11 ms·
Retail Arbitrage at Walmart [video]
- ryanmercer 8y agoThis is what /r/flipping is about 'buy low, sell high'. There's nothing new or novel about this, some people make livings doing this sort of thing using FBA and eBay. Similarly there is /r/churning where you use credit cards and line of credit to extract profit by strategically exploiting promotional offers.
- lakeeffect 8y agoWouldn't it be more effective to become a retailer and buy wholesale? As opposed to wholesale retail retail
- scrabble 8y agoIn this case Monopoly for Millenials is a Walmart exclusive item. So the money is made from people going to Amazon to buy it.
- ryanmercer 8y agoI actually made money off of an exclusive back in the GameCube day. They did The Legend of Zelda: Collector's Edition for the GameCube that had both games released for the NES and Nintendo 64, with the former including revised texts fixing the original mistranslations, a demo of The Wind Waker, and various promotional videos. It was going for 50-100$ on eBay. The only way to get it was to get a subscription to Nintendo Power during the promotion so... yeah.... I was getting a few dozen Nintendo Power magazines in the mail every month for a year and pocketing 20-70$ per subscription after the sub price and eBay/PayPal fees. Funny thing was, if people messaged me and just asked how I got the copies I flat out told them "just go get a Nintendo Power subscription".
- AdmiralAsshat 8y agoI can't remember how I got a copy of the Collector's Edition, because I don't think I had an NP subscription. Was it a pre-order bonus for Wind Waker as well? In any case, I found it endlessly amusing when I would go to Gamestop and see used copies of the Collector's Edition marked for sale at $50 or so. Particularly with the giant "NOT FOR RESALE" text on the cover: http://static4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110103022630/zelda/images/1/14/The_Legend_of_Zelda_-_Collector%27s_Edition_%28North_America%29.png http://static4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110103022630/zelda/i...
- Phlarp 8y agoYes! I got this bonus disc as a pre-order bonus for wind-waker. The "harder" version of Ocarina was a new triple A game all by itself and is still included in the Nintendo virtual console versions of the game on Switch and Gameboy from what I understand.
- ryanmercer 8y agoApparently there were other ways to get it but I only knew of the NP one https://zelda.gamepedia.com/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Collector%27s_Edition https://zelda.gamepedia.com/The_Legend_of_Zelda:_Collector%2... >In the United Kingdom, the Collector's Edition was available to GameCube owners who mailed Nintendo proof of purchase of one of several selected GameCube games, including The Wind Waker, F-Zero GX, Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, 1080° Avalanche, Mario Party 5, and Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. Consumers could also send proof of purchase of two titles from the Player's Choice range to receive the game
- partiallypro 8y agoWholesale usually requires you buy so many units, and it becomes hard to manage your inventory. Even if this guy couldn't sell half of these, he could return them all to his closest Walmart for only the loss of his travel. Also hot items are usually either exclusives or something you could not be a retailer of. I know there are people that buy things up on Alibaba in bulk then sell them here on Amazon and eBay...the problem is that helps counterfeiters.
- ape4 8y agoToo lazy to watch the video, is that $2500 profit? There is shipping costs, time spent, gas for car, car wear and tear.
- influx 8y agoYes, this is after he deducted gas, Amazon fees, shipping fees.
- hunter2_ 8y agoFolks should really use something like the IRS Standard Mileage Rate (Business) rather than gas, unless they're about to sell the car and it doesn't need anything before they do. In this case, 700 miles is $381.50. Still not bad, considering the order of magnitude difference between such expenses and his profit. [0] https://www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/standard-mileage-rates https://www.irs.gov/tax-professionals/standard-mileage-rates
- wtracy 8y agoI think that includes shipping, but not time spent or travel expenses.
- hunter2_ 8y agoRegarding "time spent" -- in a hustle like this, it's not really worth thinking in terms of "$X minus time at my standard hourly rate leaves $Y profit" but rather "$X divided by time spent is my hourly rate" so time spent is not to be deducted like shipping and expenses are. Assuming one individual pocketing everything with no separate for-profit entity.
