Podcast Episode 179 – How to Follow Rabbit Trails to Find More Inventory to Sell

A rabbit trail is when you’re focusing on sourcing one type of item to sell on Amazon and somehow you end up buying something completely different — but it still works out as a really good purchase. The longer you sell on Amazon, the more rabbit trails you begin to discover, and today we want to help you hone this skill. In this episode, we’re talking about four different kinds of rabbit trails to follow when sourcing to find more inventory to sell.

You’ll hear multiple rabbit trail starting points via both retail and online arbitrage. You’ll also learn why Amazon product pages can be an excellent place to start your rabbit trail and why it may be worth researching your competition’s storefront. For helpful tips and valuable resources for sourcing for your Amazon store, listen today!

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Key points from Episode 179:

• What a rabbit trail is.
• The profitable rabbit trail that originates from deal/lead lists.
• Why Amazon product pages can be an excellent place to start your rabbit trail.
• How to find retail/online arbitrage rabbit trails.
• The rabbit trail you can find through researching your competition’s storefront.
• Where to find more helpful resources.

Links and resources mentioned in this episode:

• Profitable Deal Lists for Amazon FBA Sellers
• Rabbit Hole Riches
• Tactical Arbitrage
  • Extended free trial coupon code: FULLTIME10
• Full-Time FBA on Twitter
• Full-Time FBA on Facebook

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Episode 179 Transcript:

[INTRODUCTION]

[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.

[WELCOME]

[0:00:21.8] STEPHEN: Welcome to episode number 179 of the Full-Time FBA Show. Today we’re talking about how to follow rabbit trails when sourcing to find more inventory to sell and with me today is my favorite person to go down any trail with, my wife, Rebecca, my cohost, my business partner. Are you ready to talk about rabbit trails, Rebecca?

[0:00:40.1] REBECCA: I am, but now that you’re talking about trails, I want to go hiking.

[0:00:42.5] STEPHEN: Yes. Yes, I’m glad that the weather is starting to get somewhat warmer. We can go hiking soon and that would be good but that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about sourcing rabbit trails, so let’s get into that today.

[DISCUSSION]

[0:00:56.4] REBECCA: Before we get any further into this, we should probably discuss, what is a rabbit trail? In case you are curious, if you’ve never heard this term used before when it comes to sourcing for inventory. Usually what people mean when they talk about sourcing rabbit trail is that journey you take when you start out looking at one set of items or one store or one product and you’re wondering about whether or not that would be a good item to sell and you’re doing some research. And you either are clicking on different things on the internet or you are walking through a store, looking at one thing or another and one thing leads to another and suddenly, you’re looking at something completely different that’s even better than what you were looking at before and you don’t give up on that first item. You thoroughly research it and then you go down this other trail and as you’re looking at this new set of items that the first set of items led you to, you discover another item and then another and then another.

And you’ve suddenly are nowhere near where you started off when you’re looking at those first original items but you found something that is even better. It will have even more profits, has less competition, is just a great resell item and you got there, “I don’t know how I got here” it was a rabbit trail.

[0:02:13.0] STEPHEN: Yup, yup, like an accident, a happy accident.

[0:02:15.8] REBECCA: A happy accident. So basically, a rabbit trail is when one thing leads to another when you’re sourcing and you end up buying something that you didn’t originally set out to buy but is still a really good purchase.

[0:02:28.1] STEPHEN: And the longer you sell on Amazon, the more rabbit trials you begin to discover as you begin to hone your skill of finding these rabbit trials.

[0:02:35.5] REBECCA: So for the rest of the podcast, we’re going to discuss some different types of rabbit trails and how you can make the most of them as you’re doing your sourcing. We have four altogether that we’re going to discuss, unless we go off on a rabbit trail of our own and that might happen. Sometimes it does. We’re starting out with four that we’ve listed out and we’ll see what happens.

[0:02:53.8] STEPHEN: Yeah, so the first one we’re going to talk about are rabbit trials that first originate from deal lists or a lead lists. Now, a deal list or a lead list is a list of inventory items that you subscribe to get. Sometimes it’s a daily list, a weekly list or even like a Facebook group of lead lists and it’s basically just a jumping off point to get you going, a little jump start to have a starting place to find inventory. And so these lists are profitable and is a really great way to start sourcing but they can lead to some rabbit trails.

