How to be Amazing at Amazon to Amazon Arbitrage

Amazon to Amazon arbitrage or Amazon flips (the current parlance for the Amazon crowd) can be a great way to make a profit selling on Amazon.

Basically, you find a product on Amazon that is priced lower than usual, buy it, then ship it back to Amazon via your FBA account and wait for the price to come back up.  Prices often bounce back quickly.  Especially if the demand is high or stock is low.  These are great opportunities to make a profit. Let's dig in!

What Causes Prices to Dip

That is a great question.  I appreciate you asking. There may be a flash sale.  Amazon’s algorithm may have had a hiccup.  A third party seller may not know what they are doing.  Maybe a repricer has gone haywire (I know this has happened very recently, but that is all I can say). It doesn’t really matter what causes the price of a product to drop precipitously.  It just matters that you are able to be there when it happens.

How Can I Be There

Well, there are several ways.  Fortunately, they aren’t particularly hard either.  However, they may take some learning. The first place to be is Keepa.  Click on the deals button in the top left corner.  It will show you all the price drops and update them every time you hit refresh. Over on the left side of the screen you can even use the filters to only show certain price drops by percentage, you can filter for seller, how old the price drop is, the price range of the item, and also sales rank. Once you have all that set it is easy to sort them by newest and refresh for new price drops to show at the top. A quick glance at the chart and a little math or a quick check with the Amazon Calculator Widget and you will know if the item is profitable for a flip. Pro tip:  Follow the keepa notifier on twitter.  You can easily see what price alerts people have set up and possibly take advantage of them for yourself.

Use Software to Make Things Easier

Tactical Arbitrage has a built in Amazon to Amazon arbitrage feature.  It will search products on Amazon based on your criteria and will pull back items that are ripe for flipping. If you want to learn more about the Amazon Flips feature inside of tactical Arbitrage you can check out my How To Guide. As you can see the Amazon Flips feature has a ton of filters for you to choose as you please.  You are also able to search bulk categories, bulk product codes (ASIN’s or UPC’s), as well as Best Seller categories if you have StoreFront Stalker Pro. Once you have found some winners it is time to buy or set an alert for when the price dips back down to where you want.  You can do this easily with the keepa extension.  You can be notified via email, twitter, or even facebook. Remember, look in many categories for flips.  Lots of people really like to focus on a particular category or two for amazon flips.  You shouldn’t.  You can find profitable items to resell in just about every category. This feature pays easily pays for the $99 monthly subscription all by itself.  Plus you get product searches, reverse searches, and The Library search features and you can run all of them simultaneously.

This Seems Hard (It's Not)

The vernacular of Amazon to Amazon arbitrage, reading charts, using software all seem hard.  But it really becomes second nature with a bit of practice.  Before you even make a purchase you can do mock trials with alerts and manual tracking to see if you would make a profit on a flip.  Once you feel a bit more comfortable it is time to practice with a little money.  I believe you always learn the best when you actually have some stakes in the game. If you spend just a few hours and a few dollars on learning the process through trial and error (never go deep, always go wide on flips) you will be a master in no time.  I promise. So, what tips and tricks do you have for Amazon to Amazon arbitrage?  Please share them in the comments below. Chris