- barnesto 8y agoyes. he details all of that towards the end of the video. what he did was visit 17 Walmart's in 22 hours and drove 700 miles. he paid $19.82 for each game and shipping averaged $9 per.
- giarc 8y ago
- padseeker 8y agoI guess this is one way to make a living. Is it sustainable? Is it gratifying? Is it scalable? The guy is a hustler, I can appreciate that. He works for himself, I can appreciate that. However if lots of other people try to do the same thing then does all the competition create a situation where lots of people are squabbling over a few crumbs? It looks like its a niche. And its only a matter of time others try to muscle in on his turf.
- ikeboy 8y agoYup it's gotten harder and harder as more people enter the industry and Amazon makes it tougher to sell and raises fees
- neaden 8y agoI remember when the PS3 came out. There were a lot of people who were convinced it was going to be in real short supply so bought multiple at midnight launch to sell them on ebay. Unfortunately the demand wasn't really there and a lot of them ended up selling for below cost.
- colonelxc 8y agoDo you mean PS4? PS3s were very hard to get at the start. 3 PS3s guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sjhjFOw4Ok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sjhjFOw4Ok
- neaden 8y agoNo, it was PS3s. Here is an article about it from the time: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2006/12/6406/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2006/12/6406/ the Wii unexpectedly ended up being the real in demand system that Christmas.
- zeroname 8y ago> No, it was PS3s. Here is an article about it from the time: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2006/12/6406/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2006/12/6406/ It doesn't say they had to sell at a loss, just that they didn't get the ridiculous markup they hoped for. The PS3 really was in short supply and prices did remain elevated. The article mentions that.
- Upvoter33 8y agoOnly one thing comes to mind when I see this video: Roll Damn Tide.
- bluto 8y agoRTR ... beat them dawgs tomorrow
- virmundi 8y agoI got stuck in line at a K-mart during its close out sale with a man that did something similar with Magic cards. He buys the yearly packs, when they’re on sale. He removes the valuable cards. Sells them independently for $10+ dollars. Due to sales and extreme sales like the close out, he makes a few grand a year. Nice work if you can get it.
- michaelbuckbee 8y agoThis strikes me as wildly unsustainable and something that just can't last, with a big caveat: I thought the exact same thing when people were doing this 20 years ago buying vacuum cleaners at Kmart and flipping them on eBay. My understanding is that people (like this guy) who are good at this pretty rapidly graduate to doing drop shipping and more online speciality work.
- Consultant32452 8y agoIn my limited experience with (3) people who do this, they never really scale/graduate. They just seem to have some different kind of hustle going on, often this is seasonal. When watermelons are in season they'll drive to the next state and buy a truck load of watermelons wholesale from a farmer. Then they sell the watermelons on the side of the road. Same thing with pumpkins near Halloween. Same thing with flowers near Valetine's. Sometimes they'll buy a couple cars and flip them. I think they just enjoy constantly doing something a little different.
- giarc 8y agoI somewhat follow this field (listening to startup podcasts, this has become pretty common theme) and they always seem to graduate to online courses etc. Very few can get away from basically nickel and dimming their way to profitability. It becomes a high labour business with shoppers, packers, shippers etc. As you said, they either need to graduate to drop shipping which is less hands on but perhaps more saturated with more issues, or do course etc. The guys that make a living in retail arbitrage usually end up buying direct from manufacturer in large quantities. At that point, they still call themselves a retail arbitrage startup because "distributor" is much less sexy.
- mattmurdog 8y agoA scalper's gonna scalpe
- partiallypro 8y agoI wonder how he knew there would be a market for this that would buy it for so much over retail.
- viggity 8y agothere are lots of FBA apps that will let you scan a bar code and tell you how much it is selling for on Amazon, and will factor in Amazon's commission, shipping costs, etc and will tell you the absolute max you can pay for an item and still make X% money off of it.
