26/12/2022
Diving into Online arbitrage Chapter 2
To learn about what is Online arbitrage and how to start it check my previous post.
Chapter 2: How to do product hunting and sourcing
Hunting:
You can do product research manually or using tools (automated process).
1) Manually:
There are 3 ways for it.
i) Using keepa:
Go to keepa product finder tab and add filters.
It's totally up to you, the more you play with filters the more results you get. But just for an overview, I will mention the criteria.
Sales rank (30/90 days average): 10000 to 80000
New 3rd party fba price: 25 to120
New offer count: 8 to 50
Select a category
BB seller: 3rd party
Uncheck digital products
Item weight: max 2000g
Adult products uncheck
Trade-in eligible uncheck
Now keepa will show you different products. Simply open products and after analysis, copy the title and check other retailers on google.
Once you find a good product then shift all your focus on seller sniping.
ii) Storefront sniping:
Once you find a product according to your criteria, then open different sellers selling that product and look for their products.
Always open and hunt from those stores whose,
Rating is above 85
Reviews are below 1000
Must be fba seller
Open their storefronts and hunt products from there, simply open each product and after analysis, do the same as you did previously for searching the retailers.
iii) Reverse sourcing:
In this method, open different retailers and go to their deals/clearance/sale section. There you will find different products with heavy discounts. Simply copy the title and search on amazon and if you find the product, then do your analysis. This is time-consuming but a great method to find good deals because the main problem in OA is finding the source (retailer). But in this method, you already have the retailer with a great price.
2) Automated Hunting:
There are 3 tools for it:
i) Tactical arbitrage
ii) Sourcemogul
iii) hero reverse arbitrage (selleramp)
All the tools scan retailers, stores, and amazon categories for you. They basically show you the retailers as well as the products on amazon with profitability depending on your criteria which you will add before scanning. Remember, whenever you find a good winning product from tools, always search for other retailers as well. It's possible that you might find a retailer offering a better price than that shown by the tool.
I don't recommend this because tools mostly give you OOS products and second, a lot of people are using tools and picking up the same products.
The third tool is provided by selleramp and it gets integrated with sellerampSAS.
Sourcing:
For this, you can either use google or the tools mentioned above.
Remember, whenever you find a profitable product, always check the retailer's reviews on Trustpilot. There are a lot of scam retailers, especially in the US.
Before calculations, always add the products to your cart, go to checkout and then calculate your sourcing price. Because most retailers, add tax during checkout. So for accurate calculations, please consider adding tax as well.
These were just the methods through which you can do hunting and sourcing.
We know this post does not includes how to do analysis because it's a very big topic and these both can't be covered in a single post.
Tips:
1) Always use VPN/VPS before finding retailers.
2) While using keepa, don't just add these filters and play with them to get more and more unique products.
3) Keepa product finder is used just to hunt a single product, after which convert your hunting technique to seller sniping because 1 product gives you an unlimited number of stores that are potentially doing OA.
4) blidz is a scam retailer in the US.
The next chapter will cover the most important and extensive part, product analysis. Stay tuned!
