Episode #3 - My best "Hacks" to crush it with Retail Arbitrage

Hey, how's it going? It's Ollie here. Welcome to another episode of the E Commerce Freedom Podcast.

Welcome to the E Commerce Freedom Podcast with your host, Oliver Denier. Learn the practical steps you need to take to build a business you can run on your own terms. Escape the 9 to 5 and work from anywhere in the world.

Now, in this episode, I really want to go a little bit deeper, deeper into how to get the most out of retail arbitrage. In episode two, we talked about the basics, how the strategy works, how to make money sourcing products from brick and mortar stores, high street stores, supermarkets, and selling them for a profit on Amazon. We discussed how this stuff works, how you know that, you know, it definitely works. And it's not not just some pie in the sky, dream, reality, get rich quick type thing. It's real, right? And although, yeah, it's going to take work, but it's definitely a valid way of growing whatever capital you have right now and starting to generate yourself a bit of an income and really setting foot inside the E commerce industry and beginning your journey. So on this episode, I really wanted to cover a little bit more in detail, some of the hacks, some of the tips and tricks you can use to really get the most out of this strategy and make sure that the time you spend sourcing products for retail arbitrage is spent as fruitfully as possible. You make as much money as you can from as little time spent implementing this strategy. So I posted a question in my Facebook group, Automate Amazon uk, and it's a group full of awesome Amazon sellers that got varying amounts of experience. There's some experts in there, there's some newbies in there, and there's some people who've been doing it for a little while and I wanted to get their feedback. I wanted to not only give my tips in this episode for retail arbitrage, but also tips from loads of other experts who are, you know, doing this stuff every single day. Right. I don't do retail arbitrage as much anymore because I don't need to. I'm focusing on private labels right now and online arbitrage. But I really wanted to, you know, pull all the resources I had to get all the best hacks that were really, really effective for myself and other sellers. So I've got eight really, really powerful tips for you here today. And what I want you to do is get a pen and paper and write these down. They're also going to be in the show notes as well, so you can grab them if you go to ecommercefreedom.com free. 3. They're going to be there for you and then you can just print them out or whatever you want. So let's get started. Tip number one is when you're going out and you're doing a retail arbitrage in the beginning, you're not really going to know exactly what is going to be a good fit for your business, right? You're not going to have the best eye for the kind of products you want to buy, right? So I recommend you scan everything. Okay? So this means basically just go into a store with your Profit Bandit app that you've downloaded on your phone and click on the Scan button on Profit Bandit and scan everything. Every product that you see, scan it. Start getting used to how these products look and what data you get drawn from Profit Bandit on how good the products are going to be to sell on your account, right? So, for example, you'll be able to see the potential profit you'll be able to make on any product that you want to buy, right? So, I mean, you might even realize you're going to be making a loss after fees and everything with certain products. Also, you'll see the best seller rating for any product. And as we discussed in episode two, it's best to try and keep that under 30,000. Okay? If you can find any product that has a best seller rating of under 30,000, then you know that that is going to be a great fit for your business because it's going to sell relatively quickly. Okay? So just scan absolutely everything. It's as simple as that. And after a while, sooner or later, you end up finding some products that work, some products that are going to make you great profit and have a great bestseller rating of under 30,000. And you can send them into the warehouse and you know they're going to sell, right? So I want to extend this point and talk about this a little bit more because I've had a few of my students who come back to me on a coaching call or something, and they'll say to me, you know, Ollie, I'm not really sure if this retail arbitrage stuff actually works. I'm not really sure if this is a real business, right? I mean, it's not really working for me. And I'll say to them, okay, well, that's fine, but how many hours have you put into this? Like, what action have you taken and how much effort have you actually put in to, you know, give this stuff go? And they'll say to me something like, well, you Know, I went down to Asda and I scanned in the clearance section for half an hour and I'll say, okay, well, to be honest with you, you got to put in more time than that. Alright? Half an hour is definitely not going to be enough time to see some serious results in this business. Right? It's very hit and miss. Some days you'll go out there and you'll find loads of stuff and you'll keep filling up your trolley full of things to buy and bring home and sell in your account. Sometimes you won't find much. Right. I've had days where I'll go to a town, scan everything, come back with very little, and this can happen. All right? This business is relatively random in some respects. So the key here is be consistent. Go as often as you can, block out a few hours at the weekend or in your days off to go to stores, go to a town and just scan everything in these stores and you will, over a period of weeks, have enough stock in your account that sells consistently to build up decent income. Okay, so tip number one, guys, is the most important tip. Scan everything. Tip number two. Now this is going a little bit more in depth, a bit more in detail. Talk to managers in stores. Okay? Now, when I was doing a lot of retail arbitrage in the beginning of my journey, I went to a toy store near me to look for some products and I noticed that they actually had load of Skylanders toys selling for a pound. Now, I knew that Skylanders were a really hot