Saul Talks Episode 1: Buying from Amazon to sell on other markets

All right. Hello.

This is an unplanned video. I was asked a really good question in the buy box discord and instead of writing on answer, I figured, hey, I'm just going to make a quick video and maybe I can even show something on the screen that would help kind of justify the answer. So the question was this from Silas. He says one thing that interests me in A2A. So. So Amazon, Amazon is the ability to sell on platforms other than Amazon, even locally in some cases. Do you know right away when you see a flip or you're going to sell it? How do you make that decision? Quickly and essentially, I would love to hear your thought process on this and others. It's a beautiful question. I've been tweeting a bit more and kind of posting a bit more about some Amazon ebay flips. I had a really big Amazon to local flip last month with some air conditioners. And so it does boil down. So, yeah, like how do we make the decision? And when you see all this data that comes in, like, how are you thinking through it fast enough to be able to pull the trigger without losing opportunity on a deal?

And part of when I started typing on answer, part of it, it's going to be a little bit of a cop out, right? Because I think part of it is level of experience. When I first started reselling in 2017, 2016, whenever it was, was very heavy in thrift stores. Like I was going to thrift stores and I was actively reselling clothing. And when I first went, I didn't really know what I was doing. And I watched a lot of videos and I paid for some groups and it was like, here are the brands you should be buying. Here's things that you should know that you might not know just as a normal buyer for the first time or as a consumer. And there are plenty of brands, there are plenty of brands I'd never heard of that were great brands. And I wouldn't have known them had I not looked them up or purchased them before. And so eventually, as I was doing that more and more, and I think this is pretty common, I was starting to be able to go down racks of clothing and just by the sleeve, right? Just kind of by like a little bit of the fabric or the texture or the color, I was able to say, hey, that looks like something interesting, that one that's sticking out for some reason looks like it might be worth me buying or looking up. And you know, most of the time, that's right, I was pulling out stuff just by the sleeve or shoulder that was higher quality or was brands that were worth reselling. And the only reason I was able to do that though is because there was a history of looking up every single product and we're learning from others about what brands to look out for. And I think there's something similar to be said for a 2A, but also OA when we look at a list of products and on my screen right now I have, you know, kind of flipper, right? This is just like the bulk profitable flip section. We're looking through products. The more you look through different types of products, the more you just have an eye for what is a mainstream brand, what is a private label brand, what is a category that's interesting, what is a price that might be interesting for that category? And those are the things that allow me to say, oh, actually, let me take a pause here. So, you know, we have some, some kind of minor examples here and we'll. I didn't plan any of this, right. It's kind of off the cusp, so I don't know what we're going to look at, but I'm just going to try to do my best to help illustrate some points. So we have Dr. Scholl's shoes. Dr. Scholl's is a mainstream brand. You likely know Dr. Scholl's just from existing on this planet or especially if you've been doing some level of arbitrage already. Even if you didn't know Dr. Scholl's, the listing itself, the way it's. It's outlined here, where, you know, it's just, it's short, it's clear, the brand is front and center, the picture is clean and white.

This doesn't seem like private label, right? This is not a packed keyword. This is nothing like 10 million words stuffed in something that the image doesn't look kind of off or weird. It looks like it could be a real product, even if you've never heard Dr. Scholes. So that's step one. Step two, of course, is it does have to be profitable, right? For the most part when I'm buying, even if it's selling on ebay locally. Poshmark Makari. There's some arbitrage opportunity on Amazon. So when I source for footballer, my primary reason is sourcing for Amazon, right? So my main thing is I'm looking at a product. Can I buy this and resell on Amazon for a profit? And so that regardless, I'm going to look at profit. My buy cost my profit, my sell cost, etc. And if when I hover over and I look at Keepa or I dive into it deeper, if that doesn't click for me immediately, or if I know it's a brand that I'm gated in because the Dr. Scholes, for example, I've sold, but they've also sent me some nasty letters. And maybe I just don't want to deal with Dr. Scholl's. But what I do know is that, hey, this does sell. It's a good rank. There is volume here.

When I'm looking for products to flip off Amazon, I assume a couple things. I do assume that the price is going to be decayed slightly. So $56 on Amazon probably won't be $56 on eBay. You know, I like to think that I tried to use about 20%. So let's say it's gonna be $45 on eBay. And then I go, all right, well, it's 25 into 45. What I know about ebay. Does that work? Does that make sense? And then if I really need to, soon we're gonna have some easy, quick ebay information. In Flip alert, you're gonna be able to very quickly see ebay pricing. But for now, I would just kind of grab the the title. And then I have this thing up here where I can just one click and open ebay.

