Podcast Episode 138 – Sourcing Strategy Hacks to Find More Inventory to Sell on Amazon

Welcome to a new episode of The Full-Time FBA Show! In this episode, we are going to discuss hacks, strategies, and helpful tips for sourcing profitable inventory items to sell on Amazon. We are going to push you out of your comfort zones, inspire you to make new decisions, and hopefully kickstart the mindset change you’ve been needing.

We’ll use our own experience of selling on Amazon to give you advice and insider tips on how to expand the range of products to sell, where to look for these products, and the nitty-gritty technicalities of Amazon sales. Listen now for this information-packed episode!

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Key points from Episode 138:

• How to branch out and source new inventory from unfamiliar and new stores.
• How to reconsider written-off and disliked stores.
• Exploring potential new categories of products to sell on Amazon.
• Understanding the ins and outs of selling new products.
• Looking at sales ranks, velocity, and expiration dates on Amazon.
• How to successfully use deal lists to find potential inventory.

Links and resources mentioned in this episode:

• Online Arbitrage Super Sourcing Sheet
• Our Most Recommended Deal Lists
• Podcast Episode 60 – How Amazon Sellers Use Deal Lists For Maximum Profits
• Leave a Review of The Full-Time FBA Show

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Episode 138 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]

[00:00:21] STEPHEN: Welcome to episode number 138 of the Full-Time FBA Show! I’m really excited! Can you tell?

[00:00:26] REBECCA: You sound really excited.

[00:00:27] STEPHEN: Yes. My co-host, are you excited, Rebecca?

[00:00:30] REBECCA: I mean, maybe not as excited as you are. Or maybe I just show it in a different way.

[00:00:33] STEPHEN: That’s true. That’s true. We’re talking sourcing hacks, some sourcing strategies, some ways to mix up your sourcing if maybe if you’re in a rut, or whatever, to try something new. Yeah, that’s what we’re going to be talking about today in the Full-Time FBA Show.

[CONVERSATION]

[00:00:51] REBECCA: As we said at the top of the show, we’re going to be talking today about sourcing hacks to find more inventory to sell on Amazon. If you’re selling on Amazon, you know that the primary thing you need to do that is inventory to sell. In order to sell, you need inventory. In today’s episode, we’re going to be sharing some ideas about how to find more inventory to sell on Amazon, if you’re in a rut, if you just need some ideas for how to get out of your comfort zone. Hopefully, this episode will be a great one for you.

The first thing we wanted to talk about today is, if you are looking for ways to find more inventory, you can try that by sourcing at a new to you store. Try to think of a way that you can get into a store, whether it’s retail, brick and mortar, actually physically going in, or online, how to find these places that you’ve never been to before, never shopped at before and just try it out.

We sometimes as sellers get in a rut, because we’re looking for just the lowest common denominator, the easiest the path of least resistance, low hanging fruit, whatever you want to call it. We’re looking for ways to just get our work done and get in and get out without it being too difficult. That can be fruitful at times, if you know what you’re doing and how to do it, you can just set it on repeat and do it. Then there’s times when it might not be as productive as it used to be, or you might be looking to expand.

In order to do that, you’re going to need to get out of your rut of going to the same places over and over again. Don’t limit yourself by only doing the same thing over and over again, when it comes to the stores that you source at. Whether you’re going into physical stores to do retail arbitrage, or whether you’re doing online arbitrage, or a wholesale, and you’re doing all of your sourcing online, try to find ways to branch out into new stores. Go to a new part of town in order to find different stores that are different from what you’re used to. Go to a new town, if you have that ability to drive somewhere for the day or for a weekend. Go to another area where you haven’t sourced before.

If you’re sourcing online, look for ways to find stores from different parts of the country possibly, or in different categories of the stores that you normally are shopping at and try something new, rather than doing the same thing over and over again.

[00:03:06] STEPHEN: Yeah, we actually, I just thought of this, I have a resource for you. If you go to fulltimefba.com/supersourcing, that is a list that you can buy that contains over 500 online arbitrage sourcing destinations with the links to the stores, links to the clearance pages, potential links to sales and coupon codes. Go check that out, fulltimefba.com/supersourcing if you want online arbitrage store ideas to get out of your comfort zone. That’s what’s going on right now.

