Retail Arbitrage App, Pros and Cons, and How it Works in 2024

Did you know that the Retail Arbitrage app helps you make money at the expense of your competitors? If that’s a tool you’ve been looking for, then you’re at the right place to learn about arbitrage apps that will surely give you an edge over your rivals.

Retail Arbitrage App

Retail Arbitrage App Review

Retail arbitrage app is a simple concept that helps you purchase a product from a local retail outlet that is selling it at a low price, and then you sell that same product at a higher price, thereby flipping it for a profit.

You can sell items via marketplaces like Amazon, Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, eBay, Jet, Walmart.com, and many more.

Although there are lots of options available to retail arbitrage sellers, Amazon is one of the best places to sell for those who are just getting started with this business model. 

The reason for this is that Amazon allows you to do something called “FBA”.  Or, “Fulfilled by Amazon”. Although retail arbitrage may sound like it’s the same as regular retailing, it’s not.

How Does the Retail Arbitrage App Work?

As you have seen from the description above, the retail arbitrage app is a very simple yet potentially lucrative concept.

Say you come across a sale at Target, where there are men’s leather wallets offered at a significantly discounted price of $15 when they normally go for $30.

This may be either because the store is clearing old stock, or it might be due to seasonal discounts.

Whatever the case, if you can invest some cash into purchasing 20 units or so, you can then sell them through an online marketplace for a couple of dollars less than the product’s original retail selling price.

And all of this happens without you having to deal with wholesalers, suppliers, or manufacturers. This is the main difference between normal retailing and retail arbitrage.

You are purchasing directly from the retail store, and while this can sometimes cut into your profit margins, it’s often an easier process than trying to source products via suppliers.

Because of this low cost of entry, retail arbitrage is the perfect way for most people to get started as sellers online.

Top Rated Retail Arbitrage Apps

Retail Arbitrage App

1. Amazon Seller App

One of the best things about this app is it’s free. And if you’re already a registered seller on Amazon, you can start using it right away. If not, you’ll have to sign up for a seller account first.

Once you’ve downloaded it, you can start scanning products right away (or do a manual search) to uncover the product price, FBA fees, approximate profits, best sellers’ rank, total number of sellers, and its official Amazon category.

However, it does come with a few downsides. It won’t show you taxes or customs fees, so you only get an estimate of profitability.

You won’t be able to integrate it with eBay, Google, or Keepa which can make it tough to match it with the product’s price trends and history.

You might have a tough time working out the maximum ROI because it’ll only show you the lowest price on new items. This app is available on Google Play, iTunes, and Amazon.

2. Scoutify

Let’s get the biggest downside out of the way first so we can start raving about all of its great qualities: you have to sign up for the whole package.

But it’s one of those cases where you absolutely do get what you pay for, and boy, do you get great features. (Because of its cost, Sellers with a high monthly volume should go for it, as you need an Amazon Pro Merchant account).

You’ll be able to integrate with third-party apps, which means you can sync it. They work in taxes so you can get an even closer final price number. You can also scan with Bluetooth.

There’s a shopping list that keeps a history of your purchases so you always stay on top of them.

You get access to InventoryLab, which means you have reporting, sourcing, and bookkeeping tools available to you.

This is probably the best scanner app out there in terms of quality and features, but if you’re not completely sure if it’s right for you, they have a free month-long trial.

This app is available on Google Play and InventoryLab.

3. Profit Bandit

This scanner app also requires a paid subscription, but it’s affordable and doesn’t compromise on being able to research items in real time.

That upside is huge: you can make the best decisions possible because you have the most current information at your fingertips. Plus, its lower cost makes it a great entry point for lower-volume sellers.

This app is available on Google Play iTunes and SellerEngine.

4. FBAScan

If you’re ever in a reception/wifi black hole, this app has you covered by switching between live search and local database modes.

It has all the information that other apps do (FBA prices, sales ranking, type, image, weight, title, etc.), but the data/wifi-independent feature makes it standalone.

This app is available on Google Play, iTunes, and ASellerTool.

5. ScanPower

This one will set you back the most financially, but it will also put you ahead the most with the best and most accurate live data from Amazon.

If you operate best on the go, this app is worth taking a second look at.

And if you need information whilst out and about but want to send it back to your desktop to mull over later, this app lets you do that, too.

Another neat feature is the ability to create 2D barcodes so when you ship your items, it’s already there and you don’t have to worry about it.

This app is available on Google Play, iTunes, and ScanPower.

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Does Retail Arbitrage App Actually Work in 2024?

Retail Arbitrage App

Yes, you can earn a very nice profit with retail arbitrage in 2024 if you follow the Retail Arbitrage Process processes Explained below:

1. Use a Scanning App

Scan the item with your preferred seller scanning app (I use Profit Bandit). Look at the FBA competition and the current sale rank or Amazon BSR.