And we can see just by looking up Dr. Scholl's 9.5, there's really not very many matches. There's a few. And then I would just kind of come over to sold and I would see and you know what we talked about? I said 45. This actually did sell over 55, right? 40 plus shipping.

But this is not the most aggressive seller. We have some in June, we have some in July. It's a pass for me. But now that I've done that once, if I see this particular product again or this brand, I have some level information. All right, well, Dr. Scholl's maybe doesn't sell as well. Even if we got rid of this, doesn't sell as well on ebay. That does on Amazon. There's only nine for this men's Sebastian sneaker white. So when I'm doing it, a lot of it again goes back to the kind of experience where, hey, I'm probably not going to look at Dr. Scholl's for eBay again unless, you know, it's 10 bucks, right? Something super, super cheap. And in that case, what will happen is I'll buy first question later. So when we look at products that are super profitable, maybe this is a $56 shoe on Amazon, that's 5 or $10 right now. And I know that I'm gated.

I'll still buy it. Because at that price, especially if, you know, if I look at Keepa, right, and I'm like, oh, this actually does sell. There's some history on Amazon. It's not just like a $5 product that's inflated to 50 and back down to 5. Like there's actually some history of it selling at that price point. I'm going to buy first question later. So I'm going to click buy. Then I'm going to go on ebay and then I'm going to go locally, then I'm going to go on Mercari and then I'm going to go everywhere and be like, hey, can I sell this where you know what would be a good opportunity to sell this for and where would I sell it? And then worst case, absolute worst case, I may cancel that order. I'm, you know, I'm pretty anti returns. You, you've heard me over the years. If you know anything about me, like I, I will never buy something and then try to list on ebay and it doesn't sell and then return it. Right. I think that sets a precedent for yourself. It makes the supplier or the retailer or whatever you're buying from hate resellers. Right. It's a lot of reasons why they don't like resellers in the first place. I think cancellations are slightly different. You know, if I have to cancel something, there is very little harmful. They won't let me cancel if it's too far in the process. So if that's where I've been picked, they're not going to cancel it. So if I order something and cancel it five minutes later, it doesn't really change much on Amazon side of things. And fortunately, Amazon doesn't, at least at this point, doesn't seem to, to mind cancellations. They do. They do not like returns, but they don't tend to mind cancellations. So if I have to cancel a couple things a day, I kind of do that.

So I'm just going to scroll through though. I'm going to see if there's anything that does pop out of something that I think might be interesting or might have been interesting for, for ebay as we're looking. So, you know, here's something that's somewhat interesting to me for, for a local player. Here's the summing down here. As well. Right. So when I look for non Amazon. So Melissa and $I'm gay on Amazon. I know that because I know my account. It's saying it's selling for $32. You buy it for 13, $8 profit. We look at Keepa, if you can see it down there in the bottom right.

Down here and Keepa is showing us and maybe I'm blocking so I'll kind of say aloud, hey this, this product last Q4 was like 30, $40, went all the way down to like sub 10, went up to 30 and now it's back down to 13.

So probably not the best buy again though what I would do for Melissa and doggy, it's a kind of a cool product which I think this one is. It's a toy. Q4 is coming up. I can't sell it. If this was a consistently 30 plus dollar product or $40 plus product, I would, I would Google this. I'd want to see what's going on other retailers. And then I might buy this for local. I don't do too many smalls local. Which smalls would be things like this, things that would kind of go in a box. My local sales tend to be larger products that are kind of annoying to ship. That's why they end up selling local or things that I can get really, really just like super cheap and I can still sell them at like 50% retail and make money. Something like this. I really don't want to deal with this locally if I'm being honest. But depending on where you live, some local areas are great for like porch pickups. So if you have a really strong like neighbor app or Facebook marketplace or groups and a lot of people are churning through inventory and something like this is a $50 puzzle that you can get for 15, but you're gated, you might be able to get 30, 35 on Facebook. And so you know that's kind of just knowing your market. For me, Facebook marketplace is kind of a pain. If I have just like these, these things, they people are really expecting much better deals. So you know something like this, which is a Halloween inflatable, this is kind of by a no name brand. Zukaki. Zukaki. Right. So we can kind of just tell this is private label. They're claiming it's worth $75. It's sold for $75. Now it's $35.

