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Proven Online Sourcing Strategies

Online Arbitrage Week 1

Arbitrage, Source Types, Budget

0:00:01 Speaker 1: The broadcast is now starting. All attendees are in listen-only mode.

0:00:05 Speaker 2: Hey, everybody, welcome to the greatest online arbitrage training that has ever been put on. This training is going to blow you away. The opportunity is limitless and we've got the best in the business to teach us. I've got one of our premier coaches, Gary Baird, and probably one of my top mentors and people that I recommend to other people out there, Chris Green. Hey, guys, how's it going?

0:00:38 Speaker 3: Going great. How are you, Nathan?

0:00:39 S2: Good, guys. I'm excited. How about you, Chris? You ready to do this?

0:00:44 Speaker 4: I am hyped, I am ready to go, I am in such a good mood to bring the best of online arbitrage sourcing. Nate, I appreciate the compliment, it means a lot. We've worked together on a lot of projects, it's been great. And I wrote a book on this stuff and I am thrilled to help everybody who's listening to this coaching get better at online arbitrage.

0:01:07 S2: Yeah, but you guys are the best at this. I can attest to that. I know everybody out there that talks about the subject of buying inventory online for reselling on Amazon and there is nobody out there in the world better in this, so listen, let's cut the small talk, let's teach these people how to do this.

0:01:27 S4: Let's do it.

0:01:28 S3: Alright. Let's get rolling. Alright. So first slide we're gonna talk about, if I can get this to move to the next... No, little hyperactive there. Alright. So the first thing we wanted to touch on was, what in the world is online arbitrage? Or online sourcing? Online arbitrage is kind of a coin that, I don't know if Chris you coined that or somebody else did but...

0:01:52 S4: I actually did. I invented... Well, I didn't invent the model, but I definitely put a name toit with "retail arbitrage" and "online arbitrage". But, yeah, this has been around a long time, guys.

0:02:02 S3: Sure. So we just want to define it first and kind of give you a base to start from. The Merriam-Webster dictionary definition says it's "The practice of buying something in one place and selling it almost immediately in another place where it is worth more." And that's probably a little

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http://provenonlinesourcingstrategies.com/


bit aggressive, the "immediately" part. So our definition... Revised definition for FBA is a simpler definition: "Finding products online that can be sold on Amazon for a profit".

0:02:34 S4: Yeah, let's keep it simple. You'll hear the term "retail arbitrage" and "online arbitrage". This teaching, this course, is all about online arbitrage. So when you hear that term, the way I try to describe it is, this is stuff where you can sit on your butt on your couch with a laptop, some kind of computer, and you can find inventory that you can turn around and sell for a profit. That's gonna come straight to your house, and be delivered to your door, maybe you're gonna use a prep companyor a prep and ship service, we got some information on that in the other segments, but you're sourcing online instead of going to a retail store and scanning barcodes. That's why it's called onlinearbitrage. And one of the coolest things about this is, this isn't like wholesale, right, there's wholesale coaching if you guys wanna get into that. This is you're just buying from a website, which means you can buy as little or as much as you want and you can do whatever you want with is. You're not doing minimum purchase quantities, you're don't have to adhere to minimum advertised price, or MAP pricing you may have heard about, you can do whatever you want with it. You don't need to have a business license, you don't need to spend a ton of money, you don't need a line of credit. Anybody can step into this business, learn the tips and tricks that we're gonna teach you, and buy inventory that you're gonna resell for a profit. It's really that easy.

0:03:52 S2: Absolutely, yeah. It's a great model that's easy, and we're actually gonna talk about some of the pros right now. Oh actually, I'm sorry, we'll talk about the Amazon buyer mindset, then we'll get into the pros and a few of the cons as well of online sourcing. Amazon buyer mindset, Chris, I hear this all the time. I hear people say, "Why would a customer pay so much? I would never pay that. They can just go to the store and website and buy it cheaper, why would they buy it from you?" So what's your explanation for why people pay what they pay on Amazon, why we're able to charge what we charge for products and get away with it, in some people's minds.

0:04:30 S4: [chuckle] Well, it's not really getting away with it, it's just the market, right?

0:04:34 S2: Right.

0:04:35 S4: This is one of the most common questions that we had when FBA first started getting big. I'd get calls all day, "Why does this work? What do you mean, people are paying more? What's this Prime thing going on?" And people need to realize... And I didn't realize this, right? So guys, if you think everybody's a price buyer, meaning price is the number one thing that they're using to make a decision about what they're gonna buy, you just need to believe me that it's not. Really, if you break it down, nobody's a priced buyer, because nobody drives around in the cheapest car and wears the cheapest shirt and they're sure not going to the cheapest brain surgeon, alright? So it's onething to say you can get it cheaper somewhere else, but I've bought boxes at Lowe's and next door's a Staples and I see people walking out of Staples with boxes that cost 10 times what they cost at Lowe's right next door, right? If there's price discrepancies, there's an inefficient market, there's arbitrage opportunities out there. And when it comes to the Amazon buyer mindset, a lot of them arepaying for convenience, 'cause it's really easy to say, "Why would they pay so much? I can go to thestore and buy it for cheaper." Yeah, well you can't get a Prime two-day shipping. I got something today that took eight days to get here, and I was like "You've gotta be kidding? Eight days?"

0:05:46 S2: Not from Amazon.

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0:05:47 S4: I'm so used to two-day shipping, and if I can't get it in two days, I really don't want it. But you just have to believe the Amazon buyer does pay more. And if you have trouble believing that, it's okay, you can test the market, you can send in one or two, or list a few merchants [0:06:02] ____ affiliate and see if they sell. That's what finally got me to switch over. I was an EBay seller. I was trying to undercut. I was thinking price was the only thing that mattered. Why would I bother listing on Amazon where the prices are higher? I finally tried it because there was no fees, and the items sold like crazy, and that's what it took. For me it took empirical evidence to change my mind. Now, you guys can use our empirical evidence, our experience in doing this for decades now, and just believe that the Amazon buyer pays more. So everything that we go through here, when we show the Amazon price, that's the market price on Amazon. And yes, they could go do a different website and buy it for cheaper, buy it for a lower price, they could. And whenever I get questions like that I tell those buyers, "Then go do it." Because they're sending us questions through Amazon saying, "Hey, I can go to Kohl's and buy this for cheaper." I'm like, "Then go do it." And I encourage...

[chuckle]

0:06:54 S2: Why are you emailing me?

0:06:56 S4: Yeah, tell me where the product is, I'll go buy some more. I don't try to be mean to them. I throw it a little back at them and say "Hey look, if you can get it at that price, then I encourage you to buy it and sell it on Amazon, because on Amazon it's 60 bucks. You can get it for 20, good for you and " You don't want to be smart with them about it. You will get questions from customers about... But I use that as sourcing material. Some customer emails me and says, "Hey I can get this and Toys"R"Us for 12 bucks," I'm like "Sweet! Thanks, dude. I'm on my way."

0:07:27 S2: Yeah, there are people with too much... More time on their hands then they should have, and they will do that just to kinda try to get under your skin I think sometimes. You just answer them kindly and nicely and be polite and move on and sell it for whatever price the market has...

0:07:41 S4: But the flip side of that is the people who don't have time. They don't have time and when you don't have time you're willing to pay a little more.

0:07:49 S4: Yeah, these are the reasons. When I'm coaching clients I tell them there's, I always said five and I came up with another one based on our conversations, and that's the loyal one. But I always say people are either busy, too busy to worry about taking time to shop, comparison shop, goto stores or whatever. They're rich. They've got more money or they have more money than they know what to do with or they just have enough money where they don't need to worry about how much they're spending on something. They're lazy. They just don't want to spend the energy to go run around and do stuff. They're really rural and can't get to stores and even if they can buy it off thewebsite, they want it fast so they're going to get it from Amazon, because they can get it faster from Amazon than some other website. They're impatient. Two day shipping, one day shipping, same dayshipping in some cases from Amazon. And then the last one that I've added recently, is loyal. They just are loyal to Amazon's brand. They get great customer service. You can return products even past the due date, to the chagrin of many buyers unfortunately sometimes. But they are very customer driven and some people are loyal to that because they know they're going to get a great customer experience on the Amazon platform, and they're willing to pay for that.

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0:09:02 S4: Alright. And I'd add one more. You had five, now we have six, I'd almost add seven andwe're talking about the Amazon buyer mindset. And there's going to be times when an item is being sold over retail. Meaning a higher price then the MSRP, is probably because it's hard to find. You may look at that, and that's a $20 Elsa doll, why are people paying $70? Because it's sold out everywhere, and if you want it today you can pay $70 or you cannot. It's Capitalism, it's a free market, you don't have to buy it. But that's the market price. And price is set on the third party marketplace by only two things: Supply and demand. That's it. This isn't economics 101, but really supply and demand set the price. Nobody's buying, the price is going to come down. If things are out of whack, the price is gonna go way up. And Amazon is gonna come in and out of stock of someitems.

