5 Steps to Grow Your Amazon Online Arbitrage Business
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This guide will help you get started, understand the basics of Amazon selling, and explain in simple words how it all works.
Online arbitrage on Amazon can be a lucrative business for those who are willing to put in the time and effort to find profitable products to resell. As you see your business grow, one day, you will inevitably start thinking about scaling it to the next level.
Scaling business offers many benefits: increasing profitability by growing revenue, reducing costs, and improving efficiency. It gives you a competitive advantage and helps ensure long-term success for future-proofing. However, it's not a process that happens overnight, and how exactly do you get there? In this post, you will find a step-by-step guide for scaling the OA business on Amazon.
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Step 1. Get More Leads
If you want to grow your online arbitrage business, you must sell more. The main difficulty in scaling OA is sourcing enough profitable products to meet the increasing demand. As your business expands, you will need to find new suppliers and products to sell, which can be time-consuming and require a lot of effort.
However, there is a remedy to it. If you are interested in getting ready-to-sell online arbitrage deals, you can purchase them from professional researchers. There are three ways to buy OA leads: hire virtual assistants (VAs) to do product research for you, purchase prepaid access to deals from OA lead-sourcing companies, and buy verified high-profit leads on the OA deals marketplace. All these options have pros and cons; however, the marketplace option is the most advanced. It doesn’t require prepayment and works like any other e-commerce marketplace: sellers offer deals to those who want to buy them.
Tip. If you want to scale your Amazon sales fast and generate good margins, you can purchase ready-to-sell deals to list on Amazon and make profits on Seller Assistant Deals marketplace. The marketplace allows buying deals safely and provides a refund warranty. It ensures that you buy only deals fitting your seller account, and all deals you buy on Seller Assistant Deals marketplace are verified.
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5 Steps to Grow Your Amazon Online Arbitrage Business
Step 2. Hire a Virtual Assistant
When you start scaling OA, keeping up with the demands of sourcing, listing, and shipping products on your own can become more challenging. A practical solution to that is to delegate these tasks. At this point, you must begin mapping out the team you need to facilitate growth. You can hire employees to help you or outsource these tasks to virtual assistants.
Outsourcing business tasks to Virtual assistants help streamline your operations, reduce the time spent on manual tasks, and focus on growing your business. VAs assist merchants in different areas of the Amazon sales process. Their services range from sourcing deals and product research to customer services and inventory management. They can help you with the routine but necessary daily tasks or complicated activities requiring analytical knowledge, like looking for suppliers, competitor analysis, repricing, and more. Sellers can outsource VA services full-time, part-time, or per-task to get professional assistance with Amazon accounts and sales issues.
Tip. If you are looking for a product research tool for your team, Seller Assistant App is a great solution. It offers team plans available for teams of up to 10 people. Team plans allow the creation of sub-accounts for your team members and VAs.
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Step 3. Find Suppliers and Build Relations
Your next step involves finding suppliers and establishing good relationships with them. This step is essential in order to scale your online arbitrage business. To obtain the best possible price for bulk products, reaching out to the brand owner or manufacturer is crucial. That will result in lower costs, reduced expenses, and less competition, leading to higher profits.
However, this approach has some challenges. Negotiating with brands or manufacturers is quite different from purchasing from low-tier wholesalers and online or retail arbitrage sourcing. Convincing suppliers to work with you is complex and requires preparation.
To build solid cooperation with a supplier, you must be ready to provide references and prove that you have extensive experience in Amazon sales and are capable of selling volumes. Negotiation skills are key; you should never accept a "no" as an answer. Instead, convince and prove you're the best candidate to grow the brand's sales. Once you've established a relationship, you can discuss discounts and better conditions.
Ensuring that your chosen supplier is reliable and credible is also vital. Verify their company registration number and check that they have a physical warehouse. Proving the wholesaler's legitimacy is crucial because your investment in this business will be significant.
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Step 4. Get Funding
To scale your operations, you will need additional capital. Usually, to solve this problem, entrepreneurs seek third-party financing. For traditional businesses, plenty of funding solutions are available. However, getting funding for Amazon business is more complicated. That is because banks are conservative and not used to dealing with e-commerce. Therefore, it’s harder to qualify for funding. In addition, banks are reluctant to provide small loans.
To get funds, you can use one of the two Amazon programs — Amazon Lending Program and Amazon Line of Credit, or consider other options, for instance, SBA microloan, merchant cash advance, or peer-to-peer loans.
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Step 5. Go Wholesale
When you’re done with the previous steps, that practically means you’re ready to start wholesale operations. That is a logical consequence of bringing OA business to the next level. Sellers reselling products in bulk are wholesale merchants.
The wholesale sales process on Amazon requires that you are on a professional seller account. Research products you want to sell in bulk and ensure they are profitable. Then find several suppliers, negotiate order terms and prices, select one, and verify the one you chose. After getting the final offer, recalculate profitability, source a product, and start selling.
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Final Thoughts
Expanding an Amazon business is an excellent option for sellers to target a more extensive customer base, increase sales volume, and leverage economies of scale to reduce costs. You can gain a competitive advantage by increasing your market share and profits.
However, it's also essential to remember that scaling the OA business is based on sourcing profitable products. With bulk purchases, it becomes even more critical because purchasing many problematic products creates massive money losses.
Seller Assistant Аpp will effectively and reliably help you with product research. This all-in-one extension incorporates all features vital for product research. Seller Assistant App shows your product’s profit, margin, and ROI. It also helps you immediately see if a product has any sales restrictions or previously triggered account health problems. It is an all-in-one extension incorporating features vital for product research. It combines an FBM&FBA profit calculator, Quick View, Stock Checker, and Restrictions Checker in one tool.