- GuB-42 8y agoTwo possibilities: Maybe he didn't and it is just luck, classic survivor bias. Maybe what you see is just the highlight of what is essentially a full time job. I have a friend who exploited arbitrage opportunities, and made a few thousands like this. While it is easy to see the surface, there is a lot going on behind the scenes. He sometimes spent the entire day packaging stuff, most of his travels included visits to potentially interesting shops, he has to deal with shipping problems and dishonest customers, and he had a very good knowledge of the market. And while big wins sometimes happened, most of the money were made through a large number of smaller gains. He enjoyed it when he did that, a bit less now, and he makes more through his day job (nurse), so he stopped doing it.
- megablast 8y agoThere are forums where people talk about this stuff. Or maybe he gets the sales data (or brochures), and looks up the big discount items on amazon. Eventually you get a feel for what is a good deal. I have done this in the past with 3g/4g modems, you know how much they sell for, you know when a sale will get you a good deal.
- awinder 8y agoSlickdeals.net apparently has a huge untapped market to go advertise to...
- headsupftw 8y agoMost Americans don't know there's a subeconomy in the U.S. where Chinese merchants buy items from retail stores and sell them to customers in China. The successful ones hire people to shop in stores. What do they buy? iPhones, diapers, baby formula, LV purses, lottery tickets...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- camhenlin 8y agoEven cars: there is a huge business of people buying up brand new luxury cars in the US, then immediately putting them on a boat to China. The manufacturers hate it, and try to write sales contracts to prevent it, but it's so lucrative that it constantly attracts new people into the game
- giarc 8y agoIllegal Exporter Ordered To Pay Dealership $1.6 Million Dollars For Selling Dodge Rams To China https://jalopnik.com/illegal-exporter-ordered-to-pay-dealership-1-6-million-1788654629 https://jalopnik.com/illegal-exporter-ordered-to-pay-dealers...
- adetrest 8y agoA dodge ram, of all cars. Why go to such length to own a car that isn't really good looking or remarkable in any way?
- pbh101 8y agoIts remarkable if its the only one on the block, or in the whole city: I was walking down a quiet residential street in Europe once and was surprised to see a giant red pickup sitting in the driveway. Looked incredibly out of place.
- 8y ago
- DubiousPusher 8y agoFor an idea of how this business goes on an average day. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/07/26/539552579/episode-629-buy-low-sell-prime https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/07/26/539552579/epis...
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 8y agoFrom the article: > It defies something called the law of one price. That economic principle says that the same item should sell for pretty much the same amount of money everywhere it's available. > Today on the show: We meet the modern middleman and we find out how he makes money doing something that should be economically impossible. This is a very deliberately sensational way of looking at it. One of the big reasons the one price law works is because there are people who do arbitrage. The first comers to an arbitrage opportunity make a lot of money. Other people come in and try to undercut the first comers and so they make less money and so on. In the long term basically the arbitrage profit tends towards zero.
- zeroname 8y agoExactly. The existence of arbitrage doesn't "defy" the law of one price, it is its entire foundation. What a bold display of economic illiteracy. Next up: English major at NPR discovers the economic secret to free lunch.
- DubiousPusher 8y agoI think the point is more that it's strange that these giant retailers who've gotten to where they are because they are basically experts at selling goods retail are creating these arbitrage opportunities and largely ignoring them. Intuitively, what you'd expect is for the retailers to find a way to close the arbitrage gap. But in the U.S. we have this kind of strange notion of retailers setting prices based on guidance from the wholesaler or producer and then not allowing any price negotiation. These retailers are used to a world in which realizing the resulting arbitrage was not worth anyone's time or money but the internet has changed that and they haven't adapted.
- 8y ago
- giarc 8y agoI love this part of the video (https://youtu.be/FknkqT5tHK8?t=57 https://youtu.be/FknkqT5tHK8?t=57). "Traffic is hades" points camera to traffic moving along nicely. I'd love to live in a place where traffic like that is "bad".
