The Ultimate Online Arbitrage Sourcing Amazon FBA Guide

In this blog post, we are going to be speaking about the ultimate money making, sourcing machine, which you can build in your online arbitrage (OA) business, because this is going to be the step by step walkthrough, with genuinely no steps skipped, exactly how you can build your online arbitrage (OA) machine.

Today, you can start to build your operations, so you can make a big difference in your life. You can potentially quit your job, you can make it out to a warehouse or a prep service, and you can have an online business - making money via Amazon FBA every single day to what ever level that you want. 

In 2015, Kev first started his business, and he started to build the exact same sourcing machine, which I am going to be talking about in this blog post. Then, I am going to go into detail, so that you will be able to see exactly what you need to do, because you want to make some money and we want to help you make some money! So, this is why we wanted to create this online arbitrage for beginners series. This is part 2, if you haven't seen or read part one, then please do so, because we go through so much which will be so beneficial to you.

Watch here below!
 

Read here below! 

This video and blog post includes Kev sharing the following: 

• components of the online arbitrage business model
• basics and fundamentals of the business
• the warehouse evolution
• how to get started with the hands-on aspects of the business
• an overview of Amazon FBA

However, now, we are digging deep into sourcing. 

Currently, this little guy in the middle is you, just like it was Kev in June 2015. He learnt about Amazon FBA and he learnt about online arbitrage (OA), buy low and sell high. And, he thought to himself that this was the opportunity which he was looking for. And this is why you are here right now, reading this blog post, because this is the opportunity which you have been waiting for, too - to get the freedom, to have the time in your life, for your family, to be able to quit your job, and not have to work the 9-5. 

So, the person in the middle was Kev, super excited. 

And the people on the side is Amazon, with millions upon millions of customers. These customers, have all got your money - our money. All of these people spend money on Amazon, they are always looking for products to purchase on Amazon. 

And what we are doing is trying to build a machine, from sourcing to purchasing to shipping. And ultimately what should happen is you should have a flow of products. You have got flows from 12 different sources, which I am going to talk to you about in this blog post, and set up multiple streams of sourcing multiple products. You want to be happy with a flow of products coming to you every single day. 

Bottlenecks

Let's start with the bottlenecks. These are the common bottlenecks which occur in business. If you want to grow, it doesn't matter what level you are at, whether you are just starting out, whether you are intimidate, whether you have got a business, one of these issues are preventing you from moving to the next level.

So, what are they?

1. Time

We haven't got any time, I haven't got any time and you haven't got any time. We all want more time, but we haven't got any - it is a huge bottleneck.

2. Money

Capital is a major bottleneck. The more money that you have, the more options you have got. The less money you have, the less options you have and the more difficult things are going to be for you. 

3. Space

Space is a huge problem. You could be currently in your home, in your shed, in a warehouse, in your garage or even in your bedroom. You could be anywhere right now. Space is a bottleneck.

4. Products 

Finding products is probably one of the most difficult, if not the most difficult element of the business. Finding profitable products at scale.

5. Strategy

You may not even know the strategy, so in this blog post, I am really going to go deeper into giving you the strategy, the step by step, how you are building your business to allow you to have the freedom, and ultimately for you to be able to go on holiday with your family or friends and have days off with your family and friends, while your business is still running without you; so, you are working on your business, not in it. 

Do you want to learn more on problems which can occur in your business, and how to stop them from happening?

Then, watch the video below!

Or read the blog post below!

https://www.systemisefulfilment.co.uk/blog/5-Hard-Truths-Why-People-Fail-with-Online-Business

If you are in this operation, it has the potential to fail - there is something which could occur which could make it fail.  

Let us get into the sourcing strategies...

1. Manual Sourcing

Manual sourcing, which is known as the copy and paste method. You are finding profitable products at possibly discount stores, a clearance section, or on different websites, and you are copy and pasting. We are going to dig down deeper into this, exactly how it works, how you can speed this up, because if you have got limited time, you really want to speed this up as much as possible. For Kev, this is not really where you want to be, because you are not building a business at this point, you are building a job. 

To begin with, this is how Kev started out, and there is nothing wrong with this, it is about getting started and getting your hands dirty, it's about putting in that blood, sweat and tears and taking massive action every day. 

2. Lists

These are sourcing lists. You can get sourcing lists from anywhere between £80 to £130 a month. But these sourcing lists, the great thing about them is it is now the first level of an automated stream coming towards you. It is recommended that you get a list which give you 10 products at once. 

Within our business, we also offer sourcing lists, so if you are interested, definitely check out our memberships. 

The best thing for you is to get 10 products all at one store, so that you can place one order - all winners.

