How to scale your Online Arbitrage Business

I will continue to update this post as I test new methods for my readers to try out. This post was last updated February 26th 2019… So you’ve started selling on Amazon and things are going well. Congrats! You’ve seen the potential this business has and now you’re ready to take things to the next level.

The majority of the time this happens around the $20,000 in sales a month mark. Now you have to begin dealing with problems other than “What do I sell?”

Now you’re questions are:

“How the hell did this customer get away with returning this product?”
“How am I going to recoup my costs on these returns?”
“How do I deal with Intellectual Property Claims”
“How can I get more money to fund my business?”
“Is it time to hire a Virtual Assistant?”
“How am I going to handle prepping more products?”

Biggie wasn’t lying when he said “More money, More problems”

These are important questions and I will write posts on each subject. Each question requires certain actions to resolve them and I will give you actionable advice to help you out.

For this post we are going to focus strictly on scaling. What does that mean? Selling more stuff without driving yourself crazy is what it means to me.

This is the time where you will need to take time out of your day to write down your processes, identify the work being done in your business, develop the idea of roles being played in your business, and identify what roles you will outsource. This is no longer a side job or a hobby. It’s time to shift your mindset. It’s time to take a hand off the wheel and begin trusting other people to do some work for you. Will they care about your business as much as you? No, probably not. Took me 2 years to get over this but it is one of the best choices I ever made for my business. To learn more about hiring a Virtual Assistant you can check out my post here.

You don’t want to just jump into hiring though. You need to map it out. To help your self with the process I suggest going about your work as usual one day but add the following step: Write down everything you do as you do it. Use a sheet of paper, a word document or my favorite, a dry erase board.

Did you initiate a scan on Tactical Arbitrage? Write it down. Scan is complete, now its time to analyze your items, write it down. Did you buy some items and add them to a spreadsheet or Inventory Labs, write it down. Did you create a shipment, prep items, drop off packages? Write it down.

These are all tasks that lead to your goal of selling more stuff. It is important to identify all the pieces of the puzzle because now you get to the fun part: Tell other people to do it!

In this example we have the following tasks being done:

1. Initiating Scans
2. Analyzing Products (Product Research)
3. Purchasing
4. Book-keeping
5. Prep and Shipment

Which one of these should you outsource first? Prep. I hope I can make this loud and clear: YOU ARE NOT SAVING YOUR BUSINESS MONEY BY DOING YOUR OWN PREP. In fact you are costing your business money. Prep can be easily outsourced for $1.65 per item, max. You can hire a prep center to do this or you can hire locally for $10.00 per hour. Hiring locally will be cheaper but now you have to deal with managing employees. You have to decide what is best for you. There are a lot of other things you have to consider if you choose to hire your employees. Personally, I chose to go the prep center route. I build my operating costs into my teams sourcing so we simply just add the prep cost into profit calculations when sourcing. Its that simple. Some people may disagree but I have been doing it this for years now.

A good prep center is hard to come by. They can make or break your business. Choose wisely. Currently, I am using Selltec Prep.

Action Step # 2 : To sell more products you are going to need to find more products. You can do a lot with a few VAs and manual product searching at deal sites but to truly scale you are going to need a great piece of software. I am going to save you a lot of time, Tactical Arbitrage is the way to go. To read more on why I love Tactical Arbitrage go here. At this moment there are over 800 websites you can scan using Tactical Arbitrage. All the filters you apply when manually sourcing can easily be plugged into Tactical Arbitrage. You can run scans while you sleep. Even better you can have your VA run scans and analyze products while you sleep. Once you find someone trustworthy enough you can use re-loadable gift cards and outsource the whole Search, Analyze, and Buy process. BOOM!

Now you can have your virtual assistants working for you while you sleep, have your items sent to a prep center, and have a VA or the prep center create your shipments for you. Now all you have to do is keep an eye on your sales, returns, profits, and other key performance indicators that you set.

This is scaling. With proper expectations and a little trust you can really be on a beach somewhere making money. You can actually be making money while you sleep. This is the power of leveraging a marketplace like Amazon.

Don’t get too excited though. It is not all sunshine and roses. This is not a get rich quick scheme. This is just a successful business model that can help fuel the life you want for yourself. You have to put in the work though!

Are you ready?

To learn more about product research and analyzing check out my post on Tactical Arbitrage.

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