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- surge 8y agoIt's the secret of living in places like Alabama. I know people who work in tech remote and live in these places making large salaries.
- giarc 8y agoI'd think if you work remote, traffic isn't a big concern :) I worked out of Toronto for about 2 years as a food safety inspector, which meant driving around all day. It was horrible. Traffic is so draining to your moral.
- sailfast 8y agoAre there penalties to posting goods you don't have and selling them before you have them in-hand? Does Amazon penalize sellers for cancelling orders if they can't be delivered?
- sovietmudkipz 8y agoThat's called drop shipping when you list an item you don't have. There's a healthy community of drop shippers in most e-commerce sites. I'm sure Amazon and other sites do penalize for cancelling orders, so one has to do a cost-benefit analysis if they make a mistake in pricing. E.g. the source increased prices recently but do you want to risk your reputation of your online store? The risk you're taking on is that you can fulfill the order more cheaply than what the customer bought it for.
- joemi 8y agoAmazon has performance targets that sellers should meet. Last time I saw them, the Pre-fulfillment Cancel Rate target is under 2.5% and the Late Shipment Rate is under 4%. (I'm not sure if they're different for different types of sellers on Amazon or if those are blanket targets for everyone, though.) If you end up on the wrong side of those targets, Amazon sends a warning, but you're not immediately suspended. It's unclear to me exactly at what point you do get suspended... I've seen it happen only when one of those rates gets up to 10% or so, but I've also seen it happen when one of those rates just goes about 1% higher than the target, so I suspect there are a lot of factors behind the scene that are considered (by an algorithm) before suspension/loss of selling privileges like negative feedback rates and other data Amazon measures for each seller. I'm not a dropshipper, btw. Just someone who's been in charge of a book store's online sales (including on Amazon) for a while. Dropshippers actually drive me crazy because they're usually really bad customers. Many of them make lots of demands of the seller like emailing the tracking number separately (even though Amazon emails it automatically), and removing any pricing info from packing slips, or removing my store's name from packing slips. One drop shipper even asked that I put their store's name onto our packing slip and remove my store's name. All these demands that dropshippers have really slow down our order processing, since almost every single other order we get has no special demands. Additionally, since they're not the end recipient of the shipments, if the end recipient has a question or issue they have to pass it along to us, and they often do so very poorly. They're often rude, frequently muddle the question, and sometimes make additional, outlandish demands, like "my customer thinks it's taking too long. send another book via overnight shipping or I'll leave a negative review!" I try to report as many of the worst offenders as possible to Amazon, but that takes time out of what I should be working on instead, and often Amazon doesn't care because Amazon Support can be almost as bad.
- jnettome 8y agoAviãozinho
- megablast 8y agoI am surprised Walmart don't limit how many you can buy. This seems like it is priced to bring people into the store, not make a huge profit for Walmart on its own.
- paulcole 8y agoI used to do support and marketing for a retail arbitrage app called Profit Bandit. I used to invite local users out to Grocery Outlet in Portland (bargain grocery store), give them all $50 and see who found the best/most profitable stuff. Once when testing the app at a Goodwill down the street from the office I found a book we ended up selling for around $100 (paid $3 for it).
- dec0dedab0de 8y agoI met a band from Australia that bought new equipment in the usa for their tour, shipped it back home, and sold it for a profit when they got back.
- throwaway427 8y agoFor some reason our office manager will only order stuff off Amazon which leads to funny scenarios where we'll get 12 pack of soda that was ordered from Amazon but was shipped from Costco with the Amazon sellers name on the billing but our office as the shipping. Down at the local Kroger the 12 pack was probably 15% cheaper...
- s09dfhks 8y agoThis happened to me with eBay once. Ordered a set of socket wrenches. When the box arrived at my house it had a Sears online recipet inside with my shipping address