So it is recommended that you find sourcing lists which can supply 10 to you all in one time.

With the Gold Membership, we offer 2 Sourcing Lists and with our platinum Membership, we offer 4 sourcing lists.

Take a look here:

https://www.systemisefulfilment.co.uk/pricing

3. Virtual Assistants

These are assistants who are doing manual, they are doing your copy and pasting. But now, what you are doing, is you are paying a virtual assistant to work for you. This virtual assistant can also find you 10 products. These virtual assistants are working directly for you. This means that it is not just quite like a sourcing list. If you have got an irresponsible sourcing list owner, they can give that to 100 people, which is ultimately a very big competition later on Amazon. 

If you are using a sourcing list right now, where you are getting massive competition, this most likely means that your sourcing list could have 5000+ members, which is a massive problem. Whereas, a virtual assistant is working directly for you.

Would you like to learn more on virtual assistants?

4. Automated Sourcing (TA)

You could be doing scans all the time. Tactical arbitrage is something you could be using to scan products all the time. There are different TA's out there, there is Source Mobile, FBA Wizard, and a lot more. But, this could get you another 10 products a day. After this, you should be building the system up. From just these, you could be sourcing 60 products a day, and you are not having to do the manual copy and paste yourself.

5. Resource Pooling

Resource pooling is when you are sharing the products which you have available in your business. For example, let's say you have 5 virtual assistants and you shared those virtual assistants with somebody else. This would mean, would be something quite extraordinary. You could then have an extra 10 virtual assistants. Let's say you had 5 virtual assistants and you shared them with 2 other sellers, now this is 15 virtual assistants. Now you have got a bank of 10x10, this then means that you have got an additional 100 products coming to you every single day. This means that the system is growing massively. 

6. Reverse Sourcing

Reverse sourcing is when you are now looking at products which people are buying. You are looking at what people are buying, you are looking at where those products are being purchased from, so what you are doing is you are recycling and bringing it back to you. So, everything what is already on Amazon, if you found sellers who are also doing this, you can have a look at what they are doing, then this will start to supply you with different products as well.

7. Replenishing

Replenishing is when you are selling products, you are making some money and you are selling and taking massive action - you are making that profit, and you are now wanting to replenish. So now, you have another stream coming towards you. And now, if you are doing weekly replenishing or even daily replenishing, you have now got another possibly 10 products. 

8. Out of Stock

You need a system to supply you with out of stock products. Out of stock products are winners, but they are out of stock. So, you need to have the finger on the pulse, so when exactly they are back in stock, you are straight on it. 

9. Bundling

Bundling is a whole new game. Instead of just doing the copy and paste method, now you have got a scenario where you can bundle things together, you can have shampoos with conditioners, packs of three and packs of four. It is a little bit of a different strategy, but it is another way of sourcing.

10. Wholesale

In wholesale, you go to trade shows, you some contacts and you potentially open an account. And you have now got the ability to go directly to a wholesaler. You can now get pallets delivered to you, you can now go through those pallets, you can now have replenish-ables at scale whenever you want. Wholesale is a different model, but I wanted to put it in here, because it is all about sourcing 

Do you want to learn more on wholesale?

 Would you like to read a full beginners course on wholesale?

https://www.systemisefulfilment.co.uk/blog/Amazon-FBA-Wholesale-for-Beginners-STEP-BY-STEP-Full-Course 

11. Creation (Listing)

You are creating different listings. For example, in 2016, Kev came across a product which he had actually created, which he had taken pictures of. It was a shocking season 3 20-pack, and he was getting them for half-price at Argos. They were around £8, and he was selling them on Amazon for around £33. And he was making incredible amounts of profit. This is because he created the listing. You should be a little careful with this one, as it is a little more advanced. 

Would you like to learn more sourcing tips?

Click on the video below!

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Now, let us talk all things sourcing...

You must understand the fundamentals of what it is that you are actually looking for. The first thing to start with is the make-or-break of this business - products, being able to review products as per criteria, to make sure that you know whether these products are selling or not. What items have information that you need to look for. This is all a data-driven business.

Copy and Paste Method

This is when you go into a store, like Argos or Disney and you start looking in clearance sections, where there are different items available for clearance. In here, you will find items that are 20%, 25%, 30%, 50% and 75% off and more. This gives you a real opportunity to potentially be able to make some money. 

So, what you are doing is you are looking for an item which is on offer, then you are finding the exact same product on Amazon and seeing what the item is sold for and what the buy rate is. 

This is about the buy box, the buy box is determined by Amazon, who they feel has the best offer, and there are many different factors that go into this, such as price, location, is it Amazon Prime. There are so many different things that go into this. 