2. Check Amazon

Since most scouting apps return incomplete information, click through to the Amazon sales page to check out the possible competition you may be facing. On Amazon, you can see the full picture.

3. Research on Keepa

Research the item’s Keepa graph. For those of you who don’t know about Keepa, it’s a very useful website that attempts to track both prices and sales ranks for millions of items on Amazon.

Keepa is not perfect, but they usually do a great job of giving us a good picture of how often an item sells and what the lowest sales prices are at any given moment in the past.

4. Look at the Item’s Sale Rank

A rank under 1,000 is usually amazing, except that many times when scouting apps return a Consumer Electronic sales rank, it is actually returning a sub-sales rank.

Be sure you know if the rank you are seeing is the rank for the full category or the sub-category.

5. Check Customer Reviews

To get a better idea about how often an Electronics item sells on Amazon you can always look at the customer reviews.

Customers rarely leave a review of an item they bought on Amazon, so when an Electronics item has many reviews, then it means that it’s sold rather often.

6. Check Recent Customer Reviews

Be sure to check how recent the reviews are. Just because a DVD player has 1000 reviews, doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to buy that DVD player for the purpose of resale.

Most times, 99% of the reviews could have come before 2010, with only a few reviews here and there since then. You’d want to find the most recent reviews.

7. Possible Future Competition

When doing retail arbitrage on Amazon, it’s a good thing to consider that other resellers may be finding the exact same thing you are.

Retail chains often clear out the same items, so it’s possible that if you find five of an item, 100 other people might be finding five at their local store, too.

To some, this may seem like an overwhelming process that might not be worth the time.

However, the fact remains that there are 20 of these stylus pens on clearance at Target makes it worth the time.

Once you do this process enough times, it becomes second nature and really only takes a minute or two.

Is Retail Arbitrage Legal?

Possible Future Competition

Yes! Retail arbitrage is legal in the US and the UK. This became legal the moment the US Supreme Court ruled that a retailer cannot stop someone from reselling their products as long as the products have been acquired legally.

However, you should avoid sourcing counterfeit products and selling branded products that are only to be sold through authorized resellers.

The Pros & Cons of Retail Arbitrage

Below are some pros and cons you might want to look out for before installing a Retail Arbitrage App.

The Pros

1. One of the main advantages of Retail Arbitrage is the benefits you get when you use the business model in conjunction with Amazon.

Even though it may seem unlikely, there are still several products that are not available on Amazon through the supply chain agreements that are traditionally used.

2. The threshold for a person to become a Retail Arbitrage seller is relatively lower than any other business. Think about it, a person could get started with $100–$200 as the capital for arbitraging.

Also, if you are only making a few sales a month for some extra cash, Amazon won’t charge you a subscription fee.

3. Retail Arbitrage serves as a gateway to private labeling. Most Retail Arbitrage sellers gravitate towards using Amazon’s FBA services due to their ease of use and benefits and thus end up using the Amazon Seller Central Dashboard.

So once resellers get the hang of how the system works, they end up creating a brand selling under a private label, which is a more stable and scalable way of creating an online business.

4. A few things that sellers pick up while using the Amazon Platform include how to create an Amazon Seller Account, how to use it, and how to get around the dashboard, among others.

How to price products, how to link their bank account to their seller account so that they can accept payments, how Amazon Prime works, and all the challenges that come along with setting up an actual business.

These are some important skills to learn to run a business smoothly in case you want to build other businesses in the future.

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The Cons

Retail arbitrage is not a scalable business model for several reasons. While it’s a low-risk venture when you are just starting out, it does have a certain amount of risk when you start to sell more and scale up.

1. With Retail Arbitrage, you don’t really have any ownership of the product that you are selling which, in turn, hampers your profit margins as you have limitations put on you.

Other costs may become applicable – traveling to multiple retailers to purchase stock will take up time, effort, and fuel.

2. Another major hurdle when using online marketplaces, especially Amazon, is the fact that certain products might be “brand gated” and you will need permission to sell them.

3. As mentioned earlier, Amazon puts its sellers above all else. The platform provides something called “Brand Registry Protection”.

The new conditions on the platform state that private labels and brands have a larger extent of control over their product listings.

4. Obviously, this would result in the reseller’s Amazon account being flagged and taken down. The rules keep getting stricter when it comes to protecting brands and private labels.

5. You risk losing a lot of money if your inventory isn’t good. Some products may be on sale because of recall issues or because they have some sort of defect that you may not know of.

Now that you’ve seen how lucrative it can be to sell items from your local stores on Amazon, use the information in this article to start your own small business with very little risk involved.

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