We were trying to get you out of your comfort zone. We as humans like to stick with what we know. Sometimes we do that and it works out for us. Then sometimes we stick with what we know and things can dry up. Or like Rebecca said, we get into a rut. Shopping at new stores is really great. Another thing that’s really great, another strategy to find more inventory is to source at stores you’ve written off. Maybe you’ve gone sourcing at a certain store for a few times and you just never really found stuff and you’ve just decided, “I’m not ever going back there. It’s obviously a dead place for inventory.” That might just be true at the time you were sourcing, but it could be a good idea to go back to some of these stores and see if they’ve been rejuvenated and they have opportunities now.

When it comes to sourcing, sourcing can come in a way with certain stores are really great for a while, and then they dry up and then other stores become really great. I mean, I remember one time, I went to Big Lots. I went to Big Lots two or three times and I never could find anything to resell on Amazon at Big Lots. I shut it down and almost didn’t go for over two years. Then just because of where I was in a certain part of town, I decided to go into Big Lots and try it again and filled up a cart and ended up spending the rest of my day at that Big Lots. It was amazing. I decided, I’m going to start going to Big Lots more often, because it was profitable again.

I’m glad that I was able to have that opportunity. Just think for yourself, is there a story you’ve written off? Why not give it another shot again? There’s nothing that can hurt you. After doing that, and you can either confirm, okay, I should still stay away from this, or guess what? It’s back and an opportunity to find some more inventory.

[00:05:11] REBECCA: A third way that you can start finding new inventory to sell on Amazon is to source in new categories for you. This is similar to our first tip, the one where we suggested that you shop in new stores. Instead, we are going to be shopping for new categories. You might be able to shop in the same stores that you’ve been shopping at, sourcing at, but sourcing new categories.

Maybe you focus on books or toys. You can try expanding to grocery or tools. This could be done by shopping in that same store, or you might need to branch out into new stores in order to branch into those new categories. Now, this is going to come with a learning curve, because not every category operates the same on Amazon. Some categories have their sales rank works a little bit differently, the sales velocity is a little bit different. Some categories are going to have more parent-child variations going on in other categories. You’re going to have to learn some new things.

Some categories are going to have expiration dates. All of those things might be coming into play. That might be stopping you from going into a new category. Think of the just millions of products that could be opened up to you if you started looking for inventory in new categories. The more categories that you can learn to become confident in selling and that you can find inventory in, that’s more of an opportunity to source greater amounts of inventory and make greater sales and greater profits.

[00:06:37] STEPHEN: Absolutely. The more you learn, the more you can earn. That is true in this particular instance. It’s also true when it comes to categories you’ve written off. So far, Rebecca has had the tips about sourcing at new places, and I’ve had the tips about going to places you haven’t found success and trying them again. This tip is the same as before, with this tip number four, sourcing the categories you written off. Maybe you tried selling in the baby category for a while, and it didn’t go well, or you tried doing grocery for a while and it didn’t go well. We’ll try it again.

Again, category opportunities can also come in waves, where there’s good times to sell in certain categories, and less than good times to sell in categories. Ride those waves and continue to try things out to expand your inventory and expand the possibilities of what you’re selling on Amazon.

[00:07:24] REBECCA: Yeah, that’s definitely the case for us. I know, in the early days of when I joined the business, we were selling grocery items. Then we stopped for a few years. Now, we’re back to selling grocery again. It does come in waves. There was just a period of time where we’re like, “I’d rather not sell groceries.” Now, we’d found some items that are really profitable and work really well for us and we’re like, “Okay, it’s time to do it again.” You just never know.

All right. Our fifth strategy that we wanted to share with you today is using deal lists to find inventory to sell on Amazon. Now this one is a little bit different from what we’ve been talking about, but it’s a really good way to jumpstart your sourcing. It’s one that we personally use to this day. a deal list is something that you can purchase on a one-time basis, or as a subscription that recurs. It’s a way that you can get delivered to your inbox, or you can get a Google Sheet, some format that you’re getting a list of potential leads of items that you can sell on Amazon. It’s a way for you to get ideas that you can just straight up buy the ones off of that list, or it can point you in the direction of just a category of inventory, or a sale that’s going on.