So the lead list that you get, I you’re curious, we do have recommended deal list fulltimefba.com/deallists, we’ll also put this link in the shownotes. But there’s been many times where we’ve gotten a deal list and there’s one particular time where I got a lead and it was a grocery item and it was profitable and then I thought that lead led me to a particular online arbitrage website.

And so I looked at that item, I bought that item and then I thought, “Wait, this site has more than just one item obviously.” So I started looking at other items and I found different types of individual items, items that I can bundle together and we ended up doing, I don’t know, $20,000 in sales of this last year I think and it was a great rabbit trail just from a deal list that started off.

Other deal lists, you know, they’ll offer a coupon code and maybe you find that the deal that they’re suggesting isn’t quite in your criteria from the deal list but there’s a coupon code that they have included that week and so you check some other items and big things to the coupon code. Maybe other items are really good for you to resell on Amazon. So a nice little rabbit trail that helps put some money in your pocket.

[0:04:36.4] REBECCA: I think these might be my favorite, I love deal list rabbit trials.

[0:04:40.1] STEPHEN: Oh yes, yup.

[0:04:40.8] REBECCA: They’re one of the best I think. That’s actually one of the number one reasons why I would ever use a deal list is so that it can give me some starting off points, not so that I could use it as a buy list but that it’s a place where I can start with my rabbit trails.

[0:04:52.6] STEPHEN: Yeah. In fact, there’s one of the deal list that we recommend and we’ll put the link in the shownotes. It’s called, Rabbit Hole Riches, because hey, you found a rabbit trail and you go down the rabbit hole and you were able to get some riches from it.

[0:05:04.0] REBECCA: Yup.

[0:05:04.8] STEPHEN: Yeah, so fulltimefba.com/rabbithole.

[0:05:07.0] REBECCA: I think that’s our first podcast episode, rabbit trail, because we weren’t originally going to talk about that and we remembered, “Oh yeah, Rabbit Hole Riches is named because of rabbit trails.”

[0:05:16.9] STEPHEN: Exactly.

[0:05:17.8] REBECCA: Okay. So the second thing that we wanted to point out about using rabbit trials when you’re sourcing is that Amazon product pages are an excellent place to start your rabbit trail. So when you’re sourcing for items online and you’re looking at an Amazon product page and you’re analyzing all the data about that item and trying to make a decision of whether or not it’s going to be profitable for you to resell, there’s some other things going on that product page that can give you some great rabbit trails and those things are, the Amazon suggestions.

If you scroll a little bit down the page and I think now they’ve even started putting it up higher on the page in some instances but you can look at things that Amazon is suggesting based on their data from what other customers have, their behavior on that page in the past. So they’ll make suggestions like “customers also looked at” or “customers also purchased” or “frequently purchased together”. Those are the ones that pop out to me that I remember.

So those are items that it’s a good idea to look at them and see, “Okay, if customers are looking at this page that I’m on right now but also looking at these other pages, what else is going on here?” and you can use that as a rabbit trial to find other individual items that might be worth reselling or you could use it for ideas for bundles even. If customers are buying these things together, maybe I could put together a bundle so that it would be even easier for them to buy them together? Buy by bundle instead of buying these separate items.

So be sure when you are looking on Amazon product pages, when you’re doing your online research, whether you’re doing online arbitrage or wholesale sourcing, be sure you’re looking at those Amazon suggestions because there could be some really great rabbit trails that you can go down on those pages.

[0:06:59.5] STEPHEN: Yeah, absolutely. A third rabbit trail that we’re going to be talking about, you know, so far we’ve talked about online arbitrage, rabbit trails. Well, there’s some retail arbitrage rabbit trails that can happen too because there’s times when I’m outsourcing and maybe I’ll find something in the clearance section that’s profitable and that might give me an idea to look at the regular priced area to see if there’s some things profitable there too.

And then one time, I found a clearance toy and it was a toy focused on a kid’s TV show and had every character from the TV show had their own vehicle. So they had their own little vehicle that they’re driving and they were clearancing out because they weren’t making those particular vehicles anymore for these kid’s toys because they’re making brand-new vehicles for those particular characters.

And so of course, you know those toys, they always want to get the new stuff so that they can get more sales form these parents that are buying stuff for their kids. So they’re clearancing out the old stuff. Well hey, if this clearance item is profitable and it’s you know, a really nice profit, let’s go check out the same type of toys in the regular priced section to see if those are profitable and not all of them are.