0:09:49 S4: But when they're out of stock, the price is what it is. And even if it's at a high price where you would say, "I'd never pay that." "Hey, I would never pay that either, but I'm not selling tome. I'm selling to the customer who's got a child's birthday coming up, and they've been begging forthis Elsa doll forever, and hey that's the market price." This isn't price gauging, this isn't taking advantage of, this is the market. You can wait until they come back in stock at a lower price or hey, stuff's hard to find the price goes up. And that goes up on everything, not just collectible toys. It goes up on Corvette Convertibles when there's more buyers than sellers. The demand is exceeding supply, then the price goes up. [0:10:31] ____ don't even negotiate.

0:10:32 S3: It goes up on stuff like appliances that get outdated. They came out with a Keurig 2.0. It wasn't as popular. It had tons of terrible reviews. People were paying a premium if you could provide them the original version of the Keurig machines. It's true for all different types of products.Toys is a great example because parents are well known to be over spenders on their kids, but its true for all kinds of products, not just toys absolutely.

0:10:58 S4: Sure. And there is the collectible stuff as well. We won't get into all that, but once something becomes collectible, think Star Wars, think someone who wants to fill out their collection, there's not much supply and there's still a lot of demand 'cause its a strong brand, price isgonna go up.

0:11:14 S2: Alright. It's time to move on to the next slide here. Talk about online sourcing a little bitmore, I call this 'online sourcing extended.' We talked about this. Chris and I have talked about this a lot. Online sourcing is not just about the products you find online to buy right then. It's about so much more. You can learn a ton of information just by going though the process of research. You might not find anything on a site that day, but you learn something about that brand, or that line, or that store. You might be able to track a product that you found that's a great seller on Amazon but itsnot quite a great buy yet and we're going to talk a lot more about tracking later on in this course, butthere are tons of good bits of information you can get from sourcing things online and one of those things that you can get, if you are able to find stuff in store... Sometimes you can find stuff that's notavailable online and it's actually a benefit to you because it's only available locally in store.

0:12:25 S2: Most people are gonna be lazy and not take advantage of that and if you do look at the in-store quantities available in your area and go take advantage of that, buy them in store, you knowthey're there, you're not wasting a trip to the store to go get them, you get in your car, drive over there, pick them up, and sometimes you can buy them at four or five stores in your area. Just set up a little route on your planner and your GPS or whatever and set your trip and head out and get all

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your products in those stores while you're there as well. So you get some in-store buying opportunities, you can also find wholesale opportunities.

0:13:00 S3: So, yeah, you can find some great online finds to buy, but when you find a great product that sells that you found online, check out who makes it, look at the back of the package when it comes to you. Who's the supplier? Can you find it at a wholesale price, cheaper at the same price that you've been buying it online, unlimited quantities, get them case packed and sent to your door? And then there's the private label opportunities. I have a coaching client right now who is private labeling something that he bought from a store online, they stopped producing it, stopped selling it, so now he is filling that gap by going to China, having them make this product and him branding it himself. And he did that just because of an online sourcing opportunity that became a private label opportunity because they stopped carrying it. It happens all the time. They stop producing products, people still want them and there's a chance to fill that void for you if you can find something that's a really good selling product. I'll leave that last one...

[overlapping conversation]

0:14:01 S3: I'll leave that one to you 'cause this kinda came from you in our discussions. We kinda came to this together, but this was your quote, so I'll let you take this one.

0:14:10 S2: Everything you do has value and I understand when people say, "Why do you spend an hour working on three different sites? I didn't find anything." Well, you learn something, right? You just said you learn about different sites, you can learn about different products, you learn about new lines that are coming out. And the tracking stuff, guys, wait till you see all the tracking stuff we're gonna show you in the later modules in this course. You're able to track items on a website 'cause when you're with computers, right? This is is... It's very different from retail versus online arbitrage.It's easy to say, "Oh, they're just different sources." Well, yeah, but they're very different strategies as well. It's a computer. It's a website. I can set up little widgets and scripts and all these things to monitor prices and monitor in-stock alerts and quantities and release dates and all these things 'cause it's computer.

0:14:55 S4: Right. I can check it all the time. It's a store. I gotta go to the store and check are the onthe shelf today, are they on the shelf today? Are they on the shelf today? You gotta keep going back.Let the computer do it. Your computer can do it every five minutes if you want because you made them see something to say, "You know what, I think that's gonna be a great product that I can make money on, but my acquisition cost, the price on the website is too high and the sell price, the marketprice on Amazon is too low." Now if one of those changes or, hey, both of them change, even better.If your cost goes down all of a sudden, "Hey, I can make money on it. I'm interested." Or the price on the Amazon goes up, "Hey, now I can make money. I'm interested." This isn't like a game of, "Oh, I can make this make money." It either makes money or it doesn't. And as soon as you can make money with it, you pull the trigger.

0:15:41 S4: So there are lots of tools out there that will track prices both on Amazon and source websites, in-stock alerts on Amazon and source websites. And when an item becomes popular or profitable, you get a text message or you get an email or you get a tweet, however you have it set up. So you can gain so much information. And I love these in-store buying opportunities. This is a little bit of a segway, but I want everybody to think big when they're doing this. You might find an item and you're gonna buy it out on the website, but you know they're in the stores and you don't

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live near any stores. This is the value of having a network. You're probably in the MST Facebook group where you can network with other sellers and say, "Hey, guys, I found this awesome product and I know there's some stock in these zip codes," and you share that information with them, guess what, that value is gonna come back to you tenfold and it's just that easy.

0:16:35 S4: You're sitting there in front of a computer and you know the stock levels, it's valuable information that you can't do anything with 'cause you don't live in that zip code. So how do you extract information from that? Well, one of two ways. You either sell the deal straight up for cash oryou use it... I don't wanna say it's leverage in a nefarious way but, hey, you're gonna build some relationships by sharing this information. That is valuable. Relationships have value. It's hard to put a dollar value on them, but man, mastermind groups and networking, the people who are in them, they'll tell you, [0:17:06] ____ the most valuable part of their business.

0:17:09 S3: Yeah. And when Chris says, "sell the deal," to just briefly expound on that, everyone ofus who sells online will gladly pay for information that makes us money. So if you find something that, one, you can't access because you don't live in that area or, two, maybe you are just starting outand don't have enough money to buy all of the available quantity online. If you can provide good information on a product that's a great deal to somebody, they will gladly pay you something for that information. I have local sourcers here who source me, I pay them 10% of whatever they spend.So if you wanna use that as a guide for what you're gonna charge for that, that's fine, or you can come up with your own price, but there's a definite market out there for information that's gonna make people money in this business. And I'll add one more even to what Chris was saying for these in-store buying opportunities.

0:18:02 S3: If you don't want to share these deals for some reason and you want to take advantage of them yourself, look, I have parent... My parents live in New York, upstate New York, so whenever I'm sourcing stuff online I always check 12078, upstate New York, and see if there's any quantity there. And sometimes there is and I have my mom or my sisters, they go grab it for me, slap it in a box, send it to Amazon. Amazon preps it and labels it for me so I don't have to mess withthat and they're more than happy to do that. So if you have friends or family around the country, check in those zip codes as well and let them help you out. Give 'em something for it and make a little extra money for products that you would have never been able to source on your own.

0:18:43 S4: Yeah, you're sitting at your command center on your couch and you've got people running around picking up products in retail stores and sending them to your Amazon account. Is that technically online arbitrage, I'd say it is.

0:18:58 S2: Sure. It's an extension of it, that's why we call this 'online sourcing extended.' But yeah,to reiterate at the bottom, everything you do has value. Learn from what you do. Track the products that you are finding, even if you buy them or not. I'll track stuff... I buy stuff full price sometimes online. I was just talking to a client today, we just started a deal's list. Greg Purdy and I just started adeal's list that we're putting out and we had some products on there today, and they were full price, selling on Amazon for two and a half times what they were full price on that website. So of course I'm gonna track that 'cause I wanna know when it drops in price, 'cause when it drops in price it's probably gonna be selling for three or four times on Amazon what it's selling for on that website. Sotrack everything and then expand. When you find products, expand your search. Go to other sites and look for that same product. Maybe it's cheaper somewhere else. Research that brand. We're gonna talk a little bit about learning a brand and learning a niche later on.

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0:20:01 S2: And before you move on, I'll add one more thing to this, Gary, on the track and learn part. Guys, if you're starting out, maybe you don't have a big sourcing budget, keep track of the stuff that you just find "interesting or potential or man, if I had the money, that would be something I would buy," and keep track of your acquisition costs, keep track of how many you could purchase.Maybe it has a large limit, maybe it only has a few left in stock. Keep track of the sales rank on Amazon and the market price. Right now, a little later we can get into identifying the market price versus the listed price on Amazon. What items are actually selling for and keep track of that. See, what was it selling for today? A month later, what's it selling for now? So you can say, "Hey, if I hadbought that, would I have won or would I have lost?"

0:20:46 S?: Right.

