Good to know retail arbitrage is still a thing. I guess the algorithms haven’t taken over yet!
until the labor to manipulate all these goods drops to near zero- it will continue to exist.
28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon
161–170 of 203 posts
Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon
#162thats a lie. almost all brands sell also on amazon and will come after your listings if you list their products on amazon. the fact that those are original products and you arent infringing any trademarks or other ip dont mean shit, ‘retail arbitrage’ is not allowed on amazon. your walmart receipts wont prove anything either. you must be authorized reseller who buys the stuff from wholesale suppliers of the product.
Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon
#163Good for him, but I really wish for a better class of business journalism. He's been doing this 4 years, and never made more than $150k/year. So he definitely isn't somebody who "makes millions".
exactly, lets say he really does make 200k in sales per month. and lets say he happens to enjoy 100% profit margin (very impossible) thats 200k-100k-50k (amazon fees) leaves him with 50k profit per month. 10 employees excluding him is 25-35k range, and 1.5-2k rent for warhouse and 1k for all utilities and shipping supplies. that leaves the guy making around 10k a month before taxes. very far from ‘millions’
Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon
#164Classic arbitrage opportunity trade
Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon
#165I am not sure what the point of these news stories is. Arbitrage opportunities have existed throughout history. How is it newsworthy? However, a basic understanding of economics would indicate that such market inefficiencies tend to disappear once widely publicized. I guess the journalist wants to grab a piece of the ephemeral surplus by publishing. In the same vein I don't understand why people share truly original…
>If I had been practising the sort of arbitrage the guy in the article was doing I would have been highly motivated to keep it secret By your own token I think the sharing of such information would be "newsworthy". Your comment is rather inconsistent.
I don't know what you mean. My comments are not newsworthy. I am not practising arbitrage. I am commenting on HN because that gives me some recreational utility. What is inconsistent?
Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon
#166My friend does exactly this between IKEA and Ebay. Here in Australia, IKEA does not ship (not sure if they do else where) so she buys a heap of items at the Ikea stores and flips them online. She's been doing it for years and does pretty well at it. Here in Australia, IKEA stores are few and far between so her arbitrage is a huge value add for a lot of her customers since IKEA cannot (won't?) ship and traveling X KM'…
Ikea here in singapore just started doing delivery 2 months ago.
IKEA in china has always done delivery and even assembly. They wouldn’t sell much of anything otherwise as many don’t have cars and there is only so much you can do with a taxi. Surprised Singapore isn’t similar.
Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. The company I work for has a similar setup; we bid on wholesale lots from the same places that Big Lots and other wholesale-to-retail outfits buy from. We flip those items both in our storefront and on eBay and Amazon. We don't do FBA but that's because we have a huge warehouse and competent shipping staff at our disposal. We clear enough for 10 competitive salaries and a comfortable income for the owners…
Lol, good luck is all I have to say to you. Invest well=) If you honestly think this is sustainable, you are mistaken. You are lucky to have done well all these years, but as more people get smarter, bye bye margins.( Same thing in every business.) More and more people will get into this space. Sure, you may be able to survive because you geta volume discount on shipping, but that's all dependent on you sourcing the…
all dependent on you sourcing the product that these new people will be doing because all it takes is a smartphone and dream
And capital for up-front costs, and a willingness to take the risk to buy stock you might not sell, and space to store the stock before it ships, and people to do fulfilment, and knowledge of how to sell through Amazon (or any other site)...
If it was that easy then everyone would be doing it already. You can build a sustainable, profitable business doing reselling (thousands of people do) but it's hard, and risky, and that puts most people off.
Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon
#168Many brands are "gating" their products on Amazon so only select resellers can sell them on Amazon. For example, the article mentions LEGO--restricted. You need to show Amazon proof that you purchased your products from a credible distributor in order to list your LEGO products. Receipts from Walmart are not enough.
Do you have a source for this? I've never had trouble selling Legos on Amazon.
https://thesellingfamily.com/the-known-brands-that-are-not-a...
Also, my Amazon seller app. But I'm a new seller. From what I understand, some of these restrictions may not apply to sellers who have been around awhile and sold certain brands or categories before they became restricted.
The deal about Walmart receipts not being valid I read in a forum post.
When it comes to "retail arbitrage", it seems dealing with Amazon FBA is kind of like dealing with the IRS. You can walk on as thin of ice as you want, but Amazon can ban your account at any time. Some argue that items purchased retail should not be listed as "new" because they will have shelf wear. Some sellers laugh at this notion.
Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon
#169My friend does exactly this between IKEA and Ebay. Here in Australia, IKEA does not ship (not sure if they do else where) so she buys a heap of items at the Ikea stores and flips them online. She's been doing it for years and does pretty well at it. Here in Australia, IKEA stores are few and far between so her arbitrage is a huge value add for a lot of her customers since IKEA cannot (won't?) ship and traveling X KM'…
Ikea here in singapore just started doing delivery 2 months ago.
Given that nobody in Singapore has a car, how exactly did people get their furniture home previously?
Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon
#170He is doing $200K/mo. Assuming average sell price is $50, that would require shipping one item every 12 minutes assuming he never sleeps and works all of the 365 days. Just think about someone needs to stroll around Walmart and find all these 4000 items each month chosen meticulously, buy them, store them, package them and ship them. Then there is a classic and dreaded inventory problem. The items you bought from Walmart has no guarantee that they will get sold by same day, week or even a month. It's not hard to imagine that you will need 2X inventory and many of these items may go unsold in long tail easily wiping out significant profits. In fact odds are squarely not on his side because he is specifically buying items from clearance which probably means that Walmart had good confidence and insights that those items won't get sold easily. Remember that massive sales and trend data available to Walmart is not available to this guy so he needs to be extraordinarily lucky 4000 times a month or just plain genius.
So I see lot of problems in claims being made. Unfortunately this reporting smells more like advertising and mostly link bait as opposed to investigative journalism with evidence and good data source. It is likely that on can find blindspots from inefficiencies in some nitche and make small profits but doing this at scale seems highly unlikely. I'm more on cautious side because Internet is littered with videos of people like this making claims of how anyone can millions by doing this and that. Usually that video is prelude to something they want to sell like books or self-help course or just get free publicity to boost their prospects.