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Every now and again we need to switch up the tempo; we need to take a look back at where we are in our businesses and see whether there’s something we can do to improve it. When you’re working within the business every single day, it can be difficult to see the areas that aren’t as productive as they could be. There’s always room to improve, and there’s always bound to be a bottleneck that you can overcome.

I feel like it’s especially true as an online arbitrage business owner. When you’re relying on sales from Amazon to keep rolling in, that site has a weird way of dragging you in to make you want to do something else, as you don’t know what you might miss. It’s a trap. Every now and again, you need to take a step back from your regular daily tasks.

The following are five different things you can do to dramatically improve your business, just by taking a little time out to.

1. Look at Your Repricing Rules Again

Time required: 1-2 days

I feel like too much attention is put on the sourcing side, when it’s the repricing side which determines whether or not your products actually leave the Amazon fulfilment centres or not. Go through a few of your slower selling products where you don’t have the Buy Box, and look at whether there’s a reasonable reason why not. If it’s the same with a high proportion of your SKUs, you may need to make a few adjustments.

You may even want to invest in different repricing software to ensure that you have something that reprices as quickly as you want it to, and has the ability to react in bespoke ways to the conditions you’re in. I use Bqool and I can change every possible setting I could possibly want, and it’s not nearly as flexible with some of the other solutions. 

2. Make a Monthly Report

Time required: 1-2 days

I’m a sucker for reports, and have been since I started making money online. I need to know whether things are going in the right direction between February and March, and September and October. I need to know what August 2017 looked like compared to August 2020. By keeping a log of sales, inventory, excess, value sent in, and all the rest each month, I’m constantly reminded of what I need to do to improve, and I can easily go back and see the progression. 

Your first report may take a little while to create, but once you have a template, if should only take about 10 minutes to fill out the details for the previous month on or around the 1st of the next month. And yes – I would advise that you start your first one at the start of a brand new month.

3. Try a Different Way of Sourcing

Time required: 3-5 days

Sourcing was bound to come up at some point, so let’s get to it now. With sourcing, I have to congratulate everyone that consistently manages to find enough products to keep their businesses growing. Online arbitrage isn’t an easy game and, as time goes on, it seems to be getting a lot harder to find products that Amazon will allow you to sell. This is exactly why you need to vary the ways that you try to source.

For those that exclusively use software, try the manual way for a little bit. For those that just do product searches (with Tactical Arbitrage), try some reverse searches for a change. Make sure that you get value for money out of the tools you’re using, and take the time to learn how to use them in a way that finds you as many much as possible, and in as many product categories as you can.

4. Write Down a Process

Time required: 3-10 days

I talk about this a lot, because I know how much of a difference it makes in everything that I do (beyond Amazon). Putting together processes means that you are able to confront the task in the most direct way. Write it out as if you were explaining it to someone completely new to it – because you may have to in the future. Make all jargon clear, explain areas in processes where people are likely to make mistakes, don’t leave anything ambiguous.

Screenshots are welcome. Print-outs are welcome. Make it properly. By going through the process of making a process document, you’re going to spot things that you’re doing that don’t make sense, and could be done in a more logical or more efficient way.

5. Hire Someone

Time required: 5-10 days

The bonus part of doing the last point is that you will actually be able to hand this over to someone. A process document is the foundation of training a VA/employee/assistant to cover a particular aspect of your online arbitrage business, so you don’t have to any more.

Hiring someone will relieve you of time pressure. That’s probably the most important thing in all of this, as it means that you will have the freedom to actual take time out to do more of this kind of stuff. It means that you will also have more time to think about other businesses you may want to develop. It’s very difficult to build up to greater things if you take on all of the tasks within your business yourself. My go-to is People Per Hour.

Chiino
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