In my most recent post, I outlined a roadmap to success for building a business instead of a job. If you haven’t read it yet, here are the Cliff’s Notes:
In today’s post we will apply this roadmap to the business model of Online Arbitrage, or OA. Since this is a blog about flipping books on Amazon, we will discuss concepts related to scaling an FBA book business. These same principles can also be applied to flipping other products, so if your business isn’t 100% books you can easily substitute the word “books” for whatever products you source online.
OA lends itself well to scalability due to its online nature. Many of the physical barriers to sourcing products are completely removed thanks to the power of the internet. Using Amazon’s FBA program further aids in scaling your OA business since your business can run without your direct effort and without the need to hire any employees to fulfill your orders. In fact, I’m writing this post from a coffee shop in Sydney, Australia, just to prove my point! My wife and I are on a three week adventure visiting five countries and our business is still running smoothly with minimal effort on our part thanks to the strategies we will outline here. Unfortunately, my CPA advised me that writing a single blog post from another country doesn’t automatically qualify it as a business trip for tax purposes. Major bummer!
I’m going to assume that most people reading this post are already selling products online. If that’s true, then your business has already launched. Congrats! There are a number of software solutions available to help find inventory online that you can flip, including eFLIP, OAXray, and Tactical Arbitrage, to name a few. Or you can find your own products through your own methods of combing through websites such as Amazon, eBay, Walmart, etc.
OA opens up windows of opportunity to new demographics of people who may struggle to find inventory through physical channels. A few examples include:
Remember, scaling your business is about maximizing efficiency. If you can buy books online instead of spending hours behind your steering wheel to drive from store to store, you can increase your books acquired per day. If you can source books on Amazon at 11 pm when your local stores are all closed, you can build your business faster than if you only sourced physical products. Building a more efficient business increases your effective hourly wage. This direct correlation between effort and reward is one reason why working for yourself so fulfilling.
A more efficient business also means you can carve out more time to explore other business ideas. Perhaps you can experiment with a new software to find inventory. Or you could train multiple employees to source products online for you so you can have a small army buying books on your behalf.
One last note about efficiency – be sure to maximize your cash back deals on your credit cards by signing up for the Amazon Prime Rewards Visa Signature Card. It offers an impressive 5% back on Amazon purchases if you have a Prime account tied to the card. Even if you use the card with a separate Amazon business account, you’ll still rack up the 5% cash back. **Note** Please use credit cards wisely – pay off all balances every month and only use them as a means to earn points and rewards, not to buy inventory beyond your current cash flow.
This last step is not for the faint of heart. It requires giving up control over certain aspects of your business, and for most people that is more easily said than done. If you’re an FBA seller, your fulfillment is already handled for you. All that remains is to outsource the buying and the receiving/prep work.
Outsource Buying – Once you’ve mastered your own methods for finding flips and can write down the specific steps involved, you can hire an employee or find a VA to handle the buying on your behalf. You’ll want to be as specific as possible and include screen shots with your sales rank guidelines, maximum purchase prices, target profit margins, and condition guidelines so you can communicate clearly when you train them. Early on, I would recommend having them not do any actual buying, but instead send you a list of ISBNs via email or in a private Facebook group so you can give them feedback on their finds. Over time you should be able to build trust and allow them to start actually buying books with your hard-earned cash. For compensation, you could pay an hourly rate or offer them a commission per book. Personally, I pay around a buck a book to my online scouts to incentivize them to find quality flips. As their scouting improves, their hourly wage can rise significantly. This aligns our incentives so we can both “win” together.
Outsource receiving/prep work – If your mailman hates you because of all your online purchases or your spouse won’t talk to you anymore because you’ve filled every square inch of your house with books… it may be time to find a prep company! Since you’re buying books online already, it won’t cost you any extra money to have your books delivered straight to a prep company instead of to your front porch. A prep company will typically charge a fee per book they process for you, and will receive inventory, inspect it, label it, and ship it to an Amazon warehouse on your behalf. It’s like hiring an employee without having to manage their schedule or figure out payroll! Whether you are scaling your business or looking to step back from your business, a prep company may be something for you to consider.
If you are using eFLIP to do your online arbitrage, we recently partnered with Texas Prep Pack & Ship as our preferred prep company. They specialize in books, have staff members with decades of experience working with used books, and offer discounts to eFLIP members. Here’s the low down on Texas PPS:
Website: texaspps.com
Support email: support@texaspps.com
Initial set-up fee: $99 (normal rate is $199)
Per-book fee: $1.50
Set-up time for new customers: typically 3-5 days
Minimum books per month: 50
Overview of the process: Texas PPS will set you up with a Google Drive folder where you can share order numbers, seller names, ISBNs, and the stated condition of the books that you order. When your books arrive at their warehouse, they will confirm that the ISBN matches exactly (they’ll weed out instructor’s editions and international editions) and that the condition matches what was stated in the original listing. If you want to return any books, they’ll provide images to prove that the ISBN doesn’t match or that the condition was worse than described, and you can file the return request from your own buyer account. Once the return is approved, you can upload the return shipping label to the Google Drive folder and Texas PPS will mail the book out on your behalf for only 50 cents per return. When they have received 20+ books for you, you can go ahead and list your books through whatever method you prefer (AccelerList, InventoryLab, ScanPower, ScanLister), and when you’re done you’ll submit the shipment to Amazon and Texas PPS will take over from there. They will access your Seller Central account (you’ll have to give them the necessary permissions to see your shipping plans), and print out the FNSKU labels for you, label your books, box them up, split shipments as needed, and even upload box level contents information on your behalf. There are even FBA warehouses in Texas that handle books, so you may even save a bit of money on inbound shipping costs to Amazon’s warehouses since they’re so close (in Denver, my inbound shipping costs average around 33 cents per pound – from Texas PPS they are closer to 20 cents per pound). They’ll do all this work for you for just $1.00 per book. Not a bad deal!
To learn more about their services or to sign up, drop them a line at support@texaspps.com. Tell them Caleb sent you.
If you’d like to test out OA for yourself, you can sign up for a 21-day free trial of eFLIP here: https://eflip.co/product/21-day-trial-1837/
That’s all for now, folks! Best of luck scaling your OA ventures. Check back soon as we’ll be discussing ideas for scaling your Amazon FBA business through hiring book scouts and through travel arbitrage.