Live data from Hacker News

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

msn.com

181–190 of 203 posts

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

#181
Parts of this are legit, but google "retail arbitrage amazon" to see a bunch of the strategies and pain points people run into. There's a reason this guy is selling seminars instead of just scaling what he does.

Long story short - for clearanced items, Amazon's new gating policy is making it more and more difficult to grey market (legit, new, but not manufacturer authorized) products. Amazon's set up a system for vendors to police their excess, and they keep internal metrics on how many items are being sold through third party vendors... and once that number/dollar is high enough, they outreach to the vendors themselves and do a sales pitch so vendors can be active on their platform.

For new items being arbitraged by a third party between like this Walmart->Amazon thing, Amazon basically sits on the sideline until the product accumulates enough sales, then outreaches to the vendor themselves. Basically the arbitrageur is doing market discovery for Amazon, and at the point where it's a particularly profitable item Amazon does their bizdev direct with the manufacturer to bring efficiency into their own marketplace. Really clever and virtuous system, to be honest.

Most arbitrageurs now go for the private label option (buy unbranded items and rebrand with their own trademark) to avoid this, but once their product is popular enough to warrant it, Amazon responds by having their buyers clone an AmazonBasics version of them item. (See prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11533973)

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

#182

Why don't Wal-Mart and other retailers get into this game themselves? They know their own stock, they could constantly compare their in-store prices to what they could make selling on Amazon. After they develop the processes it would just be part of their usual inventory management.

Walmart is not going to help their direct competitor. Ever since AMZ bought whole foods they know the game is very real and that whole foods could eventually scale up to something similar to what walmart has. They can just call it "whole foods warehouse" or something like that. Amazon will be able to compete because amazon is using technology for customer benefit while walmart is just using logistics, strong arming suppliers and employees. Those were advantages in the past but no more. Amazon is also doing logistics innovation and they're doing it better than walmart.

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

#183
post #124
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe present it as a barter deal?

Well, at the moment, I am just trying to direct people to a couple of websites. I have created flyers and I am looking for bulletin boards to post them. I would be willing to do meet-ups or something. Maybe if I were representing some religious organization, people might buy that I am just well meaning. But, I don't do religion. :/

If you were associated with a nonprofit / charity that seems like it would go a long way to convincing people you are on the level.

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

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :(

"Blockchain ICO" is easy money. People give you real cash for magic internet tokens. Then you do nothing.

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/what-is-initial-coin-offering...

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

#185
post #110

My 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'…

I used to think IKEA was insane for running such a "20th Century" business model for shipping their products. The fact that you cannot purchase anything from IKEA's website and have it delivered without incurring a $129 delivery fee is crazy when taken at face value. However, I've come to understand why they have limited their delivery service. Their flat pack products are their profit centers and the packaging that…

Every time I needed anything delivered from Ikea it was actually far cheaper to rent a Hertz van(they always have a rental place at every ikea over here) for 2-4 hours and just deliver everything myself. The total cost of the van rental was less than the delivery charge, and I didn't have to wait 1-2 weeks just to get a delivery time slot.

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

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :(

I'd say "I make $200,000/mo" sounds cooler.

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

#187
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.

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

#188

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…

>Remember that massive sales and trend data available to Walmart is not available to this guy [...]

True, but this guy and WalMart are not solving the same optimization problem. Supermarkets are dropping prices on particular items to lure customers into their stores expecting them to buy other stuff as well. They try to maximize the profits they make on all of their existing and potential customers, now and in the future. Customer loyalty is a big deal for them. This is a very difficult optimization problem.

When WalMart sells a particular item for a particular price, it is not a judgement on the real market value of that individual item. And I think that's what creates the sort of arbitrage opportunities that this guys is exploiting. He doesn't have to beat WalMart at their own optimization game only with less data as you suggest.

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

#190
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. It doesn't say $8M/year, it says $8M total sales by the end of this year. So from the founding of his company, to the end of this year.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN