Zero to Six Figures Amazon

By The Engineer of Arbitrage

Welcome to My Story 3
My Story 3

Why FBA Is King 4

Why Retail Arbitrage Is Great To Start 5

Why Online Arbitrage Is Vital To Scale 5

Sourcing Styles
This section will cover the four main styles of sourcing for arbitrage. It is a very good
idea to use a mixture of all the sourcing styles, and not just one of them. 5
#1 Reverse Sourcing 5
#2 Storefront Sourcing 6
#3 Email Sourcing 6
#4 Tactical Arbitrage 6

Biggest Mistakes I’ve Made (& How to Learn From Them) 7

Subscriptions You Need 8

Pre First Sale Subscriptions 8
Amazon Seller Account Professional 8
Keepa 8
SellerampSAS 9
Making Some Sales Subscriptions 9
SellerToolKit 9
SellerToolKit Repricer 9
End Game Subscriptions 9
Ultimate Sourcing Sheet 9

Why You Need A Credit Card 10

Top 10 Tips 10

Prep Centre 11

Virtual Assistants 12

Sourcing Criteria Checklist 13

BONUS 13

Ebay 13

Facebook Marketplace 14
Welcome to My Story
Welcome to my guide/story of how I went from a broke university graduate to a six
figure Amazon Business owner in less than one year.

By no means was this easy to do, I have made a huge amount of mistakes along the
way, some were far worse than others! This guide will give you a run down of a lot of
the things I wish I knew when I first start Amazon. I’ll also touch on a couple things
outside of Amazon!

My Story
I started in April 2021 after a friend told me about reselling and how we could make a
couple of hundred pounds a month from it. I was coming up to the end of my degree
and with a lockdown in effect at the time I was very isolated and had lots of spare
time. So I decided to start and make my Amazon Seller Account!

It was peak chimenea season, which I found out about through my friend. So me and
my mother teamed up and drove to just about every B&Q and B&M near my area. I
remember buying a couple chimeneas and some firepits, the whole time my mother
thinking I’m absolutely crazy. She couldn’t see the logic of why people would buy
overpriced stuff from me, when you could get it cheaper in B&M! (convenience, thats
why!!!)

Then we got home, I listed it all and nothing happened… for three days. I started to
panic and thought I had been an idiot and wasted my money. (Of which I had very
little left) THEN BOOM! My first ever sale was a Fora firepit from B&Q! I was
absolutely over the moon!!

A Fora Firepit
This slowly turned into panic when I realised it was a sale to Ireland, which I had to
pay a lot in shipping and was very confusing to do. After the cost of shipping and
fees I think I made around 45p. I would be lying if I said I wasn't disheartened and
nearly quit then. Especially when everytime I worked out the profit I got a new
number. (This is why software will save you hours of time)

After that I started to sell a couple more Arizona chimeneas from B&M, and these
finally had some amazing profit! Finally I made some money and I knew for sure
reselling was for me. Overall, once I made my first £100, I knew I wanted to stick
with this.

After chimenea season I struggled, as I only did FBM for the first three months. As a
newer seller and being FBM it is nearly impossible to get sales! Then I finally
discovered the glory of FBA and my story changed forever.

I would be lying if I said the start of my FBA sourcing journey was easy, I purchased
about 10 different orders of items that I had to return. For various reasons, such as
mismatches, gated, dangerous goods etc. But I am very glad I went through the
effort of returning stuff and didn’t try to get away with it, which could’ve led to my
account being banned. So if the start of your Amazon journey is rocky, just know you
aren’t alone in that!

Why FBA Is King

Now listen, EBay and Facebook marketplace can be good to do the things Amazon
won’t let you do. But FBA will always be king in my eyes. Here’s why:

There is a lot of upfront work:

- Source Products
- Prepping products for Amazon
- Analysis of deals
- Risk Analysis

But after that everything is done for you, except changing the price. (which a repricer
does for you!)

- Items are stored for you

- Items are shipped for you
- Customer service is done for you
- Everything is done for you

This makes it INSANELY scalable! With Ebay unless you hire staff and get a
warehouse, you can not ship the amount of orders you can with Amazon FBA. (Note:
there are people that scale EBay to this level, but personally I think Amazon is much
easier and more fun to do in my opinion.) Plus the amount of traffic EBay gets is far
less! You can much more easily sell items on Amazon than you can on EBay!

Plus you get the power of Amazon Prime! No where else can be as reliable and
trustworthy as Amazon Prime. Customers will pay more money just to order with
Amazon Prime.

FBA gives you the power of an entire network of warehouses and staff for a very
reasonable price! All you have to do is take these fees into account and you’re
sorted!

Why Retail Arbitrage Is Great To Start

Personally when I first started, I went to every B&M in the nearby area and scanned any
reduced product I could find. I used only Keepa at the time and would guesstimate the
profit/loss in my head.

If I were to look back on this, it was a great way to start. Being in a store and actually able to
look at products and scan them makes life a lot easier. When you first go online to a store, it
is nearly impossible to know what to look at and you often get stressed and lost as you don’t
know where to start. With retail arbitrage you just go to the reduced section or the cheap
stuff and scan, scan, scan!

Although if I had to go back and do it all again I would 100% do retail arbitrage at first to
learn the basics BUT I would have sellerampsas to scan items and easily work out the profit
of items and not guesstimate them.

Why Online Arbitrage Is Vital To Scale

Retail Arbitrage is amazing in the beginning, as you aren’t competing with massive, massive
sellers who won’t spend the time to go in store and buy products. This means you can more
easily get sales and build your account. BUT in the long run, it would be very hard to scale.
As overall, you can only get so many items per store. For instance I could get an item for £3
profit, but the store will only have 5 of them in stock, meaning £15 overall profit. Now if I want
more of this, I need to drive to the nearest store, maybe 30 minutes to an hour away! Or if I
was online I could just order more of the product as I have the ability to see all their stock
around the UK. Now there are some issues with online arbitrage such as purchasing limits,
cancelled orders etc etc, but the pros very much outweigh the cons!

Online arbitrage is insanely scalable, because you can minimise time wasted. With retail
arbitrage, there is a huge amount of time spent moving store to store, money on petrol, lunch
etc etc. But with online arbitrage you can look at 1000 stores all from your PC at home. With
online arbitrage you can hire virtual assistants to outsource your work, this isn’t as possible
with retail arbitrage. Plus you never run into the issue of not being able to fit more stock in
your car to drive it home! Overall Online arbitrage is where the end game is but you can
scale retail arbitrage to a good level, and I still look at the clearance section whenever I’m
out and about.

Sourcing Styles
This section will cover the four main styles of sourcing for arbitrage. It is a very good
idea to use a mixture of all the sourcing styles, and not just one of them.

#1 Reverse Sourcing
Reverse sourcing is using keepa product finder to search specific parameters to find
profitable items. This method is very good for searching brands that you can sell on Amazon.

Pros:
● Can optimise the profits from a ‘winner brand’.
● Use precise search parameters to find products.
● Very diverse in the ways to be used.

Cons:
● Can be used very wrong.
● Can waste a large amount of time searching ineffectively.
● Items that look bad today, could be good tomorrow.

#2 Storefront Sourcing
Storefront sourcing is looking at other peoples stores on Amazon and seeing what products
they sell.

Pros:
● Easy to do.
● Easy to teach to virtual assistants.
● Can learn what others are doing.

Cons:
● Everyone and their mother does it, meaning competition is high.
● Leads often tank.
● Newbies get stuck using only this method.

#3 Email Sourcing
Email sourcing is signing up to companies' newsletters and sourcing the sales they send you
via email.

Pros:
● Source products on sale.
● Easily find discounts.
● Can be very efficient.
Cons:
● Value depends on the strength of your email list.
● ‘Fake’ sales can waste time.
● Can take time to create accounts to sign up to email lists.

