A client specializes in retail arbitrage (buying returns and discontinued items from large stores, and then sorting through the trash and selling the treasures).
They wanted to know what products they could sell in Fulfilled by Amazon (where Amazon warehouses it and ships it via Prime to its customers).
For the returns, they only have a single product in inventory. Here’s their process:
- Make sure it can still be sold and isn’t broken
- Look for a make and model on it
- Search Amazon for that product
- Really make sure it’s the same product
- Check the current selling price
- Guess at costs
- Guess at shipping TO Amazon Cost
- Guess at Amazon Selling fees
- Guess at Amazon Shipping fees
- Guess at any remaining Profit
- Have a minimum wage employee whose primary job is to lift heavy products and move pallets do all the guessing
We were able to give them a $30 barcode scanner and change the process to this:
- Scan the product’s barcode
- Turn the entire screen Green to ship or Red to stay
We did this by integrating the barcode scanner with Amazon’s Seller APIs and do all the math behind the scenes. It eliminated the common error of having the wrong product, and gave an incredibly simple way for the pallet sorter to know if a product goes to Amazon.
FBA sales went from one or two a week to about 20 a day. Additionally, they were all profitable and listed correctly, so “wrong product” complaints went to Zero.