Want to earn more money and set your own schedule by selling things online?

We’ll leave you with answers to some of the most common questions we get about arbitrage in general and this course in particular. If you have any questions that are not addressed on this page, please contact us at support@onlinesellingexperiment.com

How much time will this take?

Our goal is to help you start as fast as possible. We include our quick-start challenge content to help new sellers sell at least $250 worth of products in their first 30 days. We encourage all new sellers to aim for hitting their first $1000 in profits within their first 3 months.

Many new sellers do significantly better than this, with some achieving 4 figure earnings in their first month. We make no guarantees other than this explicitly described above – your success is ultimately dependent on you and how much time you invest.

We recommend a minimum of 5 hours per week if you want to be successful. More is better.

I’ve tried this and there weren’t any products. Can this work in my area?

This is an extremely common occurrence for new sellers – especially those that go the “I’ll figure this out on my own route.” This is a completely valid route to take, but you have to be ready for a lot more challenges and to invest more time before seeing results.

Even with our help, you may struggle to find products the first few times you go sourcing. This is the nature of being a new arbitrage seller. As you gain experience, it will take you less time to find products and you will find more each time you go sourcing.

One of the reasons to enroll in our Complete Arbitrage Playbook is to decrease this learning curve so you get to the point where you are regularly finding profitable products as often as possible. This alone can generate a positive ROI on investing in the course.

What if people don’t buy my products?

One of the great things about starting with arbitrage is that you get to sell small quantities of existing products that have proven demand with a price history that you can check.

When you go sourcing, you will use what we call a “scan tool” to scan the barcode on the product. The tool will then tell you the Amazon “Best Seller Rank” and what price it is currently selling at.

When getting started, your scan tool can be as simple as your cell phone and the free Amazon Seller app. A tool like CamelCamelCamel can then tell you the price history if you want to check and make sure the product will reliably sell at current prices (or higher).

All this greatly minimizes your risk. When you buy a product, you can see that the exact product you’re buying sells regularly at a profit based on your cost to acquire it.

What if the price goes down on a product I buy to resell? 

Sometimes the selling price of an item will go down after you’ve already purchased it, this is inevitable. One of the advantages of arbitrage based selling is that since you are never dealing with huge quantities of products, the amount of money you can potentially lose in this even is limited.

When this happens, don’t panic. Often times the price drop is temporary. It can pay to be patient and give the price a chance to rebound. This is a situation where using a price history tool is useful because you know if the price change is likely to be temporary or long-term.

How do I avoid price wars?

Avoiding price wars is simple – don’t undercut your competitors on a listing. There will almost always be other sellers selling the same products as you, but you don’t have to have a lower price to get a sale. We recommend pricing your products a little above the current best price and allowing the price to move to you rather than the other way around.

Is this possible for a senior to do?

Yes! If you can get out to stores and walk the aisles to do your normal shopping, you should be able to do this as well. There really isn’t anything more to this than shopping.

If going to stores is not something you are able to do, you can still do online arbitrage. With online arbitrage, all the shopping you do is from your phone or computer and you can be sitting in your favorite chair while doing it.

Many of our students are retired or preparing for retirement. Don’t let age stop you.

If you are worried about learning the computer systems involved, there isn’t anything complicated about them. No coding or specialized knowledge is needed.

Aren’t there already too many people doing this? Isn’t the market saturated?

No!

There are definitely more sellers on Amazon (and online in general) than ever before – but there are also more buyers than ever before too. We are still in the early stages of the migration to online shopping.

Don’t get caught up thinking about what it would have been like if you would have started in the past. There is a big difference between something having been easier to do in the past and it not being worth doing now.

Online retail is growing at a huge pace and this trend is expected to continue over the next decade or more. There are few industries with the same growth potential as online retail.

Where do you want to be in 5 years? You can spend these next years building a business and taking advantage of this opportunity, or you could ignore it and look back and say you wish you would have started now.

Do I need my own website?

Not yet, that will come later if you decide to add wholesale sourcing and building your own brand. Technically your own website is never required, but I strongly recommend one if you do either of these sourcing strategies. Especially because it is extremely easy to build one and they cost far less than most people think.

But at the arbitrage level, there is absolutely no need for your own website.

Will you help me figure out shipping?

Yes. We cover everything from initial product acquisition to the point you have cash back in your hand.

Does this work outside of Q4?

Yes. This works at all times of the year. Q4 (October – December) is when you’ll see the greatest sales volumes, but you can still make a living during the other nine months as well. One of the keys to maximizing your sales throughout the year is take advantage of seasonality.

Everything I can find is restricted. Can you help me get ungated?

One of the biggest challenges new sellers face is the restrictions Amazon places on what you can and cannot sell. Building up experience on the platform is the most important thing you can do to begin getting ungated, so we encourage you to stick with it, find products you can sell, and maintain steller account metrics while selling them.

There are other strategies you can use to get ungated as well, including leveraging easy to get wholesale accounts. We will share strategies to help with this, including talking about our processes for applying for approval.

When you find a great deal on a product, it can also be profitable to buy it and sell it on a platform other than Amazon. For example, we sell a lot on eBay as well even though our first preference is Amazon. This is something we will cover in the course.

How much money do I need?

You can get started with any amount of money. If you don’t have any, take on our flipping challenge and sell things you already own to get your initial capital to invest.

If you want to enroll in our course, we recommend having at least a couple hundred dollars to invest into products if you want to get maximum early results.