#4 Tactical Arbitrage
This is using sourcing software to find deals. I do not use this method. (that's a story for
another time).

Pros:
● IDK, I don’t use it.

Cons:
● Everyone is finding the same leads.
● Literally no skill so competing with everyone.
● Race to the bottom.

Biggest Mistakes I’ve Made (& How to Learn From

Them)
#1 - Not Checking The Reviews

Reviews can save you a lot of money. For example, one time I purchased in bulk an item
with 3.5 stars. The result? Endless returns and an overall loss on the product. Now if I
would’ve checked the reviews I would’ve seen it is a high return item and avoided it. Plus,
sometimes reviews can tell you if people are messing up and sending a mismatch, or
incorrect number of units in a bundle etc. So always check the reviews, it will save you
money. (Occasionally, someone even says where you can get a product cheaper than
Amazon so you can buy it from there to sell on Amazon haha!)

#2 - Overstocking Seasonal Items

I fell into this trap in the summer, in a couple of ways, pools, gardening tools and sunscreen.
I was still buying these in August as they were still selling well! But come October, boom, all
the sales are gone and I now have dead stock. Just make sure to vary your inventory and
only do so much seasonal! Since I only had a small amount in seasonal items it did not
massively affect me but it still would have been nice to not have dead stock.

Another way some people had this problem occur was Christmas toys. Everyone bought
christmas toys on A2A, then only some went out of stock for amazon and sold well! This
means people now have dead toy stock they have to sell for a loss. Well if this is only 5% of
your total inventory you’re fine. BUT, if this is 50%+ of your inventory you’re in for a world of
trouble. So vary your stock and don’t overstock seasonal items.
#3 - Amazon To Amazon Flips

Overall, Amazon to Amazon can be a very good method to make some really high ROI. But
it is not without massive risk. The idea of Amazon to Amazon is to buy Amazon's stock in the
anticipation that they will run out of stock. Or there is another method where you use keepa
to track ‘hot’ items that amazon can only stock for short periods and buy these hot items to
sell on!

This can be a great method to make some money, but don’t over invest in it. I personally
bought too much A2A and ended up with dead stock. I couldn't shift as Amazon never went
out of stock. Or too many people bought these A2As and competition skyrocketed!

Personally I now do zero A2A as I use virtual assistants to source all my products! I think
A2As can be good if you manage your risk and analyse well but I personally don’t use them
as they dont fit my business model.

#4 - Storefront Sourcing

Everyone and their mother does storefront sourcing. It has literally no skill barrier to do, you
just search someone's store and then see if you can find the deals they bought. This means
that competition on these items will skyrocket and most listings will tank. The main thing to
take away from this is to learn other methods of sourcing, mix in storefront but if you rely
solely on storefronting you may struggle. With this, check what sourcing methods your VAs
are using, some VAs only use storefront and you want to train them away from this method
ASAP! Overall the higher skill required to find an item or the harder it was to find the less
competition you’re going to have.

#5 - Buy & Hold

This is one I fell into early on. Mainly with LEGO, once a set retires and is no longer
produced the value increases over time. So I decided in May that I was going to buy lego on
sale for Christmas later that year! This means that I put £500 into stock that I was hoping to
sell at Christmas for 100% ROI. But if I were to take that money and put it into faster flipping
items at a lower ROI, I would have made more money overall before christmas! In the end
the item ended up not doing that well and only broke even! So overall Buy & Hold can be
good to put some capital into to vary your stock but don’t put a large amount in. I would say it
isn’t even worth doing until you have a large amount of capital that you very much struggle to
spend it all.

Subscriptions You Need

Software is essential to an amazon business but making sure you’re only using essential
software is a great way to keep overheads low. This list will cover my softwares and how
essential they are.
Pre First Sale Subscriptions

Amazon Seller Account Professional

It is possible to sell on amazon as a free account, they charge a small amount more fees
and some other stuff. But if you are in this game for the long run, just get the professional
version. It is FAR FAR better. You will not regret it.

