Podcast Episode 079 : Using Tactical Arbitrage for Online Arbitrage and Wholesale Sourcing

If you’ve ever tried manual online arbitrage (OA), you know that it can take up immense amounts of your time to find what you are looking for. On today’s show you’ll learn about a tool called Tactical Arbitrage which can, among other things, help you drastically reduce the amount of time you spend looking for items to resell.

Rebecca has been using Tactical Arbitrage for well over four years, and her and Stephen’s FBA business has seen a great deal of success because of it. She has a lot of useful advice to share today about how you, as an Amazon seller, can get the most out of the program. That being said, if you’re a first-time seller, Rebecca also shares why she thinks it’s a good idea for you to learn how to do manual OA before diving into Tactical Arbitrage.

We also discuss how to avoid mistakes that people commonly make when using Tactical Arbitrage. Tactical Arbitrage doesn’t do all your work for you, but by the end of this episode we guarantee you’ll be convinced that it will make your job a whole lot easier and more enjoyable, and you’ll know where to go to learn everything you need to know about it!

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Key points from Episode 79:

• A summary of what Tactical Arbitrage is and who would benefit from using it.
• A practical guide for how to use Tactical Arbitrage for online arbitrage.
• How different filters will impact the results you receive from a Tactical Arbitrage scan.
• The main two benefits of Tactical Arbitrage: saving time and making money!
• Some of the many ways Tactical Arbitrage can be used.
• Why Rebecca recommends that first time Amazon sellers learn how to do manual online arbitrage before using Tactical Arbitrage.
• Where to access the free resources available to learn how to use Tactical Arbitrage.
• Mistakes people make which lead them to not find success with Tactical Arbitrage.
• Hear how you can extend the 7-day Tactical Arbitrage trial to a 10-day trial, and advice on how to get the most out of it.
• And so much more!

Links and resources mentioned in this episode:

• Tactical Arbitrage (Use the code FULLTIME10 to get extended 10-day free trial)
• Tactical Arbitrage YouTube Channel
• Tactical Arbitrage Instruction Series
• Tactical Arbitrage Facebook Group
• Keepa
• Jungle Scout
• Helium 10

 

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Episode 79 Transcript:

[WELCOME]

[0:00:01.8] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Full-Time FBA Show. In each episode, it’s our goal to help you turn part time hours into a full-time income, selling almost anything on Amazon. Now, your hosts of the show, Stephen and Rebecca Smotherman.

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:21.3] STEPHEN: Welcome to episode number 79 of The Full-Time FBA Show. Today, we’re going to be talking about Tactical Arbitrage, an online arbitrage tool that one of us uses almost every single day and that one of us is my co-host, Rebecca, so I’m going to be talking to her today. How are you doing Rebecca?

[0:00:36.9] REBECCA: Doing great, looking forward to talking about Tactical Arbitrage.

[0:00:40.0] STEPHEN: Yeah, we’re going to break it down, what it is, how you can use it in your Amazon business, if you’re using it, you might be using it wrong, and ways that you can maximize your time and energy with the tool, Tactical Arbitrage.

[INTERVIEW]

All right, to start us off Rebecca, for those who have never even heard of Tactical Arbitrage, what is a quick summary of what exactly Tactical Arbitrage is? Is it like retail arbitrage, online arbitrage, what is this?

[0:01:06.8] REBECCA: Tactical Arbitrage is a online scanning program that you can use to find inventory online to buy. It is used either to do online arbitrage or wholesale sourcing primarily. I guess there’s ways that you could probably try to find a way to use it to do retail arbitrage but we only use it for online arbitrage and for wholesale sourcing.

It’s a program that you go to their website, the Tactical Arbitrage website and you use the program, the software, through their website to do scans on other websites. So, an online retailer’s website, you could go to Tactical Arbitrage and on the Tactical Arbitrage program, scan items in a category on an online retailer site to find items that you could potentially resell and then you could also use it to do wholesale scans, whether you have an excel sheet or something like that, a price list that you can upload and scan to find products within that wholesale catalog that you can resell.

