0 to 8 Figures in 2 Years as an Amazon Reseller

Tim went from zero to eight figures in a little over two years. Tim, welcome. And how the heck did you do that? And what in the world do you even do? Uh, thanks, Chase. Um, I'm an Amazon reseller. Typically we do online arbitrage now, but I'll take it back to the beginning. I, uh, I found a mentor to teach me Amazon. I was trading and not making very much money. And, uh, I found a mentor that would teach me Amazon. And he basically had me going into stores and scanning with my phone, looking at, at Marshall's basically in the shoe section, looking to see if I could find anything to sell for a little more on Amazon. And he kept telling me that right now there's, you know, there's way more, you have way more money than opportunity here. You're not going to be able to see the opportunities, but there's going to be a point where there's more opportunity than money and kind of just asked me to keep the faith and with every scan, every, no, everything that says, no, it's not a sale, uh, you're just one more step closer. And eventually this is just going to kind of, the seas are going to part. And so I stuck with him, started getting some success. I'd find some items and I just really pat myself on the back. And this whole attitude of like seeing this opportunity unfold, just turn into an eight figure business. And I know I'm skipping some parts there, but somewhere around three, four months, you start realizing, Holy crap. There are literally opportunities. If I start getting dropped in these other stores, I can buy out like thousands of dollars worth of inventory. So from there it came, you know, a prep center, I sent things to a warehouse. I got employees involved. It's not rocket science. I'm teaching people to buy cheap stuff. So once you get your first and second employee doing it, well, next thing you know, I have 25 employees that those employees taught how to do this simple, basically flip of primarily shoes, some electronics, grocery, all kinds of stuff. Super interesting. So yourself and the employees, essentially what you guys do is you guys all live, by the way, correct me if I'm wrong. You guys all live in different geos. Like you guys live in this state or that state or different cities within even the same state. And you guys are going into local stores, whether it be a Marshalls, TJ max, something else, and finding products to purchase and literally on the spot. You'll buy a thousand, a few thousand dollars worth of product. You'll go on Amazon. You guys will type something in, you'll list the product. And that's more or less at a high level, kind of what your team is doing. Yeah, essentially no, no marketing. Like you, you literally get the product, send it into Amazon and someone else's listing that they've already made. And yeah, we started on the ground. I started with another buyer that I taught basically how to go to the outlets. Buy shoes. We'd buy up to like, we right now we buy five to $7,000 in one session. Um, drop it off at the warehouse. They send it into Amazon. And then, yeah, I have some people on the back ends, uh, basically tell Amazon what's coming. And then that also turned into online arbitrage where it's the same deal. You're grinding out on websites. You're looking on marshals.com, Sierra, um, TJ max, any of these sites. And you're just looking at the sales rack. Do you think there's so many people looking at this? How could I possibly find deals, but it's just incredible. You start to realize there is arbitrage everywhere. Everyone's got the same issue. I have the same issue. You got all these fast selling products. Then I have this chunk of inventory that's slow. Well, I don't have time and resources to dedicate to picking up pennies with that slow stuff. So I dropped price on it. Well, someone can analyze my store and say, Oh, these are way too cheap. Like I've, I've looked at a couple, you know, history of this product and it looks great, so they can buy it off me. So I hope I answered your question, but yeah, it also turned in from. Buying on the store to also just buying online at these big box stores. Super interesting. And again, not giving away trade secrets, but like, what are you looking for when you find a product? Is there a certain margin? Is there a certain kind of average order value? Like, do you have any like calculations at a high level that you've kind of run through and you're like, okay, I'm at Marshall's, I found this pair of I don't know, Nike's or Adidas or Reebok or whatever it is you're going to buy at Marshall's it's $10 on an Amazon. It's $15. So I really liked that $5 per shoe profit. Do you have any kind of like a rough math or that you run or do? Yeah, it's very simple. Uh, and I'm very open to my trade secrets because my advantage is my size at the moment. Like I'm able to buy very small quantities and spend time. My moat is that the, the actual formula to buy on Amazon, it's pretty straightforward. You have, they give you a number called sales rate. So sales rank, it's going to be a score from one to like 160 million. Um, and shoes, anything in the top, like 200,000 is totally viable. Now you have some, there's some more like wrinkles. You've got to worry about number of cells. So that means basically speed of sale. How many monthly sales there may be a hundred thousand sales rank could be like a hundred sales a month. Well, then you got to look at other number of other sellers. If there's 10 other sellers, then now we're down to, you know, we could sell maybe 10 of those a month. That's