As e-commerce is growing by leaps and bound, the business of buying and selling has become competitive and so you need to adapt the best strategies to stay competitive. One of the effective ways to boost your sales is taking on the practice of Online Arbitrage! It is all about buying item at the low price from one market place and then selling online on other marketplaces like to gain profits. While this may sound easy, but in reality, finding the products and reselling it takes high efforts and dedication. With Online Arbitrage, you can avoid countless headaches that comes while managing the online business like…
- Holding on the inventory that never gets sold
- Finding the wholesaler that you can trust
- Paying taxes and custom duty for overseas transportation
- Daily trips to shipping station (if you are shipping yourself)
- Paying for shortage and product fulfillment
- Large capital investment
So, before jumping into the business of online arbitrage, you need to understand all about sourcing the right product with the right category at the right time which can help you to stay on the top of the trends
Let’s zero down the techniques to nail Online Arbitrage and grow profits.
- Find the right online market place: To make profits on your products, you need to purchase product at low price and sell it at high price on other profit making market channel. So, to do that, it is crucial to figure out from which market place you are buying and selling your product in order to grow your business. There are many online arbitrage website available from where you can make purchase, suggest you the trending products and compares the prices for you but still you can consider Amazon’s product pricing to get insight of how much profit you can make. Additionally, you can make the use of price tracking software to get general idea of how much profits you can make.
- Selecting the best product to buy and sell online: Usually sellers do online arbitrage from eBay to Amazon, Amazon to eBay, Amazon to other market place, other market place to eBay and more. But, sellers need to identify the best product category by understanding the customer’s behavior and purchasing patterns on any marketplace (which is very difficult task for them). There are no defined algorithms, math formulas to know the best product category in few days. But as and how you start with observing prices and sell regularly, sellers may have hands-on in short duration. Although electronics and home-décor may have high profit margins, but shipping cost may kill you and glass-ware items can break anytime which leads to replacement or cancelling your order.
- Amount of money you should invest: One of the best things about online arbitrage is that, you don’t need to spend tons of money to start with. Start small and master the art of buying and selling online with the high profit margin. With this, you may gain good returns and you may even loose handsome amount of money; so, keeping the small budget is always safe. Additionally, when you are deciding the pricing strategy for your product, make sure that your price doesn’t match with the Amazon pricing; if at it matches, make sure to hold on till Amazon finish up his stock or offer free shipping option, bundles to compete with it.
- Check the sales rank: Sales rank is the best way in Online Arbitrage to get the rough idea of number of units that are being sold every day and which are highly in demand. So, select the products that have few reviews and descent sales rank – in other words products that are doing consistently great. To check out what is sales rank for a product; imagine sports and outdoors category; only have five products in it. One sold 15 units per day, one sold 10 units per day, and one sold 5 units per day. The sales rankings would be #1 for 15 items, #2 for 10 items, and #3 for 5 items. The lower sales rank is good as it means that items which are trending and sold consistently. A higher sales rank is bad as those items are not sold much and this results in less chances of moving your inventory. Look for a sales rank that’s consistently in the top 5% of its category. This will give you better insights on which items to stock and how quick your inventory will move.
Read More: Choosing the Best Online Arbitrage Software: A Comprehensive Guide
- Automate the process: There are millions of products available online and it is not feasible to monitor all of these. Many tools and software are available for sourcing the task and automating the process of finding online arbitrage One such solution is an online arbitrage software which provides everything that you are looking for to automate the process. You can also use price tracker tools that provide price history and price predictability for millions of product that is sold on all market places. Revenue calculators are also available to calculate the fees of marketplace and FBA; must be taken into account and added to your product cost so you know before you buy to make a good margin.
The Bottom line
Are you a seller on Amazon, eBay or Walmart? You can surely gain profits by just investing little time in Online Arbitrage business. We at eSellerHub can develop custom arbitrage system that can take care of all your needs. Let’s connect!