There’s a lot of different ways to use it, those are the two that we primarily use, I am not an expert on Tactical Arbitrage, I know the ways that we use it pretty thoroughly though, those are the two main ways that we have found it to be really beneficial for our particular business model.

[0:02:24.9] STEPHEN: Yeah, how long have you been using it?

[0:02:26.7] REBECCA: That’s a good question. I am not sure exactly when I started using it but it’s been at least four years, maybe five years. I know it’s been since at least 2017. I can’t remember if it was 2016 but four years plus.

[0:02:41.9] STEPHEN: Okay. You say that it’s a program that scans inventory of different online web stores. Just take us through the process of using Tactical Arbitrage from opening up the program to actually knowing what you’re going to buy to resell.

[0:02:55.9] REBECCA: Okay, I feel like this is a test of my memory here. I’m going to think through the process that I go through. Let’s say, I’m just going to pick a low hanging fruit website, this is the type of website that I would not normally go to because everybody’s going to go to this but let’s say you go to Target.

You go to target.com, you can scan a category on that website. You open up Tactical Arbitrage on their dashboard, you’re going to see a ton of different ways that you can look at data or begin searches. You would begin a product search and then you would enter in the information, enter in the URL for the category on the Target website that you’re wanting to scan, it’s going to ask you some different questions about the number of pages that you’re wanting to scan and any filters that you’re wanting to set-up, there’s things that you can program in to be your default that it does it that way every single time.

Then you click to start your search, you label your search, I always set-up a text message so that I get a text when my search is finished because depending on the number of items that it’s going to be scanning and the method that you use to scan it whether it’s live or they’re using a cash to scan, it could take a few minutes or it could take a few hours deepening on all those factors. And so I always set up a text message and then, come back whenever it says it’s finished, whenever I have the time to come back and look at it. Go through your data, you look at all the filters that you’ve already had set-up, you can continue to set-up filters after you have your data.

It’s going to tell you how many products it came back within your search criteria and then you just start going through and looking to see if there’s anything within that set of results. It could be, again, depending on the number of items that you’re scanning and the filters that you have set up, you could get hundreds or thousands of data points back or you could get just a handful of results. All of it depends.

Then I just start methodically going through each one of those results and either filtering it out some more or going through and individually looking at each item to see is this something that fits within our business model and our personal sourcing criteria that we would like to buy and resell on Amazon.

[0:05:20.0] STEPHEN: Yeah, that makes sense. When you talked about filters, the wider the filter, the more results you’re probably going to get but the more strict the filter, the smaller results, am I understanding that correctly?

[0:05:28.8] REBECCA: Yeah, that’s generally how it would work and there’s benefits to setting it up both ways. There’s benefits to tightening up your filter so that you have a lower amount of results to look through and then there’s also times when you want it pretty wide so you could just get everything back.

[0:05:42.9] STEPHEN: Yeah, speaking of benefits, what would you say are the top benefits of using Tactical Arbitrage?

[0:05:47.7] REBECCA: Well, for me, it is definitely the time that I save in doing online arbitrage. I am just getting into, in the last couple of months, getting into doing wholesale sourcing through Tactical Arbitrage because previously, I have only done online arbitrage in recent years, of course, I did retail arbitrage back in the day and then moved strictly to online arbitrage. Have been getting into doing wholesale sourcing so I know a little bit about how to set-up scans and do wholesale sourcing that way.

Regardless of whether I’m doing wholesale or online arbitrage, it saves me so much time because in just a few minutes time, the program can go through and look at all of the results on a page from the online retailer or on an excel sheet and produce results that would take me hours and hours to go through and to do searches to find, “Is there a match on the Amazon website?”

It’s basically what it’s doing is it is matching up products on an online retailer’s website or in your wholesale excel sheet with items in the Amazon catalog and then it’s comparing the two. If there is a match from your online retailer to the Amazon catalog, it’s then comparing the two and showing you how much ROI you could expect and all sorts of other data points that you would use to make a decision about whether this is an item to buy to resell. If you’re doing manual online arbitrage, you’re having to go through and do a lot of that searching and clicking on different extensions and analyzing that stuff yourself whereas Tactical Arbitrage scans and produces all of it in lists for you.

