The Best Browser Extensions for Book Flipping
Step up your flip game with these powerful tools.
Intro
Hello again!
Things are ramping up right about now if you’re an Amazon seller. The Q4 toy rush has only just begun, and it’s nearing the time where you need to start sending in your books for January. I’ll be sending in my last two boxes of books at the end of this week, which should put me around 200 books to have stocked for the new semester. I’ll write up a post about my busy season performance when the time comes, but for now I wanted to write up a post about browser extensions and how they can make your life a lot easier when flipping books. The extensions I talk about in this post will all be free (except Keepa but you should already be paying for that), and are guaranteed to enhance your book flipping experience in one way or another.
Keepa
If you’re not already using the Keepa browser extension, you’re missing out. It puts all of the data available to you on the Keepa website within the product page on Amazon, as well as some bonus features. Being able to access this data without having to go to Keepa’s website in another tab is really convenient, and saves a lot of time in the long haul.
I won’t go too much deeper into the extension since you should already know how Keepa works, but there is one really nice feature that I want to highlight. When looking at the list of sellers on an item, it will actually show you the quantity of each seller. Here is an example below:
Knowing how much stock a seller has can be really useful when making a buying decision. In this specific instance, seeing that the lowest price has a stock of 16 would deter me from trying to flip this book because you’d have to hope that the seller will run out of inventory, which isn’t always a guarantee. If you ask me, the quality of life improvements from using the Keepa extension are definitely worth getting.
DS Amazon Quick View
This next extension is extremely helpful when it comes to sourcing books. DS Amazon Quick View is a great tool that allows you to get a lot of information on a product without having to actually click onto the product page.
As you can see from the screenshot, you can get additional information on a product without having to go to the listing. Being able to quickly glance at the sales rank as you scroll through search results makes it really easy to sort out potentially profitable books from busts. You know that a book with 1,000,000 sales rank isn’t worth your time, so you can save a few seconds per book by having this extension. While there is a paid version with additional features, I’ve never used it and I don’t find the extra tools to be as necessary in the context of flipping books as opposed to regular Amazon arbitrage. I may try out the paid version in the coming months as I start to scale, but I haven’t needed it yet.
FBA Profit Calculator
Another fantastic extension for any arbitrage seller on Amazon is the FBA Profit Calculator. This tool does all the math for you. Just put in your buy cost and selling price, and you can calculate the amount of money you can expect to make on that product. It also gives you a breakdown of the fees and some additional info on the product such as dimensions, weight, and ASIN.
One thing I like to use this calculator for is to determine if I can still make money even if the FBA price tanks by a certain amount. While the rule of thumb is usually selling a book for double your buy price, using this extension can help you with the exceptions (e.g a book is a lot heavier or lighter than usual which can affect the shipping fees).
Rakuten
Even if you’re new to selling stuff online, you may still be aware of Rakuten. It’s a great extension that allows you to earn cash back on certain websites, including popular retailers like Walmart and Target. I initially discovered it in the Book Flipping Mastery course by Jarek Lewis, and I must say that its a very useful tool. While you can’t use Rakuten on Amazon, you can use it to get 1% cash back when you buy books on eBay. When buying books on eBay, I already use a credit card that gives me 1.5% cash back. Adding Rakuten’s 1% cash back, I effectively get 2.5% cash back on every book I purchase through eBay. Over the course of the last 6 months, I’ve earned a little under $60 in cash back rewards which I can turn around and use to buy more inventory.
Putting aside the benefits of using Rakuten for online arbitrage, its also a great tool to use for personal shopping as well. I finally decided to replace my 3 year old pair of shoes, and was able to get 11% cash back on a new pair using Rakuten. If you sign up using the link above, we’ll both get a $40 bonus!
Conclusion
While I know that there are plenty of extensions out there I haven’t had the chance to play around with yet, these are the ones that I’ve tried and use every single day to source profitable books. If there’s any extensions that are really good and you think I should know about, feel free to leave a comment. My next post will likely be sometime towards the end of next month, where I break down my performance on the upcoming busy season. As always, you can reach out and ask questions. I wish you all the best on your book flipping endeavors.