What Parts of Online Arbitrage Can You Outsource?

*Click to read the affiliate disclaimer*

(Last Updated On: )

I can see why so many people see online arbitrage as the perfect opportunity to create a new income stream for them. It’s a type of business that allows you to generate cash flow very quickly, once you’ve learned the ropes with Amazon. However, to generate significant income from online arbitrage, you’re going to have to put in the hours. It requires someone to put in the time finding the right products, preparing them and shipping them out to Amazon fulfilment centres.

At first the work involved in online arbitrage may be manageable, but as your business grows and your aspirations do with it, you may want to do less of the day-to-day work yourself and outsource it to others. If you’re early in your online arbitrage journey or have yet to even start, it’s valuable to work which parts of the business you can delegate to others in the future.

Sourcing

It’s very likely that at some point you’re going to have to start using some sort of sourcing software to source products for online arbitrage. I use Tactical Arbitrage and would be nowhere without my daily searches. However, software alone isn’t going to get all of your time back. Hiring a VA trained to spot a dud opportunity from a live one, you don’t even have to think about

When I hire VAs for this purpose, I need them to find me x amount of products per day. They have access to all of the tools that I have, get training on how to use them, and are free to figure out the best way to find those x products each day. Over time they will get a feel for whether automated product searches, manual ones or a combination is the best way to achieve their daily goal.

Even if you use sourcing lists, it wouldn’t hurt to have someone to actually go in and decide which of the 5/10/15 products from the list are worth your attention each day, so you don’t have to spend your time sifting through the options. This is about claiming as much of your time back as possible, and you have to fully commit to giving someone else the responsibility to tell you what you need to buy.

Prepping

Prepping eats into your time, because there’s really no reward for you – as a business owner – fulfilling this part of the workflow. You can’t learn from it in the way that you can from actively sourcing, so it’s time that you really need to get back, if you want to grow. As, quite obviously, the more product you buy, the more work that’s involved.

As for the product preparation, there are a fair few services in the country that will take in your items and get them ready to ship out to Amazon on your behalf. They obviously have a lot of responsibility to ensure that they keep your goods safe, and ship them off to Amazon swiftly, but they will take care of things thereafter.

I can’t say I’ve even used a prep centre, but I’m sure they work for other people. What I have done in the past is to get family to cover this side for me. You may be in a position to get whoever you live with/near to do this part of the job for you.

Repricing

For some reason I don’t see many people discuss repricing as an aspect of online arbitrage that can be outsourced, but it’s as valid as anything else. Repricing is the thing gets your products selling, and it’s a good idea to tweak your settings frequently to maintain that steady flow of sales.

I use Bqool for my repricing and I can’t help but go through to tweak my maximum and minimum prices for my ASINs every few days. I know I would benefit from giving this task to someone else, but I’ve just never got around to it. The more I think about it, the more beneficial it actually is to have someone else looking at this side of the business on your behalf.

I would say that you can get a lot of value in training whoever does your sourcing to do your repricing, as they will see what happens to the price of products once they hit the marketplace. This then informs the way that they should source products in the future, to ensure that they avoid the kinds of products that are prone to high competition and/or massive Buy Box plunges.

Where Do You Start?

As shown, you can essentially outsource all of your online arbitrage. All of the tools can be shared with a VA (or multiple) and they can carry out the work for you. It’s really more of an internal fight with yourself about when you hand the wheel over to others, but you’re bound to see the benefit quickly, so long as you train your team properly.

I would say it’s probably easiest to teach someone how to do the prepping for you, so it’s a good place to start. From there, write down some processes for your sourcing. Make it thorough. And see if you can teach someone how to source in the way that you do. From there, teach them the tactics that you don’t often use, but know are likely to find you the kinds of deals that are a lot harder to come across (particularly for software).