[0:07:33.5] STEPHEN: Yeah, is a huge timesaver compared to opening up multiple windows and looking at a website and going back and forth between Amazon and then looking at the Amazon calculator and trying to figure out if it’s profitable and yeah, Tactical Arbitrage, would you say that Tactical Arbitrage could turn like 10 hours of manual sourcing into what would you say, 30 minutes, an hour, something like that?

[0:07:58.1] REBECCA: I mean, it’s hard to say because yeah, definitely somewhere in that realm, that’s what we’re talking about, it’s hours and hours. I can’t tell you exactly that there’s a ratio. It takes hours and hours and turns it into the few minutes that it takes, if even a few minutes.

Honestly, once you know what you’re doing, it can take just 30 seconds to set-up a scan and then you go and you do something else while you’re waiting for those results, you’re not sitting there waiting for 30 minutes or a few hours for it to scan. You go and you do something else, that’s why I said I set-up the text message so that I get an alert that it’s ready and I can come back and look at it but, in the meantime, I’m doing a completely different task.

So yeah, not only am I saving the time that I would have spent doing the manual searching and clicking but I’m also able to do something else completely during that time.

[0:08:49.3] STEPHEN: Yeah.

[0:08:50.4] REBECCA: In that way, it’s also saving you money or making you money I guess, whichever way you look at it, it could be saving you money if you’re used to using a virtual assistant to do that process for you. If you could have Tactical Arbitrage in conjunction with a virtual assistant helping you with your scans, you’re saving time and money by not having the virtual assistant have to do all that manual searching.

I mean, ultimately, it’s about making more money too because you’re able to find more products in a more timely manner to be able to buy and send in to Amazon and increase your profit.

[0:09:21.9] STEPHEN: Yeah, that’s why we love it here at Full-Time FBA. One of the things we always try to do is focus on finding the tools that help us to make more money while spending less time doing it. I know that Tactical Arbitrage is like a pretty robust tool, it offers Amazon sellers a lot of different features. What are some of the ways that resellers can use Tactical Arbitrage to find inventory to resell that we haven’t discussed yet?

[0:09:43.9] REBECCA: Like I said, the main ways that I use it are to do online arbitrage on retail sites that, I have a handful of websites that I really like to source at and so I tend to go back to those over and over. There’s hundreds of sites that are setup to be scanned with Tactical Arbitrage and then wholesale sourcing.

But then there’s other ways too. Like I said, I’m not an expert but I know there’s ways to do reverse scans where you are reverse sourcing to find other websites where that inventory would be available besides what you already know. There’s, I think, ways that book sellers can use it to find inventory. There are ways that you can take an Amazon seller’s storefront and enter their information into Tactical Arbitrage and find out what all they have in their store front and then find ways to source that inventory from places where you could buy it to resell yourself.

I can’t even list all of the ways because it is such a robust tool and I feel like even though I use it on a regular basis and we’ve made a lot of money off of the profits that have come from the scans that I’ve done, I feel like I’m barely even scratching the surface. I don’t even know all of the ways that it can be used but those are the ways that we mainly use it.

[0:11:01.3] STEPHEN: Yeah, that’s one of the things I love about it is that we’ve found so much success with just a fraction of what is available and the possibilities are endless as we continue to learn more about it.

Speaking of learning, I’ve heard Tactical Arbitrage has a pretty steep learning curve. Do you agree with that thought process that people have had about Tactical Arbitrage and what have you done to straighten that curve if you think it’s a pretty steep learning curve?

[0:11:24.3] REBECCA: Well, yes. I do think that it has a pretty steep learning curve. It is a robust product and I feel like it’s also not something that I would have wanted to do as a true beginner on Amazon. Surely there are people out there who are more technologically minded than I am, that are better with numbers or with using that kind of technology, who could jump right into doing an Amazon business and also using Tactical Arbitrage but for me, I feel like you need to learn one thing at a time.

So, if you’re just getting started selling on Amazon, I think that there are easier ways to get going with finding inventory without having to learn this software in addition to that because it is so robust and there’s a lot that goes into setting up your filters and the user interface is pretty easy to use but there’s just a lot. It’s a lot.