0:20:46 S4: 'Cause nobody wins 10 out of 10 so don't try to go on perfection. Don't beat yourself upif you make a bad buy. We'll get into some buying strategies of keeping your acquisition costs, your buy price low, 'cause the lower your buy price the more protected you are. You're kind of insulated because of the amount of margin you have in your product. But if you keep track of all this stuff, you're gonna see, "Hey, you know what, I was right, eight out of 10 times", and that's good. And then, when you do have a sourcing budget then you already have that confidence. Business is really not that difficult or analyzing numbers or making decisions based on a ton of information that, man,if you were doing this business in the 90's or early 2000's you did not have access to the informationthat we have today.

0:21:32 S4: So you have all this information, you can make really good buying decisions with a little experience. And you can gain that experience without spending a dollar. You can sit there and track, three months, four months down the road, "Was I right, was I wrong? Hey, I was wrong. Whywas I wrong? Was there a red flag that I should have caught? Oh, I should have known, oh, okay." And you learn so much without spending a dime. So if that's the way you guys wanna get started I really encourage you to do so.

0:22:02 S2: Yeah, and if you are tracking and you realize, "Hey, I was wrong on this." Maybe you don't know why you were wrong on it, maybe you don't know what happened and what you missed.Reach out to people in the MST community, the My Silent Team Facebook group online is a great resource. People are extremely helpful there and more than willing to help you understand things when you're starting out.

0:22:20 S4: Yeah, please ask for help. Ask questions. Really, people love to answer questions, they really do. They love to see their name on Facebook with their picture answering a question. There's a little vanity that goes to it. So don't be afraid to ask because people really do wanna help.

0:22:35 S3: Alright. Let's talk a little bit about the advantages or the reasons why we love online sourcing. So the first one... This is my favorite because I'm cheap, is free boxes and packing supplies. Those packing supplies are expensive, man. Those air pockets.

0:22:52 S4: Oh yeah.

0:22:53 S3: Air pocket machine, which is ridiculously expensive where you buy them yourself or buy a ton of bubble wrap and that stuff gets expensive. So free boxes and free packing supplies.

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Online shoppers... Or online shippers are notorious for packing one square foot of, or one cubic footof products in a 10 cubic foot box and putting nine cubic feet of packing materials in there. We get stuff all the time. We got two WWE wrestling belts in a box that could have fit me in it, almost, the other day, and it had tons and tons of packing supplies. So that's one of the benefits is it saves you money, it cuts down on your costs. If you're buying in store, you've gotta buy that stuff yourself. And we do that too but it just decreases the amount of materials that you need to buy for your business. I don't think we bought boxes... After Christmas, we bought so much stuff for the Christmas season, I don't think we have bought any new boxes from the UP... Well no, we buy themfrom U-Haul, but we hadn't bought any boxes until June, middle of June. We had so many free boxes and packing materials that we didn't need to buy anything.

0:24:04 S3: The second thing, Chris has already touched on this a little bit, items are delivered to your door or, if you choose to use a prep company... The prep company's door. There are companiesout there that will receive your online orders, prep them, ship them to Amazon for you, and you never even have to see them or touch them. So, if you want to have them delivered to your door, and not use them... There is a cost, obviously, to using a prep company so if you want to keep your cost down and do it yourself, that's fine. But, they come to your door. They get delivered there and you don't have to run around town, waste gas if you're in a big city.

0:24:36 S3: I've driven in big cities and it's not fun. So, if you don't want to do that and you just want to have boxes show up at your door for you, and then have the UPS truck come and pick them up, and never have to leave your house, then that's a possibility with online arbitrage. Often, you can order in larger quantities. Online orders, you're not limited like you are in a store. Stores only have so much shelf space for those backpacks for back to school. But you know what? You go to Kohl.com, and there's a whole bunch of backpacks there that you can buy. You can buy a 100 at a time, if you want, usually.

0:25:13 S3: It's a much nicer, quicker, way to buy large amounts of inventory than having to run from store to store to store. I might have to run to six Kohl's or seven Kohl's to buy the same number of backpacks that I wanted to buy online. So, that's another advantage. Often, speaking of backpacks, they often bag the stuff that you need to bag anyway to send into Amazon. So, that's not only done for you, but it's another expense you don't have to incur because you don't have to use a poly bag for that. And they almost always come with the suffocation warning on them because that'sa law and they have to ship them to you just like we have to ship them to our customers with that warning on there.

0:25:54 S3: Alright. And the other... The next few are... The next two are about saving money. Online, you can often use discount codes and we're gonna talk more about this more later. But, discount codes. You can go to sites like RetailMeNot. There's tons of these, DealsPlus. And you can find discount coupon codes that you can use online. Often times, they're advertised right on the main page of the site and you don't even have to go searching for them. But, sometimes, the ones advertised on the site aren't the best ones. Sometimes, if you go to these deal sites, you can find better codes than are advertised on the site. In addition to the discount codes, you've got cash back sites. So you've got sites like Ebates.com and Upromise, Mr. Rebates. There are tons of these cash back sites that offer you money just for clicking through to those sites from their site. They get a kickback from the store and they give you part of that kickback in return. You can earn thousands ofdollars of rebates doing that.

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0:26:53 S3: The next thing is case packs. Sometimes there are stores that aren't always the most careful with packing products; Disney's one of them. When you order their little packs of action figures in these plastic cases that they send, if you don't order them in case packs, you're likely to get some damaged units that you're gonna have to either re-order or return. So, if you can figure out how they come, you can order in case packs and then it's just simple to label those, take 'em out of the pack, label 'em, stick 'em back in the pack, and you've got a box that's a perfect fit for those, andjust send 'em into Amazon that way. So, it's a time saver as well. The other thing is, and this is one of the reasons people love to shop on Amazon, easier returns. If you get a damaged item, or you get something that you get to your house and you realize, "Hmm, I might've missed the mark on this one and this might not be such a great deal after all," or Amazon just came in on this product and they have two million of them in stock, you don't want to keep that item and sell it so you just return it and it's a pretty simple process.

0:27:51 S3: Most boxes come with a return label inside, or you can contact the company; go to the website and print off an easy return label. And the last one is probably the best one, for me, you can source anywhere, anytime, and in anything you want, meaning any outfit you want. You wanna source in your pajamas, or swimsuit by the pool, you're free to do that. This is a business you can truly view from anywhere, especially if you use one of those prep companies. You can be in the middle of the Bahamas sourcing, having stuff shipped to Amazon, and work in a few hours a day.

0:28:25 S4: It's a very common question that I was getting, it's from international people. They are buying my book...

0:28:31 S3: Right.

0:28:31 S4: They're finding information online. And they're like, "I'm in Australia," "I'm in Japan," "I'm in Germany, can I still do this?" And it's like, "Yes, you totally can." And the prep companies... I'm callin' it right now. 2015, I'm callin' it. The prep companies, if you don't start using them, you're gonna be kind of facing an uphill battle because the bottle neck of prepping and shipping your itemsis removed from the sellers who are using the prep companies. And the international sellers are gonna be using prep companies and I really encourage everybody take a look at the existing prep and ship companies and see if they work for your business especially if you're doing a large percentage of online arbitrage. It's really a no brainer decision when you run the numbers on it. So, definitely do that. I love the fact you get these case packs shipped to your door. You put some stickers on 'em, or an Amazon label, and flip 'em around and send 'em out the door. In the introduction we kind of talked about some of the advantages of online arbitrage. You can order small or large quantities. There is no requirements. You don't have a business license to do any of this stuff. It really is that easy. And, you can see Gary's pulling up a list of all the available... There will be more. Guys, there will be more...

0:29:44 S3: These are the ones we know about, right here.

0:29:46 S4: Yeah. There will be more than what you see right here because this is such a big opportunity. Sellers have figured out this is... Fulfillment removed one bottle neck. Now prep and ship companies are removing the next bottle neck of this business. Where you seriously go to website sourced product, have it shipped to these guys, it's gonna end up in your Amazon account. You're gonna have a repricer set the prices for you and you're going to get paid money.

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0:30:09 S3: Right.

0:30:09 S4: That's really as simple as this business is. Gary, I think we should add one more thing to your advantages, 'cause we normally compare online arbitrage to retail arbitrage and it's like a little compare and contrast that we use, but man, I never really thought about this one before, how about the checkout? The fast checkout that you get online versus standing in line. I know sellers who pay helpers to stand in line and check out. They [0:30:36] ____ load up eight carts. They stick someone in the line and then they pay $10 an hour and say, "You stay here. I'm going to the next store," because they know that checkout could take 45 minutes and it's not worth their time. 10 bucks an hour, have someone else stand in line for you. With online arbitrage... Guys, you're gonna see some videos of Gary checking out and buying some stuff, and hey, like he's done. Hey, all the coupon codes were applied in five seconds. Hey, it only took us this long to get all the cash backs. Like, it's done. It's gonna kill you guys to stand in line to checkout after doing some online arbitrage.

0:31:11 S3: Yeah, it does. It hurts me. Every time I do it, it's like, "Okay, I need to go home and do some online shopping."

0:31:16 S4: We do some online [0:31:17] ____ in the line right? On your phone and your iPad?

