Retail Arbitrage- How I Made Good Money With Amazon FBA

The act of reselling has been around since one could remember and has always been looked upon as a reliable skill for people to resort to in the event that they’re in a pinch for some money or are even in the mood to declutter and get rid of things that they no longer have use for. Reselling still holds its stake in today’s market. In fact, according to Statista, $78 billion was generated in sales revenue in 2023 and is expected to hit $90 billion by 2027. It’s easy to see why reselling is still so popular in today’s market and growing.

The saying one man’s trash is another man’s treasure holds a timeless significance in today’s world.Today, I’m going to show you how you can use retail arbitrage to your advantage to make serious money. Here are the cliff notes: 

How It Works

Retail arbitrage alone involves the act of someone buying a product at a low or discounted price from its true value and reselling that same product for a higher value to someone else. This is common practice among many people of today and it isn’t new, nor is it rocket science of any kind either.

Anyone can do it, and it’s a great way to not only make use of the stuff that you no longer have any need for, but it’s also an effective way to dispose of and reuse other people’s personal belongings that they no longer have any use for. 

Items That Sell

There are so many items to choose from that you can resell. Primarily collectors items such as trading cards, vintage sports jerseys, video game collections and the most underrated items of them all: books!

Books are by far the cheapest, low-risk, yet profitable items to resell on the market. Most of what I will be covering today will focus more so on reselling books specifically, but what I am sharing today can and is directly applied to all other items that are resold online today. 

Platforms to Sell Your Items

Ebay is normally the “go-to” spot for all resellers but the platform that all resellers should go to is Amazon FBA. Ebay is great for finding items of interest for a discounted price and then using Amazon’s platform to list them for sale for top dollar.

Keep in mind though, you can also do this with other books that you find on Amazon and resell them for a higher price value and they will sell. Poshmark and Mercari are also good places to list your items, but there is so much traffic that is shared between both eBay and Amazon, that it would be a great place to start and then branch off to other platforms. 

Helpful Tools for Serious Sellers

As long as you have a phone and the Amazon Seller app, you should be good to scan just about any item you come across and know the expected value of how much you can sell the product for. However, reselling on Amazon is not as simplistic as one would think.

There are tools specifically for scanning books that work accurately to calculate how much of a return you will get from the book as far as take-home profit and can even give you an accurate time estimate as to when your book will sell. This tool is called ScoutIQ. Another tool that works universally with any reseller is Keepa.

Keepa will give you a schematic graph of all the historical sales that took place with that specific item and give you a rough idea of when it will sell and for how much.

Lastly, this tool Go2Lister is an extremely helpful listing software that will not only list your books for you on Amazon, but they will also figure out batching and logistics all for you in one single scan.

Go2Lister is one of the best listing softwares to use for book reselling mainly because of how swift and user friendly it is for all sellers. Go2Lister and ScoutIQ are a must-have combo to keep in your arsenal when reselling books if you want to make serious money by doing this. 

Where to Find Inventory

Really for any item of choice, pawn shops and thrift stores are always a great place to start. If we’re specifically talking about books, there are tons of book sales that take place all throughout the year. You can also head over to your local libraries and look to see if they have on-going book sales.

Public libraries sell their books for a fraction of the price that they can be sold for online, so it is a great place to source inventory for the time being if you’re working with a low budget.

Another great place to source inventory are estate sales. Estate sales tend to be the most overlooked place to source books for inventory but they almost always have valuable books to sell for a fraction of the price if not free. 

How to Convert This to A Business

Ideally, the best way to turn this side hustle into a fully operated business is to network. Networking is what gets you in the position to have sourced inventory come to you, rather than you going to it.

When you’re out looking for books, get to know the people that you’re buying from and establish a relationship as you continue to routinely go to them. By making yourself a familiar face, you can get first dibs on unscanned inventory that no reseller has touched and optimize your chances of coming across highly profitable books.

You could also buy a few bulk bins and label them as a “donation box” for people to place their used books that they no longer want in the bin and make monthly rounds to empty the container and see what you find that could be extremely profitable. 

Things to Consider

Unlike other side hustles, this side hustle is no easy task. It can be very time consuming and takes a good amount of physicality to keep up with. But this side hustle is extremely doable and it actually works. If you can consistently take the time out of each week to source your inventory, within the year you will start to see consistent sales daily and have another income stream working to put money in your pocket.

Keep in mind that you do have to be proactive in taking the time to go out to various book sales and libraries to find inventory. It does get easier as you keep doing it, but overall, this is a very time consuming side hustle, but at the same time this side hustle is very rewarding and will yield you a healthy ROI in a relatively fast time frame. As always, cheers friends and best of luck with your business venture!

The Right Items Matter

One of the most popular forms of reselling is retail arbitrage. Specifically through selling used books. This side hustle generates income for a number of reasons, but the main key reason is because everyone has books! Everyone at one point in their life either pursued education or just so happen to be avid readers that enjoy reading books.

Well, what happens when you no longer have use for those books? They sit on a shelf and collect dust year in and year out until someone else finds a use for them. This is where retail arbitrage comes in and it doesn’t even have to end with books.

There are plenty of items that hold value that people resell. You can resell vintage sports jerseys, bean babies, trading cards, video games, etc. Mainly, any collector item that you can think of would work well in retail arbitrage. Let us know if you found this to be helpful, and like always friends, best of luck with your business venture!