Hi there all Freelancers, this new post will be dedicated to RETAIL ARBITRAGE and it’s BASICS. What exactly is RETAIL ARBITRAGE, you ask? Essentially you buy from various retailers, wholesalers, what have you with the intention to sell for MORE than what you paid. Some recent examples I can bring up is that I recently sold a camera for $55 I bought for $7. I recently sold a Coffee container I bought for $3.. for $25. Profits can be huge, but the BIG problem people have is with SOURCING.
What exactly is SOURCING? It’s about finding the RIGHT place to get the inventory. I don’t do this on any LARGE scale but I usually find plenty of inventory, working on a PROPER place to store it all before expanding too much but ultimately I use three different things.
I utilize my smartphone for simply going to eBay/Amazon and checking the sold/completed listings items on eBay, and on Amazon I check the rank and frequency of sells via the Amazon Seller App(YOU MUST have a SELLER ACCOUNT in order to utilize this for free.). If it sells frequently enough I post stuff on Facebook Classifieds at first for the less obscure stuff, and if it sits for three weeks with no sell, I have been unloading bigger ticket items on my friends established eBay store. In the future i’ll be selling everything through mine but mostly prepping smaller ticket items until I establish at least a few hundred in + feedback through eBay. FACEBOOK CLASSIFIEDS are completely free, but there is no real tracking to see what sells effectively or not.
In regards to FINDING the actual products I follow a variety of arbitrage-type groups from Facebook, Twitter, and various other social media that tracks these for me. I am a part of a few apps that give me alerts as well and they all send directly to my phone as an alert. When a sale/discount/etc. comes out I know about it. I ALSO follow a lot of couponing-type groups to lead me in the right direction and special “promotion” groups elsewhere to sniff out other potential sales. Previous examples I mentioned a while back. STEAM had a sale for it’s controller+ the device to broadcast to the TV for.. $5. I had sold one for about $30 to 40 range at the time(The controller) and kept the box and bought another with the profits. If I had stockpiled them at $5 the controllers, the resell value sits at about $20 to $25 even today over a year later. That’s $15 to $20 before shipping costs in pure profit for a $5 cost.. that’s 200%. They had a fixed set you could buy, but it was still a GOOD deal.
Another means to find sales is to go AFTER events such as BLACK FRIDAY/MEMORIAL day, and what have you at local retailers as they often unload massive stuff on clearance just to make room for the new seasonal products. Same thing. WHIP OUT A SMARTPHONE and compare to see if what’s selling is worth buying while it’s on clearance. I had did this with Frisbess before but at the time didn’t have enough room to store them to make them worth my while.
Retail outlets I am trying to more frequently hit up local to me: Dollar Generals, local auctioneers real estate sales(look up on google near you for liquidation sales, real estate sales, and check out auctionzip.com), Ollies, and various thrift stores.
The CONCEPT is universal. ALWAYS check to make sure that what you want to buy.. will actually sell. ALSO make sure that you have the space in your home/what have you to store the item for potentially weeks/months if you’re expecting a good ROI after special promo events die down. There were GAME CONSOLES you could have bought for roughly $40 to $75 off during Black Friday specials/Cyber Monday, what have you and waited two months to unload for the discounted price you saved, yielding you $30 to $45+ profit per each $150 or so you spent. Not as good of a profit margin, but easy to unload. Just an example.