I, I assume you can kind of get something like this at Marshalls. So again if it was cheaper, if it's 10 bucks, I'd buy it for local. You easily could get you know, 20, 25, $30 for it. I don't know if we can get 50, 65, $70 locally for something like that. So you know, we'll kind of move on. Like here's a. Why I don't. This is insane, right? This is 20 a yeti 20 on tumbler. They're claiming, you know, people have been trying to sell us for 180 bucks. It's $90.

Not something that I think is worth $180.

If Yetis though are in things like smalls like this. So like mainstream brands, you know, I said I don't like smalls where it's like one off toys. But like say you found like a deal for like $15. Stanley's. I can sell Stanley on Amazon but that might be something I would move locally and then it goes back to buy first kind of question later if it's a brand that you recognize, if it looks good. Price wise. Things that I tend to ebay or look for on ebay are products that I would no brain buy for a 2A but I'm gated. So you know, the, the listing just is beautiful. Something like this, you know, this is. You might not be able to see the keeper and maybe I can pull it up here and you can see it right? This is very, very consistently $60 product.

And it has been for a long time, right? Great, great rank up and down. It kind of gets high in the four hundreds, but that's fine. Just like the velocity is there. And now it's 27. This, you know, because it's flame resistant or a flame, it's. It's might blow up. This probably is more local. I don't really know enough about it. It's a battery or some kind of coil it looks like.

I would guess that ebay is going to be a little annoying with this, but something like this, that is very consistently 60 plus dollars. This is the type of product I 100% want to go on ebay and look up if I'm gated on Amazon. And the reason it kind of drew my attention is because I know the brand. I've either sold this brand or I've looked this brand up before. I like anything that has. Honestly I do like anything that has voltage or batteries in the title. I, I think it makes it interesting. I think it usually makes it a little bit pricier. A lot of people get scared of that. Things like that. What I don't generally get attracted to are like brands of beauty that I've never heard of like this or this. I tend to find that these on Amazon are way more expensive than they are on ebay. This Area Grande perfume is an example.

If we like look this up on Keepa, like this is supposedly a $72 bottle of perfume that is selling for 36. We're not gonna be able to sell it. And I bet you if we look this up though.

On.

Ebay. Yeah. So again here, this is the exact same product, it's $40. I just find that's the case for a lot of these beauty products, which is why. And that just comes from having looked up a lot over the years. So. So I don't really mess with it if I know I can't sell it like this. This is something I actually should just be blocking on my blacklist. But I don't even look them up on ebay.

Because I've, you know, I've done that before. I do like watches. I think watches are interesting for Amazon or ebay. If I can't sell a particular brand, I do find that they're pretty synonymous price wise. This one though is just inflated. We can see that on the Keeper. What I really like for local is again big, big heavy stuff. We're not really seeing a lot of that here. I mean this thing is not a keepa doesn't really. But like this could be something that's interesting. I've sold some pool covers locally, right? Think about things that people don't want to shop online for. I sold like a 72 foot pool or not 72ft, but maybe it was 72ft around. I don't know. It was huge.

Maybe it's 27ft. But it was a pool cover retail for like 350. I got it from Amazon for 90. I think it was Rebelle. I can't sell Rebel if that's how you pronounce it on Amazon. I know that. But it was very, very consistently 300 bucks. And in my mind if you own a pool, you need a pool cover. People locally are going to go on Amazon, they're going to go these places and I can undercut the market enough. I'm, I'm good. So like if I went back to what I sold, the air conditioner, those were $500 air conditioners. I was paying $200 for them. So in that case I can sell over 350 make money. People feel like they got 30% off. It's a win win. I rarely sell things locally at retail. Some stuff I will sell locally above retailers can be like super hype stuff. But again I'm not a big local guy.

I much prefer them to sell locally, to undercut, make everyone feel like they're getting a really, really good deal.

On the product. And then for ebay it's again it's really just like what am I gated in? What is interesting? What's a name brand? What's cheap enough? You know, like this, this Tara work boot. You know, this is something that if I can't sell it's again, this keep is not great. But let's say this was like $150 product consistently with 72. This is something I would be. Oh, I got, I got to see if this is on, on ebay. You know, anything that's.

Feels like it's something that you would buy and we knew this wasn't going to be worth it. Right. But like feels like something that you would.

Buy. Like a nice department store. I'm going to look on ebay also like collectibles that like really one off odd collectible things. This video is getting quite long, but we can kind of roll with it. So like we go to product finder and I went to let's say like toys and.