product on Amazon. They were selling for say699,799. The sales ranks were very, very decent. I knew these things were going to be shifting really, really quick. So this got me really, really excited. So I cleared absolutely everything they had on the shelf. And I had a quick word with the manager and he said, you know what, look, we've got a load of these toys, we need to get rid of them. So he actually went out the back and got loads and loads of boxes, more of this stock for me to actually buy and take home. And what's more, he actually would have got in trouble if he'd have put all these products through the account on the same transaction because it would have flagged as a security thing with head office. So instead of getting in trouble, what he actually did is he split the transaction into two. Right? He did half of the transaction. I think it was about 80 pounds, 80 individual products on the first transaction and it was 70 products on the second transaction. Okay, so he did. He actually was kind enough to almost get himself in trouble with head office just so he could help me get rid of all this stock. Right? So these guys have targets, their managers, their stores need to be selling as many products as possible. So don't be shy when you're going out there doing retail arbitrage, Speak to people, build relationships with managers. There's a lady in my course, one of the Amazon courses I run and she is now known personally by name by many of the staff in one of her favorite shops where she goes retail arbitrage, right? She goes in there and they actually actively help her direct her to all of the cheapest stock in that store. So this, this is something you can really, really use to advantage. If you start building relationships with managers in stores, talking to them, seeing when they're getting new shipments in, when they're going to have new sales, you can actually get first hand info and insights as to when's the best time to visit stores, what stock they have at the back that isn't on the shelf, that's going to be profitable for you. And this could greatly accelerate your chances of coming home with handfuls of awesome stock to sell on your account. Tip number three, and this is a big one. If you haven't discovered this website yet, then I've got an absolute treat for you. Head over to hot ukdeals.com okay? Hot ukdeals.com and basically what this is is a website where anyone in the public can sign up with an account on this website and post up any bargains that they find anywhere. Alright? So a lot of these bargains are going to be things like buy one, get one free or certain percentage off or clearance sales or anything else where they think you're going to get a good deal. Okay? And this is just such an awesome hack because this website is completely filled with bargains. Stuff that's been sold for really cheap that you can actually buy and sell for a profit. You know, a lot of the people posting on this website have absolutely no idea how much profit can be made by the products they're selling because they're not wise to this arbitrage stuff. Right? They just post things because they want to help other people get great deals. Well, we can come in there and really take advantage of this stuff and end up making a lot of profit by buying the stuff from whatever website you get a link to and selling it on your account. So Definitely go to hotukdeals.com and check out all the awesome bargains they have. It's a Great place to start. And actually you could end up finding links to websites that you wouldn't have usually shopped on and found actually sales on those websites that you can buy stock from. So go there. I mean, if you're not in the UK and you want a deals website, they have loads of them in the US and in other European countries. If you just search around for websites where people post deals or forums, you know, where people post recent deals, I'm sure you'll find something equivalent in your area where you can actually start sourcing products like this. And it's a great hack. Tip number four, search online for closing down sales. Okay, search online for closing down sales. Now you can go on Google right now and type in closing down sale, clearance sale. And what will happen is you might get hints as to where stores around your area are actually closing down. I remember in my town where I lived growing up, there was a Clinton Cards, right? Like a gift shop that sold cards, birthday cards, Christmas cards, things like that. And they were having a closing down sale and basically the store was completely closing so they had to clear everything off the shelves. So this meant that there was 90% off minimum of absolutely all of their stock. Now people were running around the store with trolleys. There was a massive queue going all the way out the back. They were fighting to throw all the candles and teddy bears and birthday cards into their trolleys. And I don't really think they knew what an opportunity they actually had to shift this stock, right? If they had just sent some of the stuff into their Amazon account, they could have made some serious profit with it. But I don't think they even knew about it, many of the people who went in there. So if you're wise to this stuff and you find a closing down sale near, you really take advantage of it. You can really capitalize on that opportunity. Find products in the closing down sale which are going to be a great fit for your business and load up on loads of fresh stock and do all of this in just say an afternoon of visiting a closing down sale. So definitely have a look online, see if you can find any of these. And I'm sure they'll be a great asset to your business if you can find them. Step number five, if you find a hot item on the shelf of any store, especially if it's like a big store, like a chain of supermarkets or something, call up other stores to see if they have that same price for the same product on clearance right. Now in episode two, I discussed my awesome story where I Found a product called a call blocker for £5 in a DIY store called Robert Dyers. I picked up four of them, sent them into my account. They sold for 39.99 each and three of them sold within an hour. Right? So bas, I made £120 clean profit overnight. Now, I didn't just want to, you know, leave it there. And