I think that trying to focus on learning one thing at a time in this instance is probably better so if you’re a true beginner, give yourself a few months of using something else, another method. Either manually learning OA which I think is actually a really good idea. It does take a lot of time but manually learning to do OA and figuring out like the process of doing it and figuring out what is a good deal before you jump into, “I’m just going to use this super powerful tool to give me thousands of results and then I don’t know what to do with any of it.”

I think that that’s one way that you can really shorten that learning curve and there’s also just a really great YouTube channel that the makers of Tactical Arbitrage have put together. It’s free to use, they’ve got – I think it’s over a hundred videos in a playlist on – it’s the Tactical Arbitrage YouTube channel and they have a playlist called Tactical Arbitrage Instruction Series. I haven’t been through all of those videos but I’ve looked at it and it was not available when I first started using Tactical Arbitrage but they had some other instructional videos at the time that I went through. It’s really well done and there are webinars that they have on their YouTube channel.

Just using the free resources that they provide to you to go through and learn how to use each of the different parts, the different pages, the different menus, is why would you pay the money that you’d be paying every month for this product if you weren’t going to go through methodically and go through – It’s like a free course that they’re offering you to go through and learn how to use their product and it’s super useful.

[0:14:01.3] STEPHEN: Yeah, definitely take advantage of those free resources, those free videos when you are deciding to learn something new with Tactical Arbitrage. Some people tell me, when we promote Tactical Arbitrage, they say, “You know what? I used it and it didn’t work. Either the prices tanked of all the items I purchased or I couldn’t find anything or maybe there were some mismatches with the results.” What do you think are the mistakes people are making when they say, “I tried it and it and it didn’t work for me?”

[0:14:27.0] REBECCA: Yeah, I hear that a lot too and I am not really sure sometimes how to address it because I think different people mean different things when they say that, that “Oh, I tried it. It doesn’t work,” and I think some of the common things that come up when you dig a little bit deeper to ask, “What do you mean by that? How did it not work?”

One of them, like you said, is that the prices tank, “When I used Tactical Arbitrage, the prices tank on items.” I think what people mean by that is by the time they buy their items, have it sent to them or a prep center and then it’s sent on to Amazon, there’s no longer any return on their investment because the original price that they found on Amazon for this item has now lowered and, you know, there could be several things going on there. You know, people might not be looking at the historical data on Keepa and one of the things that’s great about Tactical Arbitrage is that they have links right there in their results that show you the Keepa graph. Not to mention, you should be clicking through to look at the actual Amazon page of every item to dig deeper on the data and that if you are a Keepa subscriber, then that information would be available there for you too on the product page.

Or it could be that they are, like I mentioned at the very beginning of this episode, they are just going for the low hanging fruit. You know, they’re only scanning places like Target or Walmart or Coles and that’s what everybody is doing. Everybody is looking at Target toys and wanting to get the clearance stuff at all of these places that are well-known big box stores.

When you’ve got this tool available to anybody anywhere in the world basically to use to scan these well-known websites, you’re going to be competing with a lot of people on those same products, basically until that product runs out at that price on the online retailer and so of course, the supply and demand on Amazon is then going to be affected by that if a bunch of different resellers are using that and so in that instance, I would say look at your historical data and also scan websites that are not as well-known.

There are hundreds of websites that you can use Tactical Arbitrage on and go a little bit deeper into some of those websites and find ones that not everybody is using. Find ones that people aren’t just not using that website, that online retailer, but they’re also avoiding certain categories. You know, go – find a niche. You have to niche down so that you’re doing something that’s different. You’re differentiating your inventory from the low hanging fruit that a lot of other sellers are using.

Then another thing that I think comes up a lot of times is that people don’t have their filter set-up correctly. We were talking about earlier, you know, you can set your filters pretty tight or you can set them so that you are getting pretty wide results and I would say that when you are first getting started, make sure that you don’t have your filter set too tight because you are going to end up with not a lot of results and you’re not going to have enough data to look through when your scan is finished and you’re going to think, “Oh, there’s nothing there,” when you had adjusted your filters just even a little bit, you could have produced hundreds more results in your scan.

