Main Lessons This Week:
- Learning Keepa takes time but it’s essential to making good buying decisions
- Why? The product data in Keepa will increase the likelihood that you’ve picking good products to resell and avoiding those that will waste your time, and possibly lost money
- Don’t try to figure everything out by yourself. There is plenty of very good Keepa training on YouTube. Take the time to find a vid that resonates and spend the time learning as much as you can.
- Using Keepa a LOT to sourc products is the only way to truly get good at it
Details
We know this is largely an analytical activity. As a CPA and engineer, that was one of the appeals to me about the ecommerce arbitrage business. Getting our analytics right is critical because picking the wrong products to try to resell is easy to do, and it has many pitfalls such as:
- Picking products that just don’t sell
- Picking products that sell, but super slow. Too slow to consider them Replens, something you can build a business on
- Picking products that sell well, but that have so much competition that the price starts to drop (or tanks!)
- Picking products that don’t have an exact matching listing on Amazon (got burned by this twice now)
Keepa’s only a tool and it won’t prevent every mistake, but the trick to becoming an advanced Keepa user is in understanding the relationship between different data elements (New Offer Count +/- Drops +/- Variations +/- Amazon Stock, etc.) takes time and probably also the experience of watching various ASINS with similar Keepa charts to see how they performed. There are so many variables that, together, paint a picture about a product that ultimately tells us whether it’s a good arbitrage option or not. But it takes time to get proficient in that analysis. Clearly I’m not there yet! 😊
Mistakes this week:
I bought some women’s shorts that were profitable, but unfortunately I didn’t look closely enough at the available Amazon listings and missed that “Oyster Gray” (which looked very white in the picture) is not the same as White. Hence, I bought 4 pairs to test, but couldn’t list them due to the oversight about the color. So I put them up on Ebay and we’ll see if they sell there. Live and learn. Btw, I hired a coach to avoid making mistakes exactly like this, but (a) still evaluating if I made a good coach selection, and (b) even if you have the best coach in town, there will still be mistakes. To many way to slip up to prevent all of them. I’ll share more about my journey with a coach in a later blog post after I’ve had more time to evaluate that.
Remember, mistakes are inevitable, part of the process and should be viewed as useful learning events. But … the fewer mistakes we make, that faster we reach our goals and training and/or coaching is the best way to avoid as many mistakes as possible. They will only get you 50% of the way to Keepa proficiency from training because experience using Keepa is still required to get the remaining 50%, but I’ll take a 50% head start anytime.
Wins This Week
I found several small but profitable ASINs at a local Ollie’s a few weeks ago. After some significant struggles getting approved to sell them, they arrived at Amazon this week and have begun to sell. Small profit, but as a successful proof of concept for Retail Arbitrage I was very happy!
Next Week: Sourcing (Finding Profitable Products)