0:31:19 S3: Yeah, oh yeah, I definitely, yeah. You're definitely shopping on the 6 plus in store, on my phone, but talk about waiting and one of the benefits was quick returns and easy returns, tried going to Walmart to return some stuff [0:31:35] ____. Talk about waiting in a line, but yeah, that's absolutely one I need to add to that list.

0:31:40 S3: That's a great point. One point I want to make, Chris was talking about those prep companies and how important they are, this is our website selleressentials.com. It's just a seller resource page where we offer a variety of resources, selling about Amazon. We're gonna offer some information about eBay here soon, book selling, and things like that. We've got a great video. I made this video about how to choose a prep company for your business, so if you are interested, thisis a great page to go to, and we can link to it in the course, but you can see this video and see if maybe one fits your needs. And you can come to this site and get all that information and check out every single one of these if you want to click on every one of these and go and see what their pricing structure is and what kind of services they offer, this is a place you can do that. So I just wanted to show you that quickly, and we talked about the coupon codes.

0:32:28 S3: RetailMeNot 's a very easy site to use. This is one if you wanted to shop at Kohls, for example, you just go to RetailMeNot, type in Kohl's, and up pop all the coupon codes. They tell youwhat the success rate is for each of these codes so you know whether or not it's a legit code or not. As the percentages get lower it's probably pretty restricted, maybe on what kinds of products you can use, but this one it looks like it's a pretty generic code. Right now on their site, I know they're offering a code that's only good for 15% off if you're a Kohl's card holder, or credit card holder, but this code here, I know, works for anybody, not just the credit cardholders. So, it pays to check these discount code sites, and this is just one example. Ebates is one of the sites I mentioned. You can see here, 15% off $100. This is the coupon code that we just saw on RetailMeNot. Plus 6% cash back and you can see, right now they run promotions, double cash back at these stores. Kohl's usually it's 3%, now their 6%. EBags, this was one of the products we had on our list today, on our deal's list, was an eBags' product, and it was 12% cash back on top of the profit you were gonna make from

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selling it. So these are great sites to link to to check out and save money and add some cash back to your bottom line.

0:33:49 S3: Alright, unfortunately there are a few disadvantages to online sourcing, and we'd be remiss if we didn't mention those. So the one thing that we want to touch on is, buying tax-exempt in a store is super simple. You get a tax-exempt certificate. You've gotta get an EIN from the federal government. Then you get a tax-exempt certificate from your state, and you just bring that. Sometimes they'll give you a card. In my state, we just have to print out a paper and fill it out, bring it to the store, and they take the tax off. Except at Target which just banned that... Banned resellers from getting tax-exempt sales. But, it's pretty simple. Online it's a little bit harder. It's not impossible. It's just a little bit time consuming. You have to contact the stores normally after you make a purchase and let them know, "Hey, I made this purchase," so it's kind of a tedious thing. If you make seven purchases online, you've gotta write seven emails. Not a big deal, but it's just a little bit harder. It's an extra step and you've got to wait to get it reimbursed sometimes so it's just a little more cumbersome.

0:34:49 S3: Some stores have restricted resellers with huge orders. That's an issue we want to makeclear to you guys. Kohl's is one of them. I've placed large orders up to a couple thousand dollars on Kohl's, but I know other sellers who make much larger orders and they've had issues with being restricted. There are some issues with that, so be aware of that and take that information and use it wisely. So place multiple smaller orders if that's something you're concerned about. For many people starting out, placing really big orders is not gonna be a big deal or a big issue for awhile. It's slower than retail sourcing in this way, retail sourcing can be slow in the check out process like Chris said and in making returns like I talked about, but it's also very fast in that I can go to the store today, buy stuff and ship it the same day, or the next day. And with online arbitrage, obviously,you have to wait for that stuff to get to you, so you're looking at least a day or two for that product to get to you if it's shipped super quickly. And usually more like six to eight days before that product gets to your door and then it can be prepped and then shipped out. So, it's a little bit slower than retail sourcing but there are, like we talked about, many, many other advantages that kind of offset these. Anything to add there Chris?

0:36:12 S4: My biggest disadvantage is when stores, like you said, they start restricting the quantity, and you get to see a lot of that on Amazon.com. Especially, as products become popular, then Amazon often puts in a buy limit where maybe you can only buy two or three units and you can only place an order for two or three units once a week. There is no real set rules on that at this point. Also if you get in early on an item before it's gone up in the sales rank and is popular, they don't have buy limits and you can buy 95 or something, or 180 or something if you want to.

0:36:47 S4: So that is frustrating to a point we're like, "Oh, check out this sick deal. Man, I can onlyget three." But what it is what it is. I am not a big fan of like fussing over things that you can't change. I'm trying to find "Hey, how can we optimize this?" And if I find a deal I can buy three of them on Amazon, make 50 bucks at each one and put $150 in my pocket. Guess what? I'm telling all my friends. Because if it's popular, if it's got a limit of three and I can only turn around and buy and sell three, I wanna buy and sell stuff that is selling. Not that like, "Oh, my three units when I send them back to the Amazon warehouse is gonna effect the supply so much." That it's just crazy talk.

0:37:28 S4: So, maybe you share with a lot of people and maybe you only share it with five or six

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people. But sharing that information, by giving value to other people it's gonna to help you form those relationships that we talk about now and up further in the coaching. Guys, that's gonna be very, very valuable, because think about it from just a simple mathematics. If you got six people in a mastermind group and everybody submits one, you're submitting one deal. And there's six people including you, you're getting five back. You're getting five times the amount of information back by sharing one piece of information. And you guys are gonna see how easy it is to find information thatwill make you money. Whether you're executing on it in a limited sense with a buy limit or just something you can't execute on at all and you're still able to contribute to your group.

0:38:16 S4: So I'm not trying to be like a half glass full or a silver lining on the cloud kind of thing. But for every disadvantage there is an advantage. There's some way that you could still extract value, and so now you got to look kind of hard but I guarantee it's always there.

0:38:32 S3: Yeah. There's none of these disadvantages of online arbitrage that make it unappealing to me. It's still one of my favorite way of sourcing and we just thought it'd be, we wanted to discloseeverything. It's not all roses and sunshine but there are definitely a few little disadvantages and you just work around those like Chris said. There's limits, there's limits. So you move on. You look for them in store, maybe if you can get to a store look for them, see if you can buy them in a store. They don't put limits typically in store. There are occasions where there's a really hot toy where they will do that as well, but very rarely do I get limited on products in store. So, alright...

0:39:10 S2: You know what I like about disadvantage, and Gary, before we move on?

0:39:13 S?: Yeah.

0:39:13 S2: Is how quickly other sellers will quit when there's a disadvantage. Like, "It's so hard to get a tax exempt, so I never buy." I'm like "Good, no competition from you." And I want people to think about this for their, 'cause I feel it too. When something is a little harder, when it's harder that it needs to be, where there's a little bit of a roadblock, I get frustrated and that little hint comes in my mind that "Hey, I should, I'm gonna quit. I'm not gonna do this. I'm not gonna complete this purchase. I'm not gonna follow up and see if they have anymore quantity." And whenever I feel that I kick my self and I say, "No, don't." And I get it. Everybody feels it. And I want people to know I feel it too. I get that feeling. But I know that feeling because I've felt it so many times and I've not followed through and I've lived to regret it. Where like, "Oh, there's probably not any deals in there." And there were, and I missed out because I didn't do the work, I didn't put my self in the position to win. So guys when you feel that, push through it. And I say this, "There is nobody, Gary included, who has talked to more sellers in the past seven years then I have." And I can tell you that most sellers out there are lazy. They're looking for any excuse not to pull the trigger.

0:40:27 S1: Don't be lazy.

0:40:28 S2: And knowing that, you guys have got to say, "Hey, I know that lazy people are out there. I'm not gonna be lazy, I'm going to pull the trigger, I'm gonna do the work. I'm gonna stay up another half hour and keep sourcing. I'm gonna get up early because that's where the price changes are gonna hit these sites." You do that and you're gonna win. If you take the lazy route, sorry, you're gonna loose.

0:40:49 S3: Yeah, that brings to mind when I was getting approved to sell in the UK, and there

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were roadblock after roadblock. I applied wrong the first time, got one number and then I applied again and I end up getting two separate numbers and I was using the one number that was the wrong number. It was a pain. But every step of the way I'm thinking, "Everybody else is gonna giveup at these roadblocks. I'm not going to and I'm gonna reap the benefits of it." And that's the perfect mindset to have when you hit roadblocks is "Most people are gonna give up here but I'm not, and I'm gonna reap the rewards when I push on."

0:41:25 S4: No, that's a great example for Amazon. Applying and getting approved for international. Getting approved and [0:41:31] ____ getting categories. It's almost like a litmus test. Alright, if someone's not willing to do that, they need to check themselves.

0:41:37 S3: Yeah, it may not be the business for you.

0:41:40 S4: Yeah.

