This morning I purchased a subscription to Ryan Grant’s Online Arbitrage Leads List. If you are unfamiliar with Ryan Grant click here. He is a pretty knowledgeable dude when it comes to e-commerce. Essentially, his team uses a product called tactical arbitrage to find discounted products on other websites. He then filters the list based on category restrictions, ROI, shipping cost, and sales rank in order to determine what the best products are to flip on Amazon. This list is sent out every week day at 12pm CST.
These products will have to be shipped to my house and then I will have to relabel and repack them in order to send them off to an Amazon fulfillment center. Access to this list costs $99 a month which is not cheap.
However, I have been following Ryan Grant for years and he seems to be pretty legit. I really doubt this list is a scam. Even if this does not work I feel that he has provided $99 worth of value to me. I will probably have to sell around 15-20 products a month from this list to break even. That’s at least 5 products a week. Ideally I can find products I can buy 5-10 of at a time to flip. This will help lower the initial cost with free shipping and hopefully streamline the labeling process.
One giant red flag for this list is that it is going out to 40+ other people. That could send a ton of competition to these listings. The last thing in the world I want to do is get stuck with more inventory at this point so hopefully that does not happen. Either way I will update this article after the first week to show my results.
Week 1
Week 1 of the leads list was not super smooth. The first day they forgot to add me to the email list. I let it slide. The second day I actually found three products that had decent margins. I bought them all at target and picked them up in store.
However, this was a mistake for a few reasons. First, since I didn’t have them shipped to my house I had to pay for boxes. That ate about 30% of my margin. I also had to pay Amazon $0.30 a unit to label everything. I’m not going to buy a label maker unless I am going to do this full time.
After the first day I was pretty optimistic. I had found three good products. That would be over 20 products a week if i maintained that pace. Unfortunately the “quality” of products deteriorated tremendously after the first real day.
The rest of the week I was not cleared to see over half of the brands or categories. There were multiple Petcare and North Face products that I was not cleared to sell. I have been ungated in over a dozen brands, toys, and topicals. I also have over $40,000 worth of sales. My account is not brand new. The fact that I do not have approval for these is a huge red flag. A lead list for online arbitrage is something primarily aimed at beginners. If they need to get ungated in half the brands and categories it will be really difficult to break even on the $99 a month charge.
A lot of these products were also sold by Amazon. For someone like Ryan Grant this is not a big deal. His Amazon account is probably doing 6 figures a month. He can hold inventory or he has enough history in his seller account to get Amazon to rotate with him. This does not apply to new accounts. Unless you massively undercut Amazon they are not going to share the buy box with you. Most of these items have $3-$5 of profit. There is not a lot of room to undercut anyone. Even if you are willing to undercut someone doing retail arbitrage is a lot of work if you are only making $1 a unit.
I was definitely disappointed in the leads list the first week. Hopefully it was just a few off days. I will update this next week after I have gone through another 5 days (60 products) worth of leads.
Week 2
Week 2 continued a similar trend to week 1. There were a lot of clothes this week. This was bad for three reasons. First, clothes have extremely high return rates. Second, clothes tend to have the most variations size and color. This makes it extremely difficult to pinpoint what is actually selling. There was one dress that had 17 different colors and 5 different sizes. Some of those variations have probably never sold. I stayed away from those because that seemed like an easy way to get burned. At least half the inventory also had Amazon on the listing. For me at least that is an automatic no.
I did find one toy that I bought two of. Still not enough to pay $99 a month for. I did get one sale of the previous inventory I bought. The other units have not sold yet. The buybox seems to jump around a lot with these.
Overall I am not thrilled with this list. It is not optimized for beginners. If you are really experienced you could probably find the leads yourself. I think I will cancel after this month but I will continue to document what I find.