But every once in a while, there will be one or two of the characters that are either a short print where they don’t make as man as they make of the other ones or just a really popular character from that TV show that is really high in demand and the prices in Amazon are a lot higher than the prices in the store and so you know, that leads me on a little rabbit trail of looking at all those characters and sourcing all those items and seeing which ones are profitable to sell on Amazon.

All starting from a clearance section item that usually, you know, maybe just by one or two of but it ends up being a replen because it’s regular priced item that might be in stores for months that I can go back to that store, replenish my inventory as I begin to sell out and send it back into Amazon. So a nice little retail arbitrage replen rabbit trail.

[0:08:52.9] REBECCA: And then our fourth rabbit trail that we wanted to discuss… and then our fourth rabbit trail that we want to discuss today is a little bit more technical and it’s going to require you using a program but this rabbit trail is researching your competition’s storefront. Now, you could do this manually but we recommend using tactical arbitrage to do this type of rabbit trail.

So if you’re going to research your competition’s storefront, you’re going to find an item that you’re selling already on Amazon or one that you’re looking at, just even one that you’re researching and you’re going to look at, “Who else is selling this item?” and you can click through those seller’s names and you can go to look at their storefront and then, when you’re looking at their storefront, you come across a whole list of other potential items that you could potentially be reselling yourself on Amazon.

This is particularly useful if you’re doing online arbitrage or wholesale sourcing. You can look at these items and then do some research online to see where you could find them. So like I said, this is something you could do manually but we use tactical arbitrage to do this all the time and it’s pretty easy to do once you’ve got it set up and it will give you lots of results that you can then sort through or have a virtual assistant help you sort through.

And it’s a way that you can take one or two items that you’re doing research on and look at. “What else is in the same genre?” because a lot of times, not all the time, but a lot of times storefronts are going to have like items within them. Now, some people sell completely random things that are not related to each other and you know, we do that to ourselves but then we also have like groups of stuff that are similar. So when you’re looking at a storefront, you could go down this rabbit trail of like, “Oh, I’m looking at this item, it’s a kitchen item and what else could I possibly sell that’s in the same category that’s possibly even the same brand or very similar?” and you can look at the storefront, find those ideas and then go about finding where you could source those items from.

Tactical arbitrage makes that so easy. So we recommend that. If you want to find out more about it, you can go to fulltimefba.com/ta. Use the code “fulltime10” the number 10, for an extended trial in tactical arbitrage. We’ll have all of that information in our shownotes for this episode.

[0:11:08.2] STEPHEN: So those are just a few ideas of how you can use rabbit trails to find inventory to sell on Amazon, maybe you hit a dead end but you find a rabbit trail that leads to something really awesome or you find something good and you find a rabbit trail that leads to even more goodness.

If you have ideas for rabbit trails, we’d love to hear you and your ideas at fulltimefba.com/179 is our shownotes page. Leave a comment and let us know your rabbit trails, we’d love to hear that for sure and while you’re at Full-Time FBA, be you subscribe to our newsletter. If you love our podcast, we have even more goodness on our newsletter, letting you know about upcoming blog posts, videos walkthrough training videos, coupon codes, free downloads.

We have it all right there on our newsletter at fulltimefba.com, right at the tope of the page, you can click to join our newsletter and about at least twice a week, we’ll send you some goodness that will help you turn those part-time hours into a full-time income selling on Amazon.

[CLOSING CONVERSATION]

[0:12:06.9] STEPHEN: Before we go, we do want to shout out someone who has left us a testimony about our podcast. Thank you to Grumpy Dasher, who on one of our YouTube videos of our podcast says, “I just got my first legit sale outside of friends and family after listening to this podcast. Well said, you two.” Thank you Grump Dasher for listening to the podcast or watching it on YouTube.

It’s awesome and we really thank you and guess what, you’re going to have more sales that are going to be coming from that. Continue to listen, continue to implement what you learn and you’re going to find some good stuff to sell on Amazon and make some good money.

[0:12:41.6] REBECCA: Yup, congrats on that sale, we really love hearing that. And we also just want to remind you before we leave that you can find the shownotes for this episode at fullitmefba.com/179 because this is episode number 179. You’ll find all of the links that we’ve mentioned as well as the transcript of this episode at that link, fulltimefba.com/179.

[0:13:01.0] STEPHEN: And next week on the podcast, you’re going to want to be here for this because we’re going to break down how to earn five and sometimes six figures a month selling on Amazon and we’re going to talk about that next week on the show. See you then.

[OUTRO]

[0:13:15.1] 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 shownotes 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]