There’s a lot of different ways that you can use deal lists. What you would be getting is a list of items, the source where you would be buying it from, and the potential ROI that you would make off of Amazon with it matched to the Amazon catalog. Then it can really help you to get out of your sourcing comfort zones. We have purchased deal list for years for various reasons. While we don’t necessarily use them on a daily basis, any given point, there are times when we will go through periods where we are using them on a daily basis.

They can really be helpful for spurring you on to find more inventory. There’s ways to use the deal list to really kickstart what you’re looking for, where you can go on rabbit trails to find a lot more information, a lot more inventory than what’s on that list. I’m not saying that you should get a list and just go buy everything on the list by any means. It really is a good jumping off point for finding inventory and just the sky is the limit, and we have found some really great replans even.

That’s one really great benefit is that you can find inventory that’s not just clearance, go buy it now, because once it’s gone, it’s gone. You can find deal lists that have items that are selling at regular price from a retail store, whether a brick and mortar or online. It’s an item that’s selling for regular price. You can sell it for a profit on Amazon. We have items to this day that are replans in our inventory that we found from deal lists. We always use Dualistic Q4 to get lots of ideas about retail items to resell. They’re just a really great way that you can just spruce up your inventory when you’re feeling like you’re in a rut, or when you’re needing to cut down on the time that it’s taking you to find new ideas for inventory.

We do have on the Full-Time FBA website, a list of deal lists that we recommend. You can go check that out for the ones that we have used and that we recommend you using that we can vouch for them. We can find that at fulltimefba.com/deallists.

[00:10:43] STEPHEN: If you are listening, and you want a full episode about how to handle deal lists and how you can best get the most out of them, you can go back and listen to episode number 60 of the Full-Time FBA Show, where that’s our topic for the day, dealing with deal lists. Did I say dealing with deal lists?

[00:10:59] REBECCA: Yes.

[00:10:59] STEPHEN: Okay, so how to use deal lists for maximum profits? You can go listen to that at fulltimefba.com/60 for episode number 60. Those are some sourcing hacks, some sourcing strategy hacks to find more inventory to get out of your rut, to find some more opportunities to add more inventory to your Amazon business. Of course, more inventory can lead to more sales, more sales can lead us to more profits. That’s what we are helping you with that. That’s what we want to do with this episode today.

[00:11:32] REBECCA: Well, that’s all we have for you today on this episode of the Full-Time FBA Show. As always, you can find the transcript for this episode, as well as the show notes at fulltimefba.com/138, because this is episode number 138. You’ll be able to see all of the links that were mentioned for previous podcasts episodes, any links to our website and things like that that we’ve mentioned, that will be in the show notes at that fulltimefba.com/138.

We also wanted to share with you here at the end of this episode a listener review. We received a five-star review from Rita Jean. It says, “I love how you guys keep things so simple and easy to understand. Each episode is quickly implementable and so practical. I regularly listen in the car when sourcing, because the episodes are short and sweet. Then I review the show notes when I get home to take my own notes. Thank you.”

Thank you for that review. That is exactly how we hope that people will use this material is to listen and then go back and refer to the show notes and the transcripts, because there’s a lot of information in some of them, and you need to take notes from it. Be sure and use that resource. Please leave your own review. It helps other people find our podcasts and helps them to be able to learn more about selling on Amazon. You can leave a review for us at the podcast player of your choice

[00:12:49] STEPHEN: Next week on the show, it’s a big day. It’s a big week, because we’re celebrating our third poddiversary next week, so we’ve got a really good episode for you. We’re going to talk about more sourcing hacks. This time, instead of sourcing strategy hacks, we’re going to talk about some sourcing mindset hacks to find more inventory. There’s some ways you can tweak your brain, tweak your thinking to find more inventory, and it’s going to be some simple hacks that can help you find more inventory to sell in your Amazon business. We’re going to talk about that next week while we celebrate our third poddiversary. See you guys next week on the Full-Time FBA Show.

[CONCLUSION]

[00:13:27] ANNOUNCER: That is all for this episode of The Full-Time FBA Show. 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’ve learned today, so you can find success at turning part-time hours into a full-time income with Amazon FBA.

[END]