Keepa
One of the most essential softwares is keepa. This will allow you to see previous prices, buy
box prices, FBA prices, FBM prices, offer counts etc the list goes on and on. It is, in my
opinion, one of the best softwares to have. I know some programs have it built in but the
product finder alone can be worth 10x the subscription cost. You NEED keepa.

SellerampSAS
SellerampSAS is the best software I use, it instantly works out the roi, profit, margin etc of
the item, this in itself is worth it. The program can also be used to find the weight and
dimensions of an item, whether it's dangerous goods or hazmat etc. Overall the program is
well worth the subscription. You can also use buy bot pro but I prefer to use sellampsas and
think it is better.

https://selleramp.idevaffiliate.com/318.html

Making Some Sales Subscriptions

SellerToolKit
The software sellertoolkit is a great piece of kit. You can use it for a large variety of things.
One of the most useful is the ability to keep a track of your cost of goods and your profits.
This is very useful to see how your inventory is doing and keep everything in one place.
Another reason to use this software is the replenish tab, this is a great way to see what items
you’re selling out of and how many you have left in stock. You can use this to determine how
many more of an item to buy to replenish your stock. It also has a calculator so you can see
if its still profitable. STK is only worth it once you have some sales under your belt. I wouldn't
recommend it till then.

SellerToolKit Repricer
This repricer is the king of repricers in my opinion. I am biassed as I’ve never used another
one but still, the rules ability on the software is insanely useful. You spend a couple of hours
building a repricer rules at the start, then you’re sorted and never have to touch it again. This
is very worth getting once you have a fair few ASINs as manually repricing you will lose a lot
of sales. Again, only get this when you have some sales under your belt.

A massive pro of sellertoolkit is the facebook group is insanely helpful and they will help you
with almost any issue you encounter with seller toolkit.
End Game Subscriptions

Ultimate Sourcing Sheet

This is Thomas Parkinsons (Fasttrackfba’s) sourcing sheet. This sheet is an extremely end
game sheet. You do not need it until later on down the line. But it has many, many benefits.
A simple but extremely effective use is being able to track your spend. Being able to track
your spend means you can see how much money is outgoing and how much potential profit
can come back, this is useful to see if your spend is going up week on week. The ability to
create custom sku’s is extremely useful to be able to track buy prices, sell prices, who found
the item etc.

The bulk listing uploader is extremely useful for uploading the full days listings instead of
doing it one by one saving a large large amount of time! The 80/20 tab in itself is worth the
money. You can see what stores you’ve bought from in the last 90 days/all time and how
much you’ve spent/expected profit from it. It also shows the top 100 ASINs by money spent
and you can check all the shops you bought them from to see if they’re at a good price
again. There is also a tab for speeding up shipments, although I have never used this as I
had a prep centre once I bought this software. This software is useful for the very end of the
game, when you are getting a lot of sales and making some good profit, it is worth the
investment. At the start it is not needed, although I have seen people get it immediately and
benefit from it..

Overall this excel document just gives me a large amount more info about your business, so
you can optimise it. But without having all this info the USS wont be extremely useful,
therefore it takes a while before the USS is extremely effective.

https://fasttrackfba.com?aff=ChrisC

Why You Need A Credit Card

NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE

In my opinion credit cards are absolutely essential to an FBA business. Why? Well for one
thing the cashback/rewards mean you’re essentially getting free money just for running your
business. Optimising this can get you some extra profits or free/cheap hotels/flights!

More importantly, if your debit card gets swiped and the account is drained, that money is
essentially gone. Debit cards suck at getting money back or helping reclaim money from
retailers when there is an issue. But credit card companies are amazing at helping getting
money back. We have had it before where a company has refused a refund as they said an
item was delivered and it never was, if it was a debit card I paid with the money would be
gone, since I used a credit card they reclaimed the money and I got my refund! Cards get
swiped everyday, and you are far more protected using a credit card than a debit card.

