An Amazon Arbitrage Journey

[UptonGoodwin]

Thanks to the thread by TeKn1qu3z on the same topic, I decided to take action this week and try to make some money through reselling products on Amazon.

Before this, I have never sold any physical products online outside of Craigslist so this should be a fun journey!

Before just going out to random stores and hoping I got lucky on clearance items I did some quick research on some local department store websites to see what clearance items they list there. I found some good deals listed online and found a couple more just browsing through Walmart's clearance bins.

So, I went out the last 3 days to various stores and have spent around $200 on items worth ~$700 in Amazon buy boxes which after fees should get me around $200-$250 profits. I haven't gotten far enough to know what it will cost me to ship everything to Amazon (I am waiting on some shipping supplies from Amazon).

I don't think anyone is interested in a full list of items I bought so I will just list the biggest profit margin on an item I found

The best find was 2 pairs of electrical gloves for $9/each on clearance that are going for $35/each on Amazon. Sadly there are no more of these gloves on clearance in my city or I would buy them all!

I have to wait until at least Monday to be able to pack and ship out my first box so I guess it will be at least a week or 2 before I can see some sales, I will try to keep this thread updated .

 

[PaulSmithAUS]

It should be an interesting journey. Sounds like you are giving it a serious start with quite a few different items bought. While I am not interested in every item you bought, how many different items did you buy (broad range of interests ?, aimed at male/female, age groups ?)

Interested to see how it turns out.

 

[UptonGoodwin]

Oh didn't think about that I guess. Here is the breakdown to what I bought.

- 16 work gloves - 14 of one item and 2 of the item already mentioned
- 10 tool accessories - basically the same item, but 3 variations of it
- 14 bike accessories
- 4 dog jackets

I was just going to send out the gloves originally, but I found some nice stuff at Walmart to add.

 

[to0namisb]

Are you going to do online arbitrary too?

 

[rodyrathore]

i think arbitrage statergy is dead now. once they caught you, they will take away al money.

 

[UptonGoodwin]

i think arbitrage statergy is dead now. once they caught you, they will take away al money.

You are wrong. There is absolutely nothing wrong with arbitrage. Only thing you could get banned for would be selling used items as new or mislabeling an item.

Amazon is perfectly happy letting other people fill up their warehouse with products they get $4+ in fees for selling.

Done legit online arbatrage is a win-win for everybody. Seller, amazon, buyer all get what they want.

 

[rodyrathore]

what is your strategy for arbritrage?

 

[UptonGoodwin]

what is your strategy for arbritrage?

Find new products on clearance that are selling on Amazon for 3x the clearance price. I have also been looking at sales rank and trying to make a guess on if something actually will sell quickly but I don't have the full experience on that.

 

[rodyrathore]

great!
do me a favour, share your progress with me time by time. i am new to this and will love to follow your journey.
cheers!

 

[UptonGoodwin]

great!
do me a favour, share your progress with me time by time. i am new to this and will love to follow your journey.
cheers!

I do plan to keep this journey going. That being said, unless I go to Goodwill or something this week and try to pick up some books, there won't be anything to update for at least a week and a half. I probably won't get the boxes out until Tuesday at the earliest. My poly bags and stretch wrap won't arrive until Monday.

 

[UptonGoodwin]

Not really much of a real update. But after printing labels at work and packing everything Monday, today I have shipped off my first 4 boxes to Amazon's fulfillment center, hopefully my items will be in their system and ready to be sold by next week. I almost made a potentially bad mistake packing one of the boxes, had packed a 3 dog jackets and put on top of a box with only the polybag between them and a cutting knife! Luckily I realized that one and put a piece of cardboard on the top of the box.

From a few quick searches, it seems Amazon doesn't care if sellers use their affiliate links on the pages of products they are selling. I don't really have any webpages built that would even work for any of the products I just sent, so I'm probably not going to try this for a while.

I will update this thread again with progress either when my items are officially in stock on Amazon, or possibly before if I get the time to find more items to sell on Amazon before then.

 

[UptonGoodwin]

Well Amazon has now started listing my items for sale on the various pages, hopefully will get some sales this weekend!

I also did some Goodwill shopping today, found a couple books to flip and managed to find an old board game from the 1960s that is still in really good shape and has all the cards and pieces, even the original rule book. Paid $1 for it and should be able to easily sell it for $30-$50 on Amazon!

 

[Alchemizt]

Keep hitting the Goodwill's. You may find gold...literally. I once got a 18k bracelet for $1 and scrapped it for $1000. Recently bought a mixed bag of jewelry for $60 and made $1600 on it. I've probably made somewhere in the ballpark of $50k from Goodwill alone in the last few years. Everything from jewelry and Antique to electronics. Your results may vary depending on your location so I recommend hitting as many locations as you can. I have 3 within a 10 Mile radius of me and I hit them all on a regular basis.

 

[UptonGoodwin]

Time for an update.

Turns out I jumped the gun a little bit on thinking everything would be sellable as everything went into "reserved" status for a few days after my last update. But now, all my product is officially listed.

I have sold 8 items in the last 2 days totaling about $135 in sales, it's a bigger item so the FBA fee ended up being $62 and I paid $40 total for the items. It's weird seeing such big numbers when really I paid $40 and made about a $30 profit on these items.

