BowTiedMahi Guest Post
An intro to Amazon Arbitrage
Today’s post features a special guest:
Below are his thoughts, and I’ll follow up with a conclusion at the bottom.Hello, BowTiedMahi here. I’m known on this side of the internet as the arbitrage guy - arbitrage in this context means buying regular everyday products from retail stores and selling them on Amazon. Many people are shocked that such a business model can exist, but I assure you it’s the real deal.
Think of all the convenience based services that exist in our society today:
Rideshare apps (Uber / Lyft)
Food delivery (Doordash / GrubHub)
Grocery shopping (Instacart / Shipt)
These are all things that millions of people use on a daily basis, despite the fact that it can cost you 2-3x the price compared to doing it yourself. So why can’t you do the same thing by selling on Amazon?
I started out in the summer of 2021 by flipping used textbooks. I would buy them from eBay at discounted prices in July / December when people didn’t need them, and resold them in August / January when both the demand and the price were double, in some cases triple. I started with $300 and made it out of the year with around $2,000 in profit.
Before the end of the year, I learned that people were selling regular items (makeup, vitamins, snack foods, etc.) with methods similar to what I was using to sell used books. With this knowledge, I went balls deep into Online Arbitrage. In this case, I think the results speak for themselves:
The model is very straightforward - buy items from retail chains like Walmart and flip them back on Amazon where they fetch for a higher price. However, you need to spend a lot of time learning how everything works - I have some free introductory content on my Substack if you’re interested in learning the basics. I’ll give a brief intro on how you can start an arbitrage business, but the main focus of this post is going to be cash back rewards and gift cards, as well as how to maximize them when shopping online. I highly recommend reading the Substack as there’s too many things I won’t be able to fit in this post.