet: http://bit.ly/2Ho44rx
The Book Scouting App I Use: http://bit.ly/2voBstC
My Online Arbitrage Tool: http://bit.ly/2HuCnh3
The 100 Book Challenge: http://bit.ly/2H3mkY5
The Listing Software I Use: http://bit.ly/2qAxEjV
Box Level Contents Spreadsheet: http://bit.ly/2qxesCW
Scouting Tools I Use (scanner, printer, etc): http://bit.ly/2viDRpF