I knew there was going to be more of these things out there, so I went around calling up every single Robert Dyer's store I could get my hands on and asked them to check the system if they had any more of these call blockers. Ended up traveling around the country to all of the Robert Dyer's in the south of England and picked up 26 of these products. Okay. So I made serious profit and they all sold out within a few days. So if you ever find a hot seller, don't assume that's going to be the only one in the country. Call up all the other stores, all the other chains of the stores to see if they've got that same product on their shelves and you will make it so much easier to find products that sell. Right. You won't just be wasting your time going from one store to another, scanning everything, buying everything and leaving it. You could be missing out on huge opportunities to buy more of that same stock from the same chains of that store near to you. Okay? So that's a really, really big tip. Call stores. If you find a hot item, call up the other stores and they might have more of them. Tip number six, and this is from a chap called John Wayne, and that is actually his real name. And John's awesome. I met him at an event I ran a couple of weeks ago and he posted this tip in Ultimate Amazon UK Facebook group. And he says, make sure you check your receipt to see if a store has overcharged you. Because a lot of the time actually if a store puts on a clearance sale, sometimes their till hasn't caught up with the prices they put on the shelves. Right? So you might be getting overcharged. So every single time you do a retail arbitrage trip, make sure you're checking your receipt to make sure you're buying things for the price you expected. Okay. Now John also mentions that a few stores will actually give you extra money if they make a mistake, right? If they somehow overcharge you on any of the products that you've bought sometimes, occasionally, they'll actually give you double the difference. Okay. So if they've say, you know, overcharge you by £5, they'll give you £10 back. So effectively you've got more room for profit with the stock that you buy. So definitely check your receipts. And thanks for that awesome tip there, John. We've got an awesome tip here from James Dinsdale in the Automate Amazon UK Group. And James says visit multiple chains of the same retailer to see if they do the same product for different prices, right? So this is a little bit similar to step number five, where you find a hot item and you call loads of stores to see if they have it for the same price. But it's kind of the opposite, right? What you'll find is if you go to, say, a toy store near you and it's, say, Toys R Us and you know they've got loads of toys on a shelf for a certain price, if you go to another chain of that store and maybe in another town, you'll find that they do it for different prices, right? So don't assume that every single toy store in the same chain is gonna be selling everything for the same price. Go to all the branches of the same toy store, check all the prices and don't, you know, write out stores just because you've been to one your local area. So thanks a lot for that awesome tip there, James. We're definitely implementing that and having a look around different chains of the same store to make sure we're getting a good price for our stock. We've got an awesome tip here. Tip number eight from Paul Madder. And Paul's been absolutely crushing it with his Amazon business. I think he recently reached £10,000 in sales, and it was actually his goal to reach £10,000 in sales again in one month, which he came up just shy of in May. So he's absolutely crushing it. He's only been doing this stuff for a couple of months and he says don't just scan reduced items. And this is a really, really big tip here, actually, because in the beginning I was just scanning stuff on the clearance sections, right? And it's definitely a great place to start, but you can find some really, really cheap products that are actually, you know, for sale in shops in the regular sale price, right? You're going to be missing out on huge amounts of opportunity if you're only looking at the clearance section. So definitely look in all the other shelves as well, because you'll find stuff that's a lot cheaper in those stores than it is selling for on Amazon. So I really hope you found these tips helpful, guys, and I hope this has given you some inspiration Some aha moments, some motivation to go out there and absolutely crush it with retail arbitrage. The amount of stories that I see of people absolutely smashing it with their results with just retail arbitrage alone is really astounding. I want to call out a girl called Barbs. She's absolutely crushing it with retail arbitrage at the moment she started, I think it was four weeks ago and she's already done £2,000 in sales. She's had 100% ROI of a lot of her products. So I think she's done a thousand pounds profit in her first four weeks implementing this strategy. And she's in the Automate Amazon UK Facebook group as well, so you can connect with her there. And it's just another example of many people who are absolutely smashing it with retail arbitrage with guys, this stuff is real and if you're broke or if you're brand new to Amazon, you want to see if this stuff works, please go out there and try it. Take my advice, this stuff really does work. And if you haven't done already, make sure you grab my Fast Start guide. This will get you started with your journey, so make sure you grab it. It's ecommercefreedom.com 3. You'll get the show notes for this episode, you'll get some other resources and you'll get a link to the Fast Start Guide so you can begin your Amazon journey and you learn how the basics of this stuff work so you can start growing your capital using the strategies and selling on Amazon. So thank you so much for listening. You've been awesome. Can't wait to connect with you on Facebook in the Automate Amazon UK group. If you haven't done that already, make sure you join. And we are going to be dealing with some awesome new strategies in the next few episodes. I've got so much cool content for you. Can't wait for you to join me. Thanks so much for listening. Whatever you do guys, keep believing. See you in the next episode.