At the same time, I know this is frustrating because it’s like you don’t want it too loose and you don’t want it too tight, you gotta find the goldilocks of just right in setting your filters. If you set your filters too wide, I think that is another frustration that people have because then they come back with hundreds and hundreds of results and they think, “Why should I even bother with this? It still is going to take me forever to go through all of these and to figure out what of this is useful for me.”

I would say in that instance, because I have done that before, I’ve either accidentally set my filters too wide or sometimes on purpose I do it just because I want to get a good set of results and then give myself the time to go through individually, you know, a few hundred items. I would say to that, it’s still work. You’re still going to have to have patience and go through and find the items. Tactical Arbitrage is not saying to you, “Okay, I’ve scanned this website and this category and now go buy all of these items.”

You still have to go through and analyze each item and look at the data on Keepa and Jungle Scout or Helium 10, whatever other products you use. And honestly, Tactical Arbitrage has a lot of that same data as well about 90 day sales and different data points that you can look at to help you make your decision and if you are not going through and looking at each of those things and expecting to just be able to have a list of – it is not producing a buy list, you still have to go through and produce your own buy list.

[0:19:25.7] STEPHEN: Yeah and so it’s still work that you have to do but it is so much better being in a place where, “Okay, I’ve got a hundred items to go through instead of having a thousand items to go through,” so it just helps you save so much more time in that way.

[0:19:41.1] REBECCA: Yeah, you have the items already matched up within the Amazon catalog, then you just have to go through and decide, “Is this worth buying or not?”

[0:19:48.5] STEPHEN: Is there anything else before we get into a coupon code that people can use for Tactical Arbitrage and helping people know which plan best matches with their needs? Is there anything else you’d like to share about Tactical Arbitrage that you want to make sure people know?

[0:20:01.9] REBECCA: I already mentioned their free YouTube channel, definitely check that out, The Tactical Arbitrage YouTube channel has a ton of information that you can learn more about how to use the program. I would also say they have a Facebook group, you can find if you just search on Facebook for The Tactical Arbitrage Facebook Group. That is also going to be really useful, there are people in there who will help you with your questions about how to use the program and also sometimes there’s going to even be announcements and information that the creators of the product are going to make in there that you’ll find useful.

Also, one of the things that has been, in our experience, really helpful is that they have a really great and responsive help team and now, even there’s just a little chat-bot right there on The Tactical Arbitrage website that they tell you, it’s basically you’re opening up a ticket through that chat-bot if you have any type of question or issue that you need help with and they’ll tell you how long you’d expect to hear back from them and usually, when I have done that before I hear back even quicker than what they’ve given me as an estimated time and they are very responsive and helpful.

In that respect I would say it’s a really great program to work with and that there is a lot of free education about it. There are multiple places where you can ask questions and get help and getting in there and trying it out and learning is, it’s going to be a learning curve but there is help along the way to figure out those questions that you have.

[0:21:30.8] STEPHEN: Yeah, there is definitely something that helps bring a little bit more peace to learning a new program knowing that you can reach out in multiple ways with the Facebook group or with a chat support, knowing that you can get some answers pretty quickly if you come up against any roadblocks.

[0:21:45.9] REBECCA: I want to correct, as a chat-bot I didn’t mean bot. There’s a chat box on their website that, you’re typing in a question, it’s not a bot that’s responding to you, there is a human on the other side of it. I think there’s a bot that will say like, “Thank you for your question, we will get back to you in X amount of time,” but then a human actually comes along and answers your question and gives you detailed information. I just wanted to correct that, it’s not a bot that you’re interacting with.

[0:22:09.5] STEPHEN: Yeah, that’s good to know. Tactical Arbitrage has a free seven-day trial if you go to Tactical Arbitrage but if you go to our link, fulltimefba.com/ta and you put in the code “fulltime10” you can get an extended free trial from seven days to 10 days. This free trial can make or break a Tactical Arbitrage subscription, so what would you say is the best way to make the most of that free trial?

[0:22:40.1] REBECCA: I would say, I mean this is my advice for any type of trial period, don’t sign-up when you’re heading out of town on vacation. Don’t sign-up when you’re about to jump into a really big work project in some other capacity, you know, sign up when you have a solid week or 10 days of time to try out this product and to give it a good amount of time each day of that trial to get your money’s worth out of testing it out.