I.

Like the sell price was $150 and.

The buy price is 50 bucks.

So like things like, I mean this is kind of crazy. I don't know what happened here.

I don't know what this is. It's like a table. Matt, I don't think this is actually worth 200. I would, I would be surprised if this is worth this. But you know these kind of things where like there really isn't as much of a market on Amazon.

Maybe there's a market on ebay. I would be surprised. Like this feels like this feels very, very niche.

Yeah. I'm not even sure what this.

Oh, I mean it is, it is card decks. Okay. So it is like some kind of white wizard game.

Like a deck.

We'd have to like do my research. Like.

This could have been a buy.

But let's see if we can find one that's like a little clearer.

Like I think Lego is an example.

There's really not that there's only 13 that kind of fall in that category of that 50 to 1 to 50 plus.

That are Amazon FBA.

Let's just say.

Maybe I'm being too aggressive here. Let's just like $80 sell and buy price like under 30.

For this one. We probably have a lot more.

More Lego.

I mean like there's this.

Also what's like great for ebay are maybe from brands that you are uncomfortable with flipping or like from sellers. I should say you would be uncomfortable with flipping back on ebay or back on Amazon like a third party seller. It's like a little shady. Or like you're not convinced the reviews aren't great, but it's a great flip. Then you know we're going to buy that. Like obviously this is from Amazon themselves. So we probably hopefully buy this to sell on Amazon, but maybe it comes damaged. This is something that you'd be able to flip on ebay even if it was damaged.

So like there's.

I mean again, I probably would sell this on. I would probably try to sell this on Amazon. Again, this is on pun video. So we're just not gonna have as great of a a time as we might want.

And unfortunately I know it's been requested and we're going to get to it. We'll kind of add a filter so we can look up super heavy things which I think is going to help. We could go to like industrial.

Or like tools and home improvement. That would be more local.

Sales again or like brands that you can't sell. Like, okay, so this is my. Probably we should have started with like Nike. Like Nike is not a brand I'm going to sell on Amazon ungated. And I just don't. It's just not something that I really want to do. But there might be great opportunity. So like I posted something recently about it. Let's go find like ROI is like 70%.

So we have at least a couple things today. There's already two things today that kind of fit this.

So something like this, if it's actually worth it, probably not.

You mention.

These Jordans. I really know Jordans well enough to make an assessment.

I mean.

It feels like this picture doesn't really belong. From what I just saw in the preview, we're 20 minutes now of just me rambling and the eating ones.

I mean, like this is supposedly a $200 product.

Someone's currently selling this for.

Cheap. I don't know why it's not letting me click.

I don't like it's called gymnastics shoes either.

I assume that's not what it's called.

I mean someone's trying to sell this for 190.

I don't know what they call this. I don't know shoes long enough to know what that shoe is.

I don't want to. Like I'm gonna say something and you're all gonna judge me for not knowing what it's called. My feeling is this could be worth, like, this could be worth an ebay grab. I've sold some Nikes in the past that looked like this on ebay again, also, because if it's a third party seller, we're not 100 sure it's. It's legit. So you'd want to get it anyway and confirm. Much rather come to you than to like.

A prep center.

Just, like take one more gander at what's kind of been popping up and see if there's anything. So, like this Darth Vader toy. I probably would try to flip this on.

On Amazon, but let's say you were gated in Hasbro or.

In Star Wars. You know, this could be.

Something where if you're gated, you would have had to pass. But now you're like, actually.

Let me just go throw this and see if I can sell it on ebay for profit. So it looks like someone's selling this here for 70 something.

This one obviously went under market. 66, 58. I mean, these are all really recent. 65. This one went for for 80. I don't know the difference between these two. This one is a sticker. Smells like an Ollie. Is this Ollie?

Yeah. You could have grabbed these for 10 bucks at Ollie's.

Isn't that crazy?

But we go back to this list. It looks like listings have come up in price.

No, I want to get rid of all this. There we go.

With the hat off.

80.

Is I looking at the wrong ones? Is there like some with hat off on, some with head on?

No. Yeah, I mean, it's still. To me, this is like a $65 toy. Why did we say we can get it for.

40.

On Amazon? It's 86, but it's going up.

So the cheapest was like 75. So if you felt like you could get 75, this would be a great eBay buy. 75 minus fees. Let's say 15 with some kind of. If you're promoting it as well. So what is it about $10, 0. 65. And then shipping should be like, what, 6 bucks? You're like 59. So 40 into 59 make $20.

