If you’re an Amazon seller like me you’ve probably got a laundry list of expensive mistakes on your resume. Most common mistakes relate to the belief that you need a huge pile of money to get started. I enthusiastically paid nearly a thousand dollars on coaching. This coach walked me through private labeling our very own product and shipping it to our house. Exciting right?
It was a goddamn nightmare. We spent a few grand on a product without doing any real testing. While the product was useful and very durable, it was in a heavily saturated niche. Sales were slow and at a much lower price point than we had hoped. Luckily we bought a shitload of them and needed to also purchase a storage unit to hold all of it. Oh the joys of not knowing what you’re doing.
Sadly, one of the most important things we didn’t know how to do at the time was retail arbitrage for replenishable products. We did do retail arbitrage but we used the standard barcode scanning method and rarely found appropriate profit margins. When we did find a winner it wouldn’t be long before the prices sky rocketed in the stores or the product simply disappeared.
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Jimmy Smith has created a course walking you through how to source replenishable items to sell on Amazon. The term replenishable in this case is referring to the ability of the Amazon seller to buy over and over at its standard price and flip for profit. Because you’re buying at regular price you can buy it again and again as needed. This also makes the best seller rank (bsr) a little less important. If Keepa is telling you the item only sells a few times a month then you only buy a few a month.
This strategy is simple but requires slow and methodical movement through the store. If done properly it would be highly unlikely to cover an entire store in a day. Smith himself has stated that he hasn’t even made it through Walmart yet. The payoff is that once an item is found you can put together a shopping list and pick it up from any store that carries it at that price or below.
If you’re a member of the My Silent Team Facebook group you’ve definitely seen many of the members showing their success with this formula. Many admit it was a little slow going at first but once they began finding products the snowball took off. At the time of this writing the course is being sold at a massive markdown.
Finding these replen products would probably get an Amazon seller by on its own. However, this process can showcase gaps in the market that lead you to private labeling or securing wholesale accounts to accompany your replens sourcing. I’m certain the average person cannot even imagine the amount of units and money that one good product can produce.
As I’m writing this I’m at home during the semi-lockdown my city has implemented for the Covid-19 pandemic. While I’m hanging out at home I’ve been working on my websites and taking some great courses online to improve our Amazon business. With everyone stuck at home and still needing products, the e-commerce world is on fire.
Amazon expects this current trend to have a residual effect even after we get past this national emergency. I agree. Many folks that previously did not buy certain items online will decide to stick with it. If you want to be there to sell them some readily available products, check out the course.
*UPDATE*
Since writing this post Jimmy Smith has released a book about his replens strategy. You can check it out here.