And also like I said, there’s those videos. You could watch some of the YouTube videos ahead of time, before you even start your trial, so you don’t start your trial and then end up spending two hours the first day of your trial just watching YouTube videos. You know, watch those videos and then start your trial the next day and go through and just do as much tinkering and playing around with it as you can.

I really truly believe that if you are at the right point where you already have a good solid foundation in the concept of arbitrage and how to run an Amazon business and you are just looking for a way to streamline and speed up your sourcing process, you should be able to, in that seven or 10-day trial, you should be able to find enough inventory to resell for a reasonable amount of money to pay for your next month or two months or three months of your subscription so that it is more than paying for itself to do that free trial and get going with it.

[0:24:07.2] STEPHEN: Yeah, that’s pretty cool. Tactical Arbitrage has a couple of different suites, plans, options for those who are trying to get started, from the flip pack to OA only or wholesale only or a OA and wholesale combo to the full suite, which one would you recommend for a beginner to start using?

[0:24:24.1] REBECCA: I think it really just depends on your business model. If you are – I feel like this is pretty self-explanatory, you know if you are doing OA, then focus on only – you would only need to get the OA package. If you only do wholesale, all you need is the wholesale package and if you do some combination of that, then go with the combination. If your business model and your time that you have available to use it is broad enough that you would use all of these different functions, then definitely go for the full suite because I think you’re going to get a price break if you do that as opposed to just buying individual ones.
If you are concerned about the learning curve and unsure whether you would get your money’s worth out of it, you could always start off with a smaller component and then see how it works for you and then go from there. Like I said, I started out using it for OA only and have expanded to using it with wholesale as well myself. Stephen has been doing wholesales scans and whatnot for a while, for years actually, but I’ve just recently gone into it.

For me personally, I have only used the OA part and would have just recently expanded to the wholesale part of it as well if we hadn’t already used it. That is one good part of it is that they give you that ability to pick and choose which parts of it that you are going to be using.

[0:25:47.7] STEPHEN: Yeah and I know they’ve got a monthly payment option and then there’s an even bigger price break if you pay for an annual membership so that is something to consider too but if you want more information, definitely go to fulltimefba.com/ta to check out Tactical Arbitrage, use our coupon code “fulltime10” to get an extended free trial from seven days to 10 days and let us hear back from you on what you think about Tactical Arbitrage and your experience and your success stories, we’d love to hear about that.

Tactical Arbitrage has been something that’s helped our Amazon business for years. It’s helped save us so much time and it’s helped make us really good money and we also think it could do the same for you, so check it out at fulltimefba.com/ta for Tactical Arbitrage.

[CLOSING CONVERSATION]

[0:26:34.5] STEPHEN: Rebecca, thank you so much for answering all of my questions about Tactical Arbitrage. We’re going to make sure that we put all of the links we talked about Tactical Arbitrage and their Facebook group and YouTube channel and all the other stuff in our show notes, which can be found at fulltimefba.com/79 because this is episode number 79.

[0:26:53.8] REBECCA: Well, thank you for having me as the main interviewer – interviewee I should say, this time around. Usually, we do it the other way around where I am asking you the questions but it was fun talking about my knowledge of Tactical Arbitrage. Hopefully, it’s been helpful and next week, be sure and come back and join us again. We’re going to be talking about spring cleaning your Amazon accounts. If you’re like me this time of year, you are really in the mood to organize and clean up and get things freshened up and that also applies to our Amazon business, not just to our house and lawn and all of that.

[0:27:25.9] STEPHEN: Yes.

[0:27:26.4] REBECCA: Be sure and join us again next week. We look forward to being back with you on The Full-Time FBA Show.

[OUTRO]

[0:27:33.7] ANNOUNCER: That is all for this episode of The Full-Time FBA Show. So head over to fulltimefba.com/podcast, where you will find the show notes and links from this episode. While you’re there, subscribe to our newsletter where you’ll get several free downloads of our popular and helpful Amazon FBA resources. Now, take action on what you have learned today so you can find success at turning part-time hours into a full-time income with Amazon FBA.

[END]