0:41:42 S3: Alright. The other thing that I want to mention here, one last thing, buying tax exempt. There's a couple of options you have with, if you don't want to mess with getting the tax exemption on these websites. You can talk to a CPA obviously, but some of the options are that you can add theitem to your cost of goods sold. Instead of saying you paid $10 plus 7% tax, you just make the cost of goods $10.70 when you record your cost. Or, some states actually allow you to count the taxes that you paid on purchases against your other taxes, so, you can actually deduct... Ours is not one ofthem in Indiana, but, check with your CPA for your options there and see what's the best one for you.

0:42:27 S4: And don't get hung up on doing tax exempt, either, right? Sometimes just pay the tax. Sometimes it's not worth the hassle on the smaller purchase to be like, "Yeah I gotta get my $3.40 credit back." Be discerning here guys, and be like, "You know what, that one's not worth it." And not just online, bonus retail tip, if it's gonna take you so much longer to check out because whoever is running the cashier has no idea what tax exempt is because it's their first day, hey, maybe you justpay the tax, and get out of there because you got some hot deal on the other side of town, and the more minutes you sit there, the larger the chance that someone else is gonna find that deal. So, always be discerning with your time. People forget about that so many times. Your time is valuable, so be efficient, and sometimes, it pays to pay money and pay tax to get your time back.

0:43:19 S3: Absolutely. All right. Let's talk about sourcing options. We're gonna talk way more about where to find products and all that stuff later on in the course, but, we just wanted to touch onit here a little bit. There are the main-stream sites that everybody knows about, right. WalMart, Toy's 'R' Us, Target, etcetera. Those are the sites that are easy to find which means that, what? The competition is higher, because everybody is able to find them, and knows about them, and shops there, so, not that you can't get great deals there. We shop at every single one of these stores except K Mart, which I've sworn off, because they drive me insane, saying stuff's in stock and then you get to the cart and it's not. But that's a whole other story. There are certain stores that you're gonna like shopping in-store, and there are certain stores that you're gonna like shopping online, and stick with the ones you like, but, don't be afraid to branch out.

0:44:11 S3: So, one of the things we like to do is focus on niche or secondary sites. And here are some of the sites that we've shopped on before. That you probably haven't heard of or you may not realize that they had a website where they sold products. HomerunMonkey, so, a lot of baseball

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stuff. WeGotSoccer. Like it sounds they sell soccer gear. Oneida, a lot of cooking supplies, glassware, things like that. MattyCollector it's a site for Mattel collector type products. It's the higher end toys that collectors will buy. Speedo, Vera Bradley. If you want swim gear, look up Speedo. You can go to WalMart and look up swimsuits, or Target and look up swim gear. But you can go to Speedo and get the name brand, high end Speedo gear, here we go Vera Bradley. There areso many of these niche sites and I just wanted to show you quickly a couple of them. WalMart obviously has the Savings Center right here, if you go to Walmart.com. It's pretty easy to sort. You got Savings Center and just start sifting through the products. Then you've got the site WeGotSoccer.

0:45:28 S3: This is one of the sites that we were able to... We shopped from a list one time and theyhad some shin guards on there. We actually went to the site and followed the rabbit trail and found some other Shin Guards that nobody else was selling on Amazon. They were listed but nobody else was selling em at a great rank, and we were able to buy a ton of them. And we went to RetailMeNot, and believe it or not and a niche site as small a site like We Got Soccer has coupon codes on RetailMeNot. And quite a few of them actually. Some of them are for very specific product, but some of them are just general, like, this one. 10 bucks off of $150, 10 bucks off of $100. Now it has a low success rate, so, it may be on a specific type of products. But you can look at the comments frequently and see what people had success with and what people didn't have success with. So, this site happened to have a 25% off all sale products that day day that we came here, so we got lucky and we got an extra 25% of all those products.

0:46:24 S3: So, and this is a site I actually came across today. Who knew Curious George has his own website, and they sell products. I found a blanket online that I was looking at trying to find a good price and it was a Curious George and I came across this Curious George blanket. They've got toys, DVDs, and clothing. It's just amazing how many niche sites... I've been doing this for four years, and I still come across sites that I didn't know about before. This takes you to TV's Toy box when you click on that. But there were products on the site when I was there today. So there are tons of niche sites there are always new sites that you are gonna discover and one way you can do that... We had these pulled up earlier. One way you can discover niche sites is by going to a site like eBates and looking at their departments and just picking one.

0:47:16 S3: You wanna find sporting and outdoors suppliers? You wanna sell in that niche? Well, click on the sports and outdoors and look what pops up. A list of tons and tons of sites that you've probably... Ever heard of Dazadi? Danskin you've probably heard of. Crocs, a site that you might not have realized was available online to shop, great brand. There are a lot of sites here that you've never heard of. Edwin Watts Golf, I'm guessing most people haven't heard of. EmpireCovers. Some of these are gonna be so niche that they're gonna be really specific products for a very specific clientele and they're probably not gonna be Amazon type products, but, a lot of these are gonna be sites that you've never thought to source and it's gonna get you an advantage over your competition,who's only sourcing those mainstream sites.

0:48:09 S4: Yeah, I completely agree the way you're comparing and contrasting the main sites and the secondary sites. One thing I like with the mainstream sites, they're often so big that a price mistake might go through or a promotion that really wasn't set up properly and is checking out where you're getting a ridiculous discount on a product, those will often go through on the mainstream sites. Cause they don't catch 'em or cause they don't care, or because they ship so fast that they can't do anything about it. And I love those types of deals, right? Or they'll get real

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aggressive because they've got a big budget. Where like Wal-Mart who can blow something out for nine bucks and be like, "Yeah, screw it, just get rid of it." Where on a smaller site, you're gonna see that less frequently. You may still see the price mistakes, but they may not ship, they may not let you buy as much quantity, and that's understandable. I don't want anybody to get upset if the retailerdoesn't ship something for a certain price. Especially if it's clearly a price mistake and it's so aggressive, you're like, " Oh, I can't believe they're doing this." Because you're gonna find that. You know?

0:49:17 S2: We talk about under-retail buying and over-retail selling a little later. But you're gonna find this under-retail stuff that's a mistake, right? And it's not gonna ship. So, when that happens, don't be emotional about it, don't get mad, don't email the site and think that they owe you something. I mean you can, it will often give you a coupon or a gift card or something. But if you bought $9,000 worth of stuff, you can't force them to do it, right? So, that's gonna happen. You do this enough times, you're gonna have an awesome deal that's gonna get cancelled on you. Sometimes from the big sites, sometimes from the small sites, sometimes from Amazon themselves.I bought enough stuff that I have bought from Amazon, direct from Amazon, and they still didn't ship. They're like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa." I could actually pull up one of the emails, we can put this in the video later, that says "Hey, from time to time there are price mistakes on our site and we don'tship... "

[laughter]

0:50:13 S2: Have you ever got one of those Gary?

0:50:14 S4: Oh yeah.

0:50:16 S2: It doesn't happen very often. They usually will ship so fast that they'll ship before they even know it's a price mistake, and we're assuming they're price mistakes. There will be such low prices, so aggressive, you're gonna think it's crazy. But these things happen. Either because it's end of life on a product, maybe the manufacturer has already rebated Amazon or WalMart and say "Hey,we want that stuff gone off your shelves, off your site, we're gonna pay you to discount it." And at that point Amazon, Wal-Mart, ToysRUs, they don't care what they sell it for. They drop the price and they are happy to ship it. So don't always think, "Oh, I'm taking advantage of WalMart on this item." There is lots of things that go on behind the scenes and we don't have time to get in for all thepossible things. The main thing is, you don't need to know why it's happening. You see a hot price, you see a price you can make money on, buy it. Worst thing that can happen is they don't ship it. And most sites don't charge until they ship.

0:51:13 S?: Right.

0:51:14 S2: So you don't really even have anything on the line. I just got an Amazon order shipped today that I placed in January, over eight months ago. Placed the order and just let it sit there. And then they finally got 'em in stock, they got 'em in stock this week and they're gonna be delivering it tomorrow. And I don't know what I'm gonna do with these things. It's six footballs for 14 bucks, but it didn't cost me anything to leave that order open.

0:51:37 S3: That's a peewee football league in town, donation.

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0:51:40 S2: I'll keep 'em for something. Yeah.

0:51:41 S3: There yeah go. Alright.

0:51:44 S2: But look on the secondary sites, cause that's where everyone else isn't, right? You can often find stuff there, you can learn new things that your lazy competition's not learning. And always remember, there's customers out there. This isn't a world of sellers, right? We are the minority. The super minority of people shopping on these sites. Most of its customers going, they're buying DVD players and TVs and all these toys. They're customers going to these sites, those customers go to the big main sites and the quantity get purchased up and it's a great price. Sometimes that price is good enough you can make money on it, you can buy a bunch of quantity. That's where we come in, to make money. But for the majority of products out there, they're being bought by customers buying one or two for their own personal use and they're going to those main sites.