Top 10 Tips
#1 - Don’t wait to start - Simple enough, but instead of sitting on the sidelines just start! You
will learn a huge amount more from your mistakes and doing things as you go than reading
everything about it.

#2 - Vary Your Inventory - Don’t put all of your money into one item, wide not deep. With this
don’t put everything into buy & hold or only beauty etc. The more variation, the better safety
in your inventory.

#3 - Your Store Is Your Store - Don’t listen to what other people say, do whatever you want
with your Amazon store. Just because people say you have to do X, doesn't mean you have
to do X.

#4 - Cash Flow Is King - In my opinion, rather than holding inventory, its better to sell it out
quickly and get the money back to put it into other stock.

#5 - Spend Spend Spend - The more you spend, the more you will make. So don’t leave
money sitting in the bank, put it into flips and keep the money churning.

#6 - Find Your Own Tricks - The key to doing very well at Amazon, is finding your own tricks
or suppliers that other people aren’t using. So learning from other people is amazing but you
need to add your own little twist to differentiate from them.

#7 - Free Shipping Boxes - Simple method, but look on facebook marketplace for free
shipping/fba boxes. Someone is always giving them away for free.

#8 - Cashback - Simply, don't forget about cashback, it's literally free money.

#9 - Free UPS Pickup For FBA - Use an old Amazon FBA shipment code and you can book
an UPS pickup for free. Don’t do what I did and pay for them.

#10 - Learn The Game - Always try to improve. You constantly need to be learning new stuff
and adapting! What works today may not tomorrow!

Prep Centre
I very often get asked:
“What sales per month do I need to get a prep centre?”
“How many units do I need to be doing to get a prep centre”
So I thought I would answer that in this section.
There are three trains of thought I have for this:
1. You cannot self prep fast enough and items are sitting in your house for extended
periods of time
2. The time self prepping is eating into your sourcing time and now you can’t spend all
of your money on products.
3. You’re starting to hate Amazon as it's taking all of your spare time.
For number one, if the items you order are sitting in your house for extended periods of time
then you should get a prep centre. Everyday an item sits in your house is time that it could
be selling on Amazon! This means in the long run your turnover of capital will be slower
meaning less profit. In this instance it makes sense to add the prep costs to your sourcing
and make your sourcing a little harder but you can scale more easily. Unless you get a
warehouse and staff, a prep centre will be the way to go for scalability.

For number two, if you're spending so long every day prepping that you don’t have time to
source and therefore you aren’t spending all of your capital, you are in theory losing potential
profits. In this instance again it would make more sense to get a prep centre, spend more
time sourcing with the prep fees in your sellerampsas and outsource your prep.

Finally for number three, at the end of the day prep is a low roi activity, it really does not save
that much money to self prep. It can save £1,000 per month, BUT the amount of time you
are losing in the process is huge. If you’re starting to hate amazon because you spend all
the time prepping or sourcing or some other task then it is time to outsource.

Overall outsourcing your prep is a very personal decision, there is no right or wrong answer.
There are sellers who prep their own stuff years in and some who never even prep and start
with a prep centre! It is a decision you must make but in my opinion prep is very low ROI, it
is far more worth it in the long run to outsource your prep and focus on scaling the business!
But in the beginning the money you save can be worth it if you have limited capital. Finally
you will need a prep centre if you ever want to be able to run Amazon FBA from overseas,
otherwise you are tied down to a specific location.

If you want to get set up with a prep centre, please message me on Twitter and I will set you
up with the one I am currently with.

Virtual Assistants
People come to me from time to time and ask me whether a virtual assistant (VA) should be
their next step, or they get a VA and come to me asking if they made a mistake. I want to
cover that in this section.