Not bad. So it's really just that it's like, what can I. What would I have purchased for Amazon that I can't sell? And then what is it doing on ebay? And then what is big, bulky or weird or annoying? Which is also actually why we launched the personal deals over here. Part of the personal Deals section was yeah, like they're personal. But also when we look at profit and how we conduct profit in the profitable flip section, we're looking at the FBA fees. We're saying, hey, buy it for this, sell it for this. FBA fees, what's the difference? But if something's really big and grossly like hard to ship, it might not be profitable on Amazon or very, very low profit, but it might be great for local. So in the personal deal section, that's kind of the digest. We actually don't even look at profit. Instead we're just looking at percent discount. So you have all the same stuff here, but instead you're going to be able to say like the discount value. Right. So you know, let's say we want to buy something for $200 with at least a 50% discount over the last 30 days. We'll see if there's anything that matches that. There might not be, but this is how you would use this if you were looking for particular like I would say big stuff to me. Like big stuff is usually more expensive.

There we go.

You got some fbm. Because we didn't really fix that. But.

You know these are all today.

Products that have dropped. And again like here's like that Robelle thing I was talking about. You know, this isn't obviously a great one just based on that Keepa, but I do like those Kohlers are kind of interesting as well. We can get like more refined. This is turning into a ridiculously long video. We can get more refined and say like.

Oh, it was discount value. We want discount percent. Oops. We want over 30 and 90.

You curious about any?

All right.

The reason it takes long is has to look through millions and millions of products and filter them. So like the wider we get with our searches, the longer it can take.

But it loads. All right. So we don't have as many, but we do have some. So the self clean litter box which went from $2,000 to $500. Laptop.

Okay. Actually this one is kind of perfect for what we're talking about. So this is a $668 shed, supposedly. I don't know, you'd have to like do some research to see maybe 500, $600 clearly has sales. It got down to 213.

This to me, you know, is a potential local sale, right. You can buy this for 200 bucks and you can sell for $400 and you can undercut the market.

You know, right now it's 363. So you probably have to wait for it to get back up. But it's been very consistently in the 600s. You know, certainly an interesting idea for local play that you would never. You would never flip this on Amazon. Even if you could, it wouldn't make sense.

What else do we have?

Laptops at least. Potastic things.

Ratchet straps is $12,000.

Mattresses, they're all FBM. Let's see more laptops. A bike. Right. I don't know if this actually shipped.

Probably not from.

Shiny seller.

Maybe have this couch.

Changing table.

Another couch. I don't know.

This couch was 600 down to 250.

So that was about 440. So you have a 250. So over 350.

But this is one very extreme idea of if I was actively looking for things to sell locally that were big, bulky and heavy, that had more consistent drops like this is probably the winner of this lot. But that gives you an idea of looking for. This is a long video. I'm not sure it was helpful. Hopefully it was.

Just as I said. The key things here are the more you sell, the more you look at products, the more you understand what you're gated in, the more you understand what brandings are like, interesting and worthwhile to sell on ebay. Tend to buy first question. Second, if it's remotely at all interesting and something I want to look at because again, those deals do kind of move fast sometimes. And then you know, if you see something that's bulky, weird, seasonal, like big Christmas things, Halloween stuff, etc. That's going to be more of a local move for me anyway. Or if it's something that's like very, very specific. Actually I'll leave on one more note. I'll show you an example of a product I just purchased recently for.

Local.

Let me find it.

If you got this far in the video, congratulations.

Nope.

So these bare bones chef knives.

These popped into.

Flip alert.

Recently for $4 and 47 cents.

These go for 80, 60, $80. I cannot sell these. Well I can but the brand is on the listing and so I was probably not going to sell them on Amazon. But for $4 and 50 cents I will 100 make money somewhere. I looked on ebay. This brand does sell on ebay A bit.

Closer to like the 40 or 50 range.

So maybe it was going to be an ebay play. Even if I sold for 35, that was a great return locally. Who doesn't want like a Japanese knife that sells for $80 for like 35 or $40 locally? So this is a real world example of something that I just purchased for that purpose. And when I saw the price from 59 to 4, I bought it first and then I questioned later. I was like, all right, where am I going to sell this? And that's when I did the research. All right, I'm going to end here. Hopefully this is helpful. Feel free to ask follow questions. I'll try not to make a 30 minute video for each one because that's a lot. And I'll talk to you soon.