0:52:27 S3: Yep. Alright, so not only do we have the main sites like WalMart, and Kohl's, and Target, and the niche sites, but we also have other places to find products. The other sources that welooked at primarily earlier, the daily deal sites. Sites like Slickdeals, and FatWallet and Ben's Bargains and Brad's Deals. They are kind of compilers of hot deals of the day. They have communities and they have employees as well that search the net for great deals, and a lot of the people will have affiliate links that they are allowed to put on there if they're really good contributors, and that's how they kinda get compensated for sharing these great deals. But they are agreat way to find a lot of different deals from a lot of different sites that are hot right now and it might just be today only, it might be for a few hours in some cases. But you can find a wide variety of sources and products from different sources on these sites.

0:53:27 S3: It's also a great way to learn new sources. I've learned plenty of new sources of products by going to FatWallet or Ben's Bargains and realizing "Hey, they got a great deal on x, y orz and I didn't even know the store existed so let me go check it. I don't really care about this productthey've got advertised. But if it's 70% off, I bet you they've got some other stuff that's 70% off. So I'm gonna go there and check that stuff out." Just as a way to expand your knowledge about sources.I just want to show a couple of those. You've got Slickdeals here. This is what it looks like when you go to the main page. You've got different tabs you can play around with it but this is the main page and this is where they list great deals that are going on and things are rated. You get this little flame here, it's a hot deal. Got lots of thumbs up on this one, 185 thumbs up. It's a Nike store coupon. Extra 20% off so if you can go... It's an extra 20% off clearance actually so if you can there,go to the clearance section and find something that's marginally good to resell, you get an extra 20%off, you might have a great deal.

0:54:30 S3: But then they put other products, literal products. Here, six pack of 25-ounce seventh generation dish liquid for 14 bucks. Sometimes you just find stuff that you wanna buy for yourself for personal use, but this is something that you can do, kind of reverse sourcing. Instead of bundlingstuff together or multi-packing stuff together, sometimes you can take a multi-pack that you buy on Amazon and take it apart and sell it as two packs or one packs and you can see you're paying about $2.25 or something like that for each one of these. This is not a... This is a high-end brand so you might be able to sell these for $9 or $10 a piece on Amazon.

0:55:06 S3: This may be a really deep price drop on this product so you can go through this site and

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see a lot of different products from a lot of different stores. It's not one store specific which makes ita really nice resource. You do wanna be careful with a lot of these electronics, especially on these sites. A lot of times they will be refurbs, refurbished products and you wanna make sure you know that at least. If you choose to sell refurbished products you can, you just have to mark them as such when you list them on Amazon. Don't buy a product thinking it's a brand new one and get it and it's in a plain brown box and then you either have to return it or sell it on Amazon at a much lower pricethan you thought you were going to.

0:55:47 S3: FatWallet's another one. Very similar to what I just showed you. Just a little different site. You'll find some different deals. Some are gonna be the same. They've got a coupon for Kohl's here extra 20% off. Kids and juniors clothing, Nike up to 50% off and you've got that 20% off coupon that was on Slickdeals as well and again you can go through and find specific products. Handbags and backpacks, everything from computers to beauty cream to guitars. So sometimes you'll find nothing on a given day and sometimes you'll find three or four things. Sometimes it's all about just finding who's having a great sale and going to their site and doing some heavy shopping. Woot's one of my favorites. I know Nathan likes Woot. He buys stuff from there and we have shopped on Woot for years and years and they've got... They've added lots of categories over the years. They've got everything from home to electronics, tools and garden, sport, kids clothing, even wine now and...

0:56:44 S2: I watch that site every day.

0:56:46 S3: Yeah.

0:56:48 S2: Amazon actually owns it.

0:56:50 S3: Right. Yeah, you need to be careful with that. You ought to make sure that they're not selling on their own on Amazon, too. In some cases they do that so you wanna check and make surethey're not doing that before you make a purchase but if you're checking what Amazon is selling it for you're gonna notice that so, but yeah, it's a great resource. Musician's Friend. Here's a niche site and the daily deal site all in one or double and down. In this case it's a niche site for musicians, obviously, and it also has a stupid deal of the day and it has stupid deals of the day for multiple categories. So in this case you got this... What is this? I don't even know what this is. Nathan, you probably know what this is. [chuckle] Vox tone garage trike fuzz guitar effects pedal. Something foryour guitar. So it's 50% off, MSRP of $200, regular price $140 down to $70. You can get a stupid deal of the day RSS. You can get the feed sent to you. Be the first to know of the stupid deal of the day and you can see they've got lighting deals here. They've got acoustic deals. They've got pro audio deals. They've got deals in all these different sections. That's not just this one deal of the day so that's a great little site to keep an eye on if you're into selling music products at all.

[background conversation]

0:58:16 S4: Yeah, like these sites, Slickdeals and FatWallet are great sites. I would call them deal aggregator sites. They're really community based and they are kind of focused towards the consumer. They make their money through referral links or affiliate links where they basically split the cash back or the rebate that is earned from these sites like you get money back when you use thelinks on their sites and people are posting deals that they're excited about. They went to BestBuy and they found some on clearance so they went to a website and hey, this promotion is really great.

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You guys should get in on it.

0:58:46 S4: And a lot of those... You can buy and resell for a profit because guys, we gotta take intoaccount the prepping, their time, all that goes into it including the Amazon fees which if you're using FBA I'm guessing you're probably going to be about 30% depending on the categories that you're selling and the price points that you guys are selling at but if something is hot enough... If you see that little flier going on those deals there's a bunch of green votes up on these deals, hey, they might be a very good price, a price so low that you can buy and resell for a profit so use these sites and take advantage of the information that's shared there. These people are posting all kinds of deals. Not every deal is gonna be good for resale but there's so many deals some of them are going to be good for resale and the more you look at the sites the more comfortable you're gonna get and the faster you're gonna be able to find the items that are good for resale. You'll be able to identify them and take action on them and look over all the other deals that exist. They're good, just not good enough.

0:59:48 S3: Absolutely. Yep. It's a great, great way to start, too. So sometimes it's overwhelming to know which site do I start on, right? Well, if you start on one of those sites, you're kinda getting exposure to all the deals on all the sites, All on one site, so it's a nice place to start for some people.

[background conversation]

1:00:10 S3: Paid Facebook groups and email lists. These are groups or lists that provide for you a daily dose of deals that you can buy online. Some do buy online and in store. Some are only in store. There's a new group that just popped up for TJ Maxx, I think, and Marshalls. But a lot of these groups are targeted to people who want to buy online deals and they cater to that market because there's some people who live internationally and they wanna sell in the US and so they have to shop online. And these groups have popped up and they fill that need.

1:00:49 S3: So some are Facebook group based, and they just provide a private Facebook group where they share their deals, and some have a community feel where other people share deals that are members of the group as well, and not just the leaders of the group. And some are email lists. And they email out a list of products every day. You go through the list, see what's interesting to buy. You can also use the rabbit trails from those lists. You see a product on there, you may not wantthat product, but it ht be the impetus that you need to go to check that site out and see, "What else do they have on sale that I might wanna check out?" Because, trust me, when there's a list that's put out, they can't searcheverything on every site, so they may put a deal or two from a site but they didn't go through every single deal on every single site that's on that list.

1:01:35 S3: And then there's some, our list that we've just put out last week actually, Essential DailyDeals, is a combination of those two. We put out an email list of 10-15 deals a day and we also havea Facebook group where we add additional content, additional deals, additional tips and resources that people can use. So there are tons of these resource lists out there, and talk a little bit about the pros and cons, Chris. From your perspective, what do you see as the pros and cons of these groups?

1:02:05 S4: There's a lot of pros and cons and I think it's just better to think of it as, "Are you making more money than they cost?" 'Cause they cost money. They're paid. There's probably a monthly subscription fee and you're gonna get information. Now does that information make you

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more? Is it $50 a month for a list of products and you're making more than $50? Then go for it. I think people need to be aware of the cons of how the information is shared. Do you know how many people it's going to? Is there a limit on the number of people in the group? Those things can come into play on the dynamics on the product. Whether a product gets bought out very quickly because you're not able to get the information fast enough 'cause maybe a Facebook group isn't howyou can get your information. Maybe you still have a full time job and you check Facebook at lunchand after school or after work, whatever it might be. So just be aware of how all this is going to work, and if it makes sense for you. Like I said earlier, this isn't like you're getting sold on something. It either makes sense or it doesn't. A product is either profitable or it's not. A list either generates you profit or it doesn't.

1:03:15 S4: So try them out. Almost everyone that I know has a free trial and a money back guarantee. I don't know anybody and I wouldn't dare recommend anybody that doesn't want you to succeed and doesn't want your money if you're not getting the value out of it. So try some of them out. Probably the best value that I would get out of a group is what you put on there as rabbit trails. Finding one product, and learning about a new line that just came out that's gonna lead me to find other products in that line, items that weren't on that list now I know about from the list. So it's like side information, a little ancillary value that you're getting from the list. So it's not always gonna be about, "Hey, I made $50 profit from those items, those buys that I made," but, "Do I feel like I am being a better seller, like I'm learning more, I'm upping my game from being in that list?" Then go for it.