Keepa

Keepa is a paid tool, however it makes you money. Keepa allows you to see a graph on Amazon products. Keepa allows you to see the price history and the sales rank. With the sales rank, you can see in this moment in time, how Amazon has determined how this particular item has sold in terms of the whole catalogue. 

So...
If you scroll all the way down on the page of an item to the additional information section, you will be able to see the ranking of the item. However, this is always changing, all items over the next hours, days, weeks, months and years will change and possibly sell more or less.

Keepa allows you to see so much information about products.

Take a look at Keepa here: https://www.lifesuccessengineer.com/lse_resources/keepa/

FBA Calculator  

If you take the ASIN of an item and you go to the FBA Fee Calculator, it will show you what Amazon will charge you, if you were to sell the item. Here, you are able to see the fulfilment cost plus the sales on Amazon fee and you will see the entire cost of what you will be charged. 

With the FBA Calculator, you can type in the cost of an item and you will be able to see what profit you will be able to make. 

The main thing we are interested in with the FBA Calculator is simply how much the fee would be from Amazon, if you were to sell the item. 

Collect Data

 Here, you would go into your sourcing management spreadsheet, and we are going to be capturing the data which we just discussed above. So, if there is a winner, you want to capture as much detail as you can about it. 

For example:

• The name
• The ASIN
• The store
• The store URL
• The Amazon URL
• Buy for
• Sell for 
• Quantity to purchase
• FBA fee preview

 One thing you need to be aware of is if you are VAT registered or not, if you are in the UK, so that is one thing to be concerned and aware about. After you have put in these details, it starts to show you a lot more. 

Once you have got started and you get quite good at it, the chances are, you are not going to go through and collect all of this information every single time, because it is pointless. It is pointless if you are not going to purchase it. 

Once you first start, it is slow, it takes time and it takes a lot out of you, because it can be draining, and you are spending hours upon hours trying to find the items, a winning item, because it is sort of like digging for gold. 

Once you have got lots of items in your seller central account, you are going to want to have a repricer as well, which allows you to set what the 30% is. 

 Would you be interested in learning more about spreadsheets?

Sourcing Lists

Sourcing lists are when you getting a bunch of products shared with you in one go. This isn't like a flow, this isn't a one at a time, this is a bump, like a full slab of products in a list. The great thing about a sourcing list is you don't have to go through all the hassle I mentioned above - the copy and paste, because it is already done and it has been supplied to you. 

So, for example, if you found a product which was 3 for 2, and they were £5 each, you could get 3 for £10. This is all depending on if you are VAT registered and you are claiming it back. There is a whole lot involved, which is why we use spreadsheets.

With a sourcing list, you have now been supplied 10 products per list, so this makes the process so much quicker and less stressful. Going back to trying to get it up to 200 items coming to you per day, and now, you are processing. This is an amazing thing.

With the sourcing list, you can put if it is a loser or a winner, and if it is a loser, you are able to put why it is a loser. 

There is so much to be learned with sourcing lists...

So, would you like to learn more on them?

Would you like to read our blog post on sourcing lists?

How to 4X Your Online Arbitrage Business with Sourcing Lists

Virtual Assistants  

This is when you are hiring the virtual assistants to do the sourcing for you. They are going to go into these stores for you, and they are searching on your behalf. They are going to do exactly what we just talked about, except now, you are not having to do it - you have virtual assistants who are going to do it for you. The great thing about virtual assistants is that you can hire them from places like the Philippines, where there wages are a lot less than here in the UK, or the US, and they are very great working people and very responsive if you get them trained right and if you work with them right.

Would you like to learn more on virtual assistants?

Automated Sourcing

What this does is it gives you the ability to be able to scan different stores. Once it is all set up, you can search for the store which you want to search for. It also has an easy bulk feature, which will allow you to such for all the different categories which you want to search for. Then, it has the ability to use different filters - you can set these filters up depending on what you are doing. There are different source price adjustments and you can remove different items that it finds. 
There are a whole lot of different things which you want to think about and test. 

What this ultimately does is you press search and it will search for all those categories and all those lists on the website, automated for you.

If you would like to try this out, you can do this here: https://tacticalarbitrage.com/?frnd=37

Idea Resource Pooling

Imagine now, you have got these sourcing lists, you have got VA's doing this for you, you have TA and an automated system doing this for you, and now you have also got VA's in different categories, different VA's supplying you with items as well. And in terms of a resource pool, you have got access to possibly 10 other people's VA's.  

Well...Now all of this is over to you...

Thank you for taking your time to read through this blog post. I hope that you have learned something from this ultimate guide which is beneficial to you. 

Thank you so much for the support, we here at Systemise Fulfilment really appreciate it!