I will be sending out another 64 products to Amazon tomorrow. I spent around $140 on these and after fees should be able to turn about a $200 profit on the sales.

I might have also sourced a regular $2 product from Walmart that can be resold on amazon for about a 50-75% profit, depending on who is trying to undercut everybody on pricing.

I plan to go to a few thrift stores and maybe garage sales this week to see if I can find any nice scores, but this week should be pretty slow on sourcing as I wait to get paid out on sales to reinvest.

 

[UptonGoodwin]

A quick little Monday update and a look into developing something that resembles an actual goal in this venture!

So, after about a week of my first shipment being at Amazon, I have sold 11 of the 44 units that I shipped to Amazon for a current total of $185 in sales! None of this is turned into profit yet really, as I am still working my way through the cost of buying everything. My total costs for buying everything for this first shipment was about $200 and currently my Amazon account is at +$60, which is above what I paid to ship my first to shipments to Amazon!

I sent the 2nd shipment out on Friday morning, it almost made it to Amazon's fulfillment center, but sadly got stuck at a UPS hub for the holiday. Pretty sure it will be processed Tuesday or Wednesday and probably start getting sales by the weekend. This shipment I started paying more attention to product ranks, so I expect at least some of these products to get sold quickly. This shipment had more items, at about 64 but the total cost to buy was around $140 and I am looking to get about $220 in PROFIT from these products.

I am starting to get some products to sent out for shipment #3 this week, currently around 40 products, currently have around $110 into these products with a possible net profit being around $340. Found some good finds at Goodwill and Walmart, mostly with blank media (cassettes and computer tape cartridges). The tape cartridges were in a box of 5 for $10 at Goodwill, with a 1500 rank in electronics and going for around $15 merchant fulfilled, with not a single FBA offer at the moment!

 

[hammad latif]

It should be an interesting journey. Sounds like you are giving it a serious start with quite a few different items bought. While I am not interested in every item you bought, how many different items did you buy (broad range of interests ?, aimed at male/female, age groups ?)

Interested to see how it turns out.Great,Good Luck with the journey!

 

[UptonGoodwin]

It should be an interesting journey. Sounds like you are giving it a serious start with quite a few different items bought. While I am not interested in every item you bought, how many different items did you buy (broad range of interests ?, aimed at male/female, age groups ?)

Interested to see how it turns out.Great,Good Luck with the journey!

Hello, thanks for the reply! I have a pretty large range of products I think, probably mostly aimed for men and kids however. Starting to get a lot of electronic related items (Blank computer media and ink), also got some nice toys to send out in my next shipment. Actually found 2 different toys at a local Walmart today for $2/each that are selling for between $10-$15 on Amazon. They only had 11 total units between the two toys though .

With the first shipment however, the only products I have sold at the moment are bike tires and a single pair of work gloves. I didn't pay enough attention to sales rank on some of the products in the first shipment so am stuck being patient on getting sales on some of the items.

I am thinking about starting a blog with the store name I have chosen where I can hopefully use some SEO knowledge to drive some targeted traffic to the sales pages of products that have low sales ranks. From my understanding, Amazon is okay with sellers using an affiliate link to the sales pages on products they are selling, but I will likely ask the seller support directly before trying it.

 

[UptonGoodwin]

Today has been a good day on both sourcing and on sales! I bought a Wii with a fit board, 3 wii guitars, and a rockband drum set (with some games) for $40. The wii I am going to keep to use for testing as I would like to keep buying guitars and fitboards to resell. I also picked up 4 Fitboards and 2 WiiFit games for about $25. I will pair up the games with the boards and resell them used for around $35 each.

Also sold 9 items today for about $150 in sales. Amazon is kind of annoying with the way they display the profit and sales information as they don't actually credit the sale and take the FBA fee out until they ship the item. I've now sold 23 of the 44 items that went in my first shipment!

On my post yesterday I said I would mention my goals that are starting to develop with this business, but I got lazy and didn't post it.

I have been watching some YouTube videos from other FBA resellers and I would love to follow in the steps of a guy that goes by Resale Rabbit. I think it would be enjoyable, at least for 6-12 months to travel around the states going to thrift stores and reselling on Amazon. It's a long way off from me being able to do this, but if I have a good Christmas/winter reselling, there's a good chance I will do this in the later half of 2017.

 

[LoftPower]

Will be following along. Keep up the great work!

 

[UptonGoodwin]

Well I did send the 3rd shipment in to Amazon today with about 50 items ready to sell!

I did however, make a few mistakes when sourcing this week and ended up with probably 10-15 restricted items. Most are small and not a big deal but there is a Netgear router and 5 Monopoly games. I probably could return the monopoly games, but instead I am going to look into diversifying my income stream and am looking to add Ebay to my business so I can sell the stuff I can't sell on Amazon. Which this would also open me up to being able to source DVDs at thrift stores as well.

Never really sold on Ebay and not really looking forward to dealing with providing customer service, but you gotta do what you gotta do I guess.

My Amazon account is currently at +$160 to be paid in a couple weeks. Which this is taking out the ~$60 in shipping fees I have paid shipping all 3 shipments to Amazon.