1:04:06 S2: In a lot of these lists, just like you said about yours, you're not just posting deals, you'reposting content, you're posting tips, you're answering questions. And that's a great place to start trying to find a mastermind group, networking with other sellers. These are sellers who are at least putting some money on the line every month to get better versus, "Hey, we've got a very large Facebook group ourselves." There's a lot of people in there who don't even have an Amazon seller account. They're not active sellers. And some of these are the most active posters. They post all the time. But you'd be surprised to find out they actually don't even sell on Amazon. So if people are [1:04:42] ____ pulling in now $50 a month, you know they're an Amazon seller so it may be a morefocused, better place to try and network with other sellers than in a lot of these large free groups.

1:04:52 S3: Yeah. Absolutely. I just wanted to show you quickly, I wanna pull that up here, we provide ours as a Google spreadsheet. It allows us as we get deals during the day, it's a group of three of us, we can all share those deals and see what we're posting. So I'll show you today's list of deals that we put out. And this is what the format will typically look like for a daily deals list. So you can see we've got the store, we've got the ASIN, we've got the product itself. We add this, which I've never seen in any other list. It's unique. It's to keep an average 90 day rank instead of justthe single day rank.

1:05:33 S3: This is the rank that it is today, which is interesting 'cause in the morning one of these ranks, I think it was this one right here, was like 85,000 but two hours later when I double checked it, it was down to 59,000. So these are fluid numbers and that's important to know and this is why we include the 90 day average. So that's important to know. Category, the store price, any promos ordeal that you're gonna be able to apply, the lowest Amazon price, net profit, the percentage, the ROI, the return on investment you are going to expect if it sells for that current price. The number of sellers, which is important to know if you're making that decision. Obviously the links to the two stores, or the sites, the site that you can buy the product on Amazon, so you can double check it.

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And then we also add the cash back on Ebates and any other sites over here where they might offer cash back as well. And then down here we offer a little quick rank list, so we see the categories that we list, the top 1%, top 0.1%, top 0.5%, so people can quickly see what the... What percentage each of these ranks are when they're analyzing products to sell. So, these are the... This is an example of the type of deals you can get when you use one of those lists, so.

1:06:45 S4: And there's gonna be more lists, and the lists are gonna get better. It's basically value proposition. If people are able to provide value by giving information to sellers, they're gonna keep popping up, and the good ones will survive, and the bad ones won't. And it's great for the market. So, depending when you're watching this coaching, and when you're getting an online arbitrage, there are gonna be a lot of different ones out there that don't exist today. But try them out, see if they're worth it. They're going to get better. It's like Gary was saying, he's the only one that adds thison his list, and they're doing this on this list. People responding what sellers want, what the members want. "This is what I need to make a better decision. Can you add it?" "Yes, we can add that." And they get better, so don't be afraid to speak up in any list that you're in. Say, "Hey, this is what I need. Can you add this?" And the good lists, they wanna cater to you guys, they wanna give you good value.

1:07:46 S3: That's exactly what we do, is some of the changes we've made and added on that site weren't there when we launched it, even a week ago. And it's just been as a result of the Facebook group that we have. The customers were telling us, "Hey, we'd like to see this, we'd like to see that, or we don't wanna see this." And we take it out, or put it in as we see fit, based on their suggestions.So yeah, I think you're right, they're gonna get better and better, based on the added number of thesegroups and the competition for buyers. But I've never honestly belonged to a list where I had to pay for it, that I didn't make money every month off of it. If you're accessing it, and taking action on it, you're going to make money off the deals. And the rabbit trail is, sometimes I buy way more off of the things I find from the list, than I find because of the list, because I went to the store and found other stuff, or because I went and found that product or something similar at a different site. I often spend way more on products like that, than I do from the actual list itself.

1:08:48 S3: Alright, so the next topic is reverse sourcing, what I call reverse sourcing anyway. I don't know if everybody calls it that, but this involves searching a brand on Amazon, and then usingtools to find them elsewhere. Instead of going to Walmart, or any of the other niche sites, and finding products, and going through product after product after product, and then going and checking out Amazon to see if it's selling for more, this involves going to Amazon, finding a brand, say Crocs, if you're looking for shoes, go and search Crocs, and see which ones are selling well, andthen go find which sites they're selling on. And there are tons of tools that you can use to help you do this. You can also search the word 'exclusive.' A lot of times you can search 'exclusive' on Amazon's site, and then find... And then go find which store's exclusive that is. Is it a Toys "R" Us exclusive, is it a Kmart exclusive. Where can I find this product and resell it on Amazon? They show up on Amazon all the time.

1:09:49 S3: Or you can do the same thing with retail sites. You can go... Toys "R" Us has their own exclusive line, Target has their own exclusive lines that are house brands. They can... You can search the word 'exclusive' on these sites, and often come up with products that are unique to these retail sites, that Amazon won't ever carry, because it's a Target branded product. And if it's exclusiveon Amazon, if you're finding it there, it's usually from some other site, although Amazon does have their own exclusive products as well. They have exclusive toys, and that's mainly the thing I've had

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exposure to. I don't know if you have any other exposure to exclusive product on Amazon besides toys, Chris, but...

1:10:28 S4: They've got a few other products. They make exclusive bundles.

1:10:32 S3: Yeah, that's true.

1:10:33 S4: You can only get on Amazon. And the reason a lot of these places do exclusives is they don't have to price match. But this often now, what the customers really care about, they want a certain version, or it's this, they want that product, and they don't live near the store. They want it, and you can get it to them through the Amazon sales channel. And pick up stuff at Walmart and Toys "R" Us, and all this stuff. I love reverse sourcing. To me, it's almost even better than just goingout and seeing what's cheap, and then seeing if it's selling for a better price on Amazon. Guys, sell what sells, right? Go find out the popular products and we'll show you a few tips later about suppress Buy Box and finding some items that are being sold over retail prices, and then going backwards to find out where you can get them, what the MSRP is, which retailer sell them, how to set up tracking alerts when they come back in stock. This is all the stuff you're gonna learn in this course.

1:11:27 S4: But start with what's selling, right? Don't find all these great low priced deals only to find out that hey, you just found the mother load of the Zuzu pets on the Toys "R" Us clearance website. I wouldn't take those for free, because there's no demand. You gotta find products that have demand. Often that demand will be so high, and that's what puts the price higher than MSRP. But the stuff has to at least have some demand. And we're selling on Amazon, we're piggy-backing on the Amazon marketplace, we're piggy-backing on the goodwill on the Amazon customer. We are piggybacking on the brand names of all these companies that are selling their products, and advertising on television like Mattel and Hasbro, and Disney, and Fisher Price. We're piggybacking in all these stuff. I saw someone post today, "Amazon is like having Walmart, where we can walk inwith a table and set it up and put our products on the table and customers buy off our table." That's what Amazon is letting us do. One big Amazon store. We all walk in with our stuff, and we say, "Hey, what's up? You wanna buy our stuff?" It seems preposterous to go to Walmart and do that. But we are doing that on Amazon. And we are getting all the advantages of the goodwill that Amazon has built up over the what, 17 years that they've been in business, whatever it's been.

1:12:43 S3: Yeah.

1:12:45 S4: It's crazy. So, finding those products that the customers are coming in and searching forand buying. We get Sales Rank which we're gonna talk about later to see how popular products are, and then find out where to get them. Whether it's doing their online arbitrage or you can sprinkle in a little wholesale because you can do wholesale sitting in front of your computer. Just find out where to get these products and find out if you can get them for a price low enough that you can make a profit.

1:13:12 S3: Absolutely. Yup. Alright, so let's look at an example quicky of doing reverse sourcing. So, one of the things we found the other day was in Target, I've shopped in Target for almost four years and I had never in my life sourced their store brand of sheets and at Circo, they have housewares in that Circo line. So, I found these sheets that were like five bucks, six bucks on clientsand they were selling for 35, $40 on Amazon. I was amazed but I couldn't not scan them, right?

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'Cause they were five or six bucks, and you have to scan stuff. So, I went... When I got home... Because I realized that this stuff sells, and I realized that I might even be able to buy some of the stuff at regular price and sell it on Amazon. So, I came home and I searched Circo on Amazon, and lo and behold, up comes all kinds of products.

1:14:09 S4: And you can see, I've got this tool called Amazon Quick View, which we'll talk about later in the course, it's one of the extensions we use and it shows on the front page everything that, all the ranks for all these products, you don't have to click on everyone individually. But you can quickly see which products are selling. You got one here, this doesn't look like a Circo product, it looks like an incorrect result. But this one, 19,000 on Baby, not an incredible rank but it's a solid rank. Fleece Blanket Whales 'n Waves, so is this something to search on Target? Another 4-Pack of Flannel Receiving Blankets, decent rank 1980. You just go through here and search.

1:14:49 S2: And if you wanna search Circo sheets, which is what we had done. Well, here's that Circo sheets, and I wanna see which sheets that's were doing really well. We got this one, Whales 'n Waves Fitted Crib Sheet. Go to Target, and if it's not a great price now track it. Which again, we'll talk about later on in this session or in future sessions. But track it and wait for the price to drop andthen come back and buy it and resell it on Amazon.

