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28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon

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Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon

#171

Post by 59nadir »

FuckOffNeemo wrote: post #100
mr337 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in US people are doing that with IKEA. The closest IKEA is about 2.5 hours way and you can put in a order through them and they make a weekly trip to buy your item and you can pickup it up locally.

Ah, thank you for the comment. I'm guessing IKEA don't ship any where in that case and that isn't specific to just Australia. Paying some one else for the luxury and buying it through an online medium like eBay is a pretty decent alternative to a 2.5 hour drive.

IKEA in Bulgaria deliver and it's extremely affordable. Given that we've only had stuff delivered twice I can't vouch for how well they do it, but we haven't had any issues.

Edit: They deliver to the whole country, but if you're not in Sofia you're gonna pay more. Given that Bulgaria is like a small state in the US that'd probably be the scale I'd expect in the US, but I'd bet that you have more IKEA stores in your average US state than Bulgaria has country-wide.

Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon

#172

Post by AWebOfBrown »

Scoundreller wrote: post #131

I do a similar thing on Ebay: Canada Post has been taking 5 or 6 weeks to deliver items from China that are shipped with free shipping. So, I'll buy 10x what I need from China when I need a part, then sell the rest on Ebay. Paying attention to things that I can ship cheaply (i.e. Lots of buyer will pay extra to get their spare part in 3-5 days instead of 3-5 weeks. Christmas time will be especially good to me :)

Do you not worry about unfit-for-sale goods? Getting a replacement means waiting those 5-6 weeks and often incurs return expense. Unless your margin is high enough that you can afford to buy extras for that purpose?

Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon

#173

Post by onion2k »

koancone wrote: post #144
golf1052 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're very right, the internet and technology would be very different if open source didn't exist. Basically saying, if you aren't only helping yourself and turning a profit you're doing it wrong is a little disturbing to hear.

The internet and modern computers are the result of Government and University funding (e.g. DARPA, UC Berkeley BSD) and corporate R & D projects like Xerox Alto / Start at PARC and Bell Labs Unix, C, etc. Free Open source volunteers merely imitated (Linux vs. Unix) or extended institutional or corporate sponsored projects or ideas. Without robust government and corporate funding of basic research in the later 20th ce…

It just means assigning value and ownership to the results of socially valuable work. What is so evil about that?

Nothing at all. That's how Canonical built a billion dollar corporation building on and releasing, for free, open source code. That's why Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc all release huge amounts of their code openly and for free. There's no reason to believe you can't make amazing open code and generate huge profits too.

Free Open Source fanatics like the GNU people are stuck in the stone age and do the profession of software development a disservice.

GNU gave us the GPL and LGPL, which, combined with the rise of the internet for distribution, was fundamental in changing the way applications are built using other people's code. Those "fanatics" made every developer's lives immeasurably better. Even if you don't like the code they produce themselves you still have a lot to be grateful for.

Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon

#174

Post by SyneRyder »

FuckOffNeemo wrote: post #104
siquick wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IKEA are stepping up their home delivery game in Australia, hope your friend knows about this. https://www.smartcompany.com.au/industries/retail/ikea-onlin... Online shopping is already available in Tasmania, the Northern Territory, Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory.

Oh nice, thank you for the heads up. I'll let her know. I was unaware, she may be across it though. I gave the impression that she exclusively deals with IKEA products but from what I understand it's more diversified than that but, I'd suggest it's still her bread and butter.

Looks like online ordering / home delivery is available in Western Australia and South Australia too (which apparently are not part of the eastern coast IKEA network). Delivery cost is $19.75, which is still crazy if you just want one $5 USB powered lamp... but less crazy if you're ordering several items at once.

Not that I checked eBay and noticed a lot of people selling IKEA USB lamps or anything ;)

Looks like there's no IKEA in New Zealand though. Hopefully your friend can still make her fortune selling across the Tasman and providing a great service to Kiwis!

Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon

#175

Post by SyneRyder »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #169
philliphaydon wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Was TaskRabbit popular in Singapore for that kind of delivery (and assembly)? I know IKEA bought TaskRabbit a month ago:

https://www.recode.net/2017/9/28/16377528/ikea-acquisition-t...

Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon

#176

Post by hardwaresofton »

sytelus wrote: post #170

He 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 Wal…

While I agree that there is some hyperbole in the article, I think it's worth pointing out that this is a fundamental (if not the fundamental) business concept: Buy/make a thing for price x and sell it for price x + profit.

$200K/mo is a little much for this kind of low-hanging-fruit but easy/easier money DOES exist. Your next startup doesn't have to be a blockchain AI distributed whatever whatever that's going to change the world.

If you can afford to use distribution centers (there are some that come ready made and will drop ship and do stuff for you), and can find a niche/gap in the markets and fill that niche/gap until it's no longer there.

That said, this is low hanging fruit (basically arbitrage), and difficult in practice, as logistics (storing, shipping, inventory, etc) is hard. If you can do it easily, odds that others can too, and more will enter the market, and reduce your profit margin.

I also don't need millions to feel like a success at such a startup -- If I were to make a setup like this (and I know people who have, though they focused on specific niches), and get away with 50K a year or 100K a year, I'd be very happy (assuming the logistics were little to no work after initial setup costs).

Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon

#177

Post by owens99 »

sytelus wrote: post #170

He 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 Wal…

> that would require shipping one item every 12 minutes assuming he never sleeps and works all of the 365 days

He uses Fulfillment by Amazon, meaning after he buys the products he just ships them all to Amazon and Amazon will ship them to the customers when the orders go through. That saves 90% of the time required to operate a business like this. All he has to do is find and buy products where he can make a margin significant enough, send them to Amazon and list them in his store.

Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon

#178

Post by coldtea »

zaroth wrote: post #118
rubyfan wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His high salary was $150k. You can still make millions without taking it out in the form of a salary. If he owns the company and the value of his equity increases into the millions, then he’s making millions. It sounded like he was reinvesting the money back into the business too. It’s probably a smarter use of profits if he has predictable margins that scale.

No recurring revenue, no actual customers, no secret sauce. Maybe some proprietary data models, but doesn't really sound like it. So what would it be that someone was hypothetically paying for if they were to buy him out? The blog following and sales classes probably are the key IP worth paying for.

>No recurring revenue, no actual customers, no secret sauce. Maybe some proprietary data models, but doesn't really sound like it.

So exactly like most of the 100s-of-millions valued internet startups?

(But in this case, actually making a profit)

Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon

#179

Post by coldtea »

tyingq wrote: post #40
ssanders82 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the article says "his business is making seven-figure profits"

Hmm. Seems unlikely given the manual nature of shopping at WalMart, shipping costs, returns, etc, on an $8M revenue base. Edit: He contradicts himself... "four years later, we're a team of 11 and we're doing well over $200,000 in sales per month" $200k/month isn't even close to $8M/year. And you aren't netting 7 figures with $200k/month and 11 employees. Now I'm thinking this is just a puff piece for his get-rich-qui…

>$200k/month isn't even close to $8M/year.

He said $8M total (over 4 years), not $8M a year.

If one is going to discredit the article, at least they could read it carefully.

Re: 28-year-old makes millions buying from Walmart, selling on Amazon

#180

Post by anonymous5133 »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #176
sytelus wrote: post #170

He 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 Wal…

While I agree that there is some hyperbole in the article, I think it's worth pointing out that this is a fundamental (if not the fundamental ) business concept: Buy/make a thing for price x and sell it for price x + profit. $200K/mo is a little much for this kind of low-hanging-fruit but easy/easier money DOES exist . Your next startup doesn't have to be a blockchain AI distributed whatever whatever that's going to…

but blockchain AI ICO developer sounds more cool to my friends :(
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