There are three main trains of thought:

1. I can no longer spend all my capital by myself.

2. I don’t wish to learn to source, I want to scale and have a VA who does the sourcing
for me.
3. I want more free time and don’t wish to spend my free time sourcing.
Before going into these items I want to talk about VA’s in general.

- They dont pay off straight away

- Emotionally driven
- Need to keep an eye
- Bonus schemes

For number one, if you can’t spend all your capital but can find a lot of leads but just cant
spend enough to use your capital. Then it is time for a VA.

Number two can work, but since you won’t know the basics of sourcing you will need to find
a way to have someone teach this to your VAs. This is where it can be very useful to use a
VA academy, I personally use fasttrack fba VA Academy: (aff link). These VAs come with
very good basic knowledge but still need some help to reach peak levels. This is where its
perfect for me as I can mould them into the VA I want! Other services will give more in depth
teaching for a higher price and therefore will need less teaching but will be harder to mould.
There is a tradeoff for both and you must assess and see what you need.

Number three is perfectly reasonable, if you want to start to reduce your hours a VA can be a
good choice. At the start there will be a time increase but over time you can reduce your
hours more and more!

Overall, the same as a prep centre a VA is a very personal choice. You can get one at the
start, middle or later in your journey and none are wrong to do! They’re all just different
challenges you will have to face and overcome. But I personally think everyone should learn
to source and this gives you a greater knowledge of the challenges your VA will face.

I get my Virtual Assistants from: https://fasttrackfba.com?aff=ChrisC

Sourcing Criteria Checklist

This is an effective sourcing criteria for a non-vat registered seller:
● Minimum £3 Profit.
● Minimum 30% ROI
● Can I buy more than 3 of the product?
● Dangerous Goods?
● Amazon Share The Buy Box?
● Amazon FBA Fee Unknown?
● Meltable?
● IP Claim? (Instant Sharp Decrease In Offer Count?)
● Lowest consistent price
BONUS
This is a small section covering some other areas of reselling which can be good but aren’t
strictly Amazon related.

Ebay
Ebay is the place for the stuff you can’t do on Amazon. When I get a slightly damaged
product, or returns, these are sold on EBay. This is what I use to make my money back and
a bit on the side. A tip I learnt for it is to use every single listing image, apparently Ebay loves
it when you do that!

I won’t lie and say I’m a king of ebay, I rarely use it but it is needed to ensure you can save
every penny on returns or bad stock. A tip I like to do is if I get a bunch of lets say pet food
items back I cant sell, is bundle them into one listing and sell them as bulk. This means I
have one shipping fee to pay.

Ensure you are using the £1 max free and 80% fees etc etc, these are what make ebay
worth it as you can sell items for close to no fees. Also make sure you use ‘sell similar’ or
‘sell this yourself’ as it will save you a lot of time instead of creating listings from nothing.
Again, I do this with images and descriptions as I don’t have the skills to take good pictures
or make good descriptions myself. So I use theirs and slightly reword them.

Facebook Marketplace
Facebook marketplace can be amazing and horrible at the same time. You get a lot of
people messaging you, who have no intention of ever buying the products. I use facebook
marketplace to sell my stuff. I dont want any chance of people returning or are very big to
ship. I know people do stuff like ps5 & xbox’s on their, but I never sold consoles so approach
at your own risk.

I love facebook marketplace for pool season, stock up before the five days of sun in the UK
then offload them on facebook to people for very good profit. Just make sure you deliver or
meet people in a safe place. I wouldn't suggest allowing people to come to your home.
Another amazing idea to get sales is to put items into one big listing, so I took a picture of
the 5 different types of pools I had and said ‘message for more details’ than when people
messages I gave them all the prices. Engagement on the post went up a lot meaning it was
shared to more people and I got more sales.

Add a ‘buffer’ to your price as well, if you want to sell something for £50, list it at £100 or a
higher value so people think they got a deal.

Overall, don’t sleep on Ebay & Facebook. You can earn some nice extra cash on these two
platforms or just sell the stuff that you can’t get rid of on Amazon!