1:15:15 S2: So, you can go through here and you can see some of the stuff is a little higher rank, even 558,000 in home and kitchen, definitely sells. Trust me. We actually sell this exact tea set. So that does... That rank does sell. But go through here and sift out the good stuff, the gold. Without having to go to to Amazon or go to Target, and go through every single Circo product and compare it on Amazon with the price. You can just go to Amazon. Go direct to the source and do the reverse search instead. Much quicker way. Much more efficient way on doing that.

1:15:55 S?: Once you know a house brand, guess what guys, every seller on that house brand item, on that ASIN... What, is ASIN Amazon Stock Inventory Number?

1:16:06 S2: I think so, yeah.

1:16:07 S4: Whatever it is. ASIN is the Amazon item, right? If you find an ASIN on Amazon, a product on Amazon, that is being sold, then every seller on there, if he knows it's a Target item, guess what, they source at Target. And guess what, everything in their store, you might find some other Target deals. So, it's a little ninja kind of sourcing trick. You can do online. Once you find someone who's selling a Target Exclusive, Toy "R" Us exclusive, Walmart Exclusive brand, you know where they're sourcing, and you can get other ideas. And I don't point this out to freak anybody out, because you guys need to know that other sellers are doing this to you. If you sell a Tor "R" Us Exclusive and it's got that "Only at Toys "R" Us" sticker on the picture, guess what, theymight be looking at your store saying, "Well, what else are they getting at Toys "R" Us?" Hey, it's a fair game, all is fair in this seller world. And so, use all these tips to your advantage and just understand that it can be happening to you as well.

1:17:06 S3: Absolutely. We just did that today. We were sourcing a product from a website and it was kind of a niche site, so we saw this one store was selling it and we clicked on their site and sureenough, they had a bunch of stuff from that site that would've taken me hours and hours to sift through to find this shirt, or that backpack, or whatever. But I was able to go through their store and cherry pick each and every little good deal instead of doing it on the actual website, where it

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would've taken me way longer to do. So, yeah, take advantage. And ASIN, by the way, Amazon Standard Identification Number.

1:17:42 S4: Oh, I wasn't even close. Did I say Stock Inventory Number?

1:17:45 S2: You had an Amazon, right? And number.

1:17:47 S?: Amazon and number.

[laughter]

1:17:50 S2: All right, moving on. Learning a New Niche. This is kinda similar to the reverse sourcing a little bit. But, learning a new niche... This could mean learning a category, learning a product or brand in a category, but learning a new niche is... It can be critical to your business. We started out when we were selling, and I know Chris you did a lot of tools, because that was what made sense for you, you knew that right? I sold a lot of toys and baby, not because I had kids or babies, but because that's what I like to source, honestly, and the list that I purchased at the very beginning when I started sourcing had a lot of toys and baby stuff on it. And I actually liked sourcing that stuff. Toys were fun to source, and I've kept a few of them over the years for myself because they're just... They're fun. So, I learned that stuff, but over the years I've expanded into way more categories and learned different niches. We sell pretty much in every category except for wine and jewelry now. So it's a strategy that will serve you well.

1:18:52 S2: Once you have established your presence in one niche, branch out and learn another one. So choose a category, learn inside out, and you become an expert. I have one coaching client, we started our first session, and really all she's done since then is clothing and shoes, and she does it, and she knows it well, and she teaches me stuff about it when we talk. So its a great strategy when you can dominate one market. You don't have to learn every single category. You can really do well with with just one if you learn it inside and out. So were gonna look at the Amazon New & Popular, that's one way to find what's worthwhile to source. If you search the new and popular stuff,it makes sense. Doing simple Google searches, and simple Amazon searches are both easy ways to help learn a niche. So, Chris give me a niche, we'll just do something off the cuff, and unplanned. We'll go crazy. A category, or a niche, that you want to learn a little bit more about.

1:19:50 S4: Let's do a shoe line. Lets do Crocs. You know you're gonna find some good stuff there, right? So, in Crocs, we've got tons of great products, just a line that I knew nothing about as of about a month ago. I don't like the shoes, they don't appeal to me in any way, shape, or form, but they sell like crazy as you can see from these ranks. So if you think you could possibly make some money on these, this should be a great brand to research. You can see they're as low as $19.99 up to $74 right now. And we just pick a size. Here's a little trick to... I know Chris you have another trick, but this is a trick to find which size is selling for the least amount of money.

1:20:36 S4: Now if you pick a size and then you can go over here and pick three new for all the sellers that are selling it. It'll open up this window, and you can go to this drop down menu and clicklowest offer for each. And then you can either pick each size individually, or you can click lowest offer for each again, and it will pull up this, and show you which size are selling for that, those low prizes. In this case, we got this candy pink one and pearl pink, and like you saw on the front page, some of them sell like $80 or $74. So, I think it might be worthwhile to go and source Crocs on

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some sites. So let's go to Google and see where we can find this product. Alright, so we got LeftLane. Im not sure what that is. LeftLane Sports maybe? Zappos, Shoebuy. So, not a lot of great prices compared to what we saw on the other site. We got 20% off Crocs here though, so we can find what's available on crocs.com, the actual website where they produce them.

1:21:53 S4: And its looking like, we are not having much of a sale here, on this one. But you can goto the sale page and see what's going on here, and find some deal. So, we are not gonna have time obviously to check every single product on this line, but you get the idea. You wanna learn a line, you go to Amazon, and search that brand. You want to learn clothing? Go search the hot brands. So, if you don't know the hot brands are in a category, go and... I don't know what the hot women's brands are in clothing. Go click on clothing, and then women, and then click clothing again. And you're gonna come up with all kinds of brands down here, featured brands right there. I guarantee if you look at these, and you aren't a clothing expert already, you're gonna find tons of brands here that are hot brands, that you have no idea about what you can learn in that niche. So, again, we don'thave time to go through every single product, but you get the idea of how to go and search for a niche, and learn that niche.

1:23:00 S2: Use Amazon, and it's gonna tell you whats popular. Use Google, you're gonna be able to not just finds out places that are selling that product but also information about the product. It's not just the source and the sale price. You can learn a lot and say, "Oh something new is coming out", or "I'm gonna be ready when that next movie hits". All that Minion stuff? You can go back andlook using [1:23:24] ____ what you can learn about later. And see the prices, and you can find out the release date of Minions. Be like, "How did the prices change before and after the release date. How can I use all these information to be ready for the next big childrens' movie." If you don't know what the next big children's movie is, use Google, ask Facebook, talk to your friends. There's really no secret that whatever Pixar comes out with is gonna be very popular. Whatever movie Disney is pushing at Christmas time will be very popular. The big movies in the summer time are gonna be very popular, if they have merchandise that goes with it. It's very likely you can get in andmake some money on it.

1:24:05 S3: Alright, great. Next one is Restricted Products, and this is what we'll end with tonight actually. Restricted Products are products that Amazon has for one reason or another, either the manufacturer has asked them not to allow anybody to sell or there're some reason that they're restricted, you can't sell those products on their website, it's HazMat or something like that. This listchanges all the time and it's important for you to stay up on this, in fact one of the things that we're sourcing today was a laser pointer, Chris I don't know if you knew that, but laser pointers are supposedly, are restricted product, a banned product on Amazon. But when you search for laser pointers, there are ton of laser pointers listed on Amazon right now. So it's easy to make that mistake if you're not up on all the restricted products. We have on the website, that I showed you earlier, today we have an updated list of all the different brands that are restricted, it's a nice little list and we give you an option here to click to tell us if there is a brand that's restricted that it's not on our list and somebody's products are restricted in some types of products but not others.

1:25:14 S2: So you may have one product that all the shoes are restricted in that brand but the clothing is fine to sell. I think, ASICS is one of those examples, the ASICS shoes are off limits but the clothing is fine. As you can see, we have a ton of products, there are a lot here but there are plenty more brands that you can't sell. Bodum is one of those kitchen brands, some items come up restricted so you should always check buying and listing and the way you do that, if you wanna

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check a brand to see if you can sell it, so say you came up with... We found a bottom coffee [1:25:47] ____ graph, so if you wanna know if you can sell it, you simply open up the page and youclick the sell on Amazon button... Oh, I guess I have to log in.

1:26:01 S2: And when you're here it will tell you... If this page doesn't show up you'll get a warningand saying you can't sell it. Then you always wanna check the condition to make sure you can sell itin new condition. Some stuff you can sell but only in used or collectible or refurbished condition. So this one looks like it's okay to list and sell for me. So you always wanna double check that, even if it's not on the restricted brand list, when you're selling a new brand for the first time it's always a good idea to double check. So you can see this is a nice, comprehensive list and it's a good one to bookmark so you can avoid sending products in, that you really can't sell, then having to get them sent back to you and paying that fee.

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proven online sourcing strategies - amazon s3...line of credit. anybody can step into this business,...

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