Retail arbitrage is simple. A retail store sells a product, you purchase that product, sell it for a higher price yourself and pocket the profit.
Like you, I am a curious person.
When I hear about starting a business that offers little investment and not much risk I am all about giving it a try.
Why not?
Before I started working at StartupBros I came across the videos and articles StartupBros had posted online explaining how to sell on Amazon using retail arbitrage.
Here they are in case you want to check them out:
• YouTube: Amazon FBA Clearance Arbitrage Trip
• How I Turned $2,200 Of Rice Cakes Into A $1-Million E-Commerce Business
What is retail arbitrage?
This is the definition I was able to Google:
“The practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets, striking a combination of matching deals that capitalize upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices.”
Simply stated, this means that retail arbitrage is where you find a retail product for sale at an unbeatable deal, purchase it and then resell it for a profit.
Using the information direct from StartupBros I went out to Walmart, Big Lots and Target to try and find some great deals.
I found nothing at Big Lots, some cheap bracelets at Walmart, but most of what I purchased were red sticker clearance items from Target.
The time it took for me to shop and scan items was about 2 hours.
At times I was nervous that store employees were watching me. The nervousness was all in my head, nobody from the store came up to me or asked me any questions.
I ended up walking away purchasing 6 unique items, 13 total in quantity. Some items I was able to buy multiple of.
These are the exact items I ended up buying. Nothing special here. Just great deals!
Yes, I could have bought more but I was afraid of wasting money.
I gave myself a $150 budget and stuck to it.
When I got home I quickly opened a free Amazon seller account (since I was selling less than 40 items a month, I chose the free option).
Scanning my items into my Amazon seller account using the iPhone app and creating a shipment to an Amazon fulfillment center was easy.
I did let Amazon label my items for me.
They charged me a little for this, but I was ok with that.
Living in Florida Amazon had me ship all of my items to Joliet, IL right outside of Chicago.
I thought that was strange since there were closer Amazon warehouses, but went with it.
SUPER CHEAP shipping to the Amazon warehouse.
The cost for sending this shipment using Amazon’s discount was $5.03.
I dropped the package off at the UPS store.
Easy.
A few days later my items were delivered to Amazon, checked into their system and placed on the Amazon US Marketplace.
Amazon notified me during this entire process.
To my surprise, the very next day I had a sale.
And then another.
And another.
Wow!
People were actually buying these items and I was making a decent profit!
After about a month and a half all my items had sold.
Well, actually one item took a little longer.
The Peanuts blanket didn’t sell until I dropped the price multiple times.
Regardless, the profit from the other 12 items more than made up for it.
At the end of the day I made around $100 from selling these 13 products using Amazon FBA.
It took me around 2.5 hours of my time, so I made $40 an hour.
Not too bad for just getting started!
Obviously there is more to retail arbitrage than just watching a YouTube video or reading an article.
I get that.
The reason I wrote this article is to motivate you to stop waiting and just DO IT.
You could research things until you pass out.
You can think about all of the “what-if’s”.
Or you can just START.
DO IT.
Take action, learn, and change direction if you need to.
You will never know everything. You will always be learning new and improved ways to grow your business.
By experimenting with retail arbitrage I was able to learn how to:
• Create an Amazon Seller account
• Learn how to use Amazon Seller Central
• Ship products to Amazon fulfillment centers
• Learn about labeling products to sell on Amazon
• Learn how to set up my bank account to accept payments from Amazon
• See how other sellers react when you add your product to Amazon
• Understand the importance of Amazon Prime
• and much more
The education I received just by taking a very small financial risk and taking action was worth thousands of dollars.
This took was less than 3 hours of my time and around $150 up front so that I could buy the products at retail.
I look at the $100 I made in profit as a BONUS.
Have you ever been curious about selling products on Amazon?
Retail arbitrage is a great way to get started with very little risk.
Why not give it a try yourself?
If you end up enjoying the process and want to grow as an Amazon seller your next logical step would be to private label a product.
If you hate it, you can move on to the next business opportunity.
Don’t forget if you have questions about retail arbitrage, selling on Amazon or private labeling a product we have a live Q&A session weekly. Just ask us and we will help.
So what are you waiting for?
If I can get started selling on Amazon, so can you.
The post Retail Arbitrage: What Happened When I Tried to Buy Low and Sell High appeared first on StartupBros.