great. Uh, there's also a shoes and clothing. There's another wrinkle with variations. You got to get good at the sizing and the colors. So there's a little wrinkle there, but for the most part, if I'm buying an electronic, I get a sales rank. And it says there's a hundred sales per month and there's 10 other competitors and some competitors sell more than others, because like if you're a bigger seller, I can do that quick math and I can buy that product. And then obviously the other number is, does it make money? That's also a simple calculation. The last wrinkle is a chart and you can look at it's called keep the charts and you can look at the chart and see, all right, is this profitable just today? Or was it like, was it consistently profitable the past three months or was it normally losing and it's just up for the day? So those are the major, those are literally the major trade secrets still buying on Amazon. Super interesting. Um, are you only focused on market, uh, marketplace like an Amazon or are you doing this on eBay or Etsy or other places, or you're specifically focused on, on Amazon? So I'm big on putting time into high value activities. So my biggest moneymaker is Amazon. There's all the customers are at Amazon. Like earlier I had an eBay store and when we'd kind of get inventory that didn't sell on Amazon, we'd remove it and sell it on eBay. But all that time spent on the eBay store, you got to respond to customer messages. You got to list your products. You got to take pictures of your products. It took way too much time. Amazon, you're just sending you a listing. People see the prime checkbox. They buy Amazon customer support, takes care of us. Amazon takes care of returns, take care of warehousing, your inventory. They give you all these customers. So the moment I hear like, Oh, Amazon's raising fees on prime sellers. I'm like, raise them up. They literally do everything in the business for you. And if it's going to scare away the new sellers from like wanting these huge margins, like bring it. I'm just going to keep getting bigger. Yeah, it's good. It's good for the existing players for sure. I know when we exchanged a couple of DMS on Twitter, where we got connected, it sounds like you also run a community. Is that correct? So you have kind of this business where you do it yourself. You have folks that work for you. You also run a community where you teach and kind of mentor as well, or just have your own business. Yeah. So arbitrage ops is our community. Basically I hit a guy up on Twitter and I told him when I was getting into Amazon and his name's Charles and he took me on his podcast and it just like blew up. I just, I was just excited talking about like, you know, I had just hit like my first hundred thousand dollar month or something. I was super excited. And it was COVID like right when COVID hit. So I was at first, I was like, I don't want to do that. I just want to do my business. I, my passion is definitely building my own business, but I was shopping in the stores at that point. So the stores were shut down. So I'm like, we got to do something. So we made a telegram group. Then it became a discord group. And now it's like a couple of years later, we got 700 bang members. And our benefit is like, is the community. Like we teach it from the ground up, but the community, like we're getting eight figure sellers popping up and seven figure sellers from our OGs like popping up and like everybody's like the mind share there is starting to get really, really good. I wanted to, okay. There's a lot I want to talk about here in terms of like telegram and discord, why do you think those are so popular versus people using like a Slack group or a Facebook? Is it just the world of the folks that you're in or more like privacy and security and want to fly under the radar? Like why, why are so many people using discord and telegram right now? Um, well, discord is so similar to Slack, but I think discord, uh, definitely like we got a big chunk of crypto community early on. Uh, so I think that was a natural progression. I freaking was hating discord. I'm like, there's too much here. I'm like too old for this, but discord is a place where you can literally sit there and be entertained all day. You have so many channels, like people can talk off topic. I fought that forever. And like, I want this only Amazon focus. We still don't allow trading talk really in our inner channels. Um, but yeah, it's like literally this, this sad, but true thing in this life is 90% of your life is online. It's this, like this reality over here is kind of like the secondary reality. And discord is like a community room where you can just like talk to all different people about all different things and research and put information and come back to it and search. It's a really good platform to store all your information. Yeah, it makes sense. I think for me personally, I'm kind of in this beginning phase of being like so overwhelmed. There's like so much noise and things move so quickly. So that makes sense. Um, in terms of like the 700 or 800 folks that are paying members. Um, how, how did you acquire those people? Was it going on podcasts, uh, you know, inherently kind of just by being open about sharing people follow you and then kind of build trust. Like how did you scale from nothing to 700, 800 people actually paying you monthly, quarterly, annually, whatever that looks like. That's really interesting. I haven't thought about it deeply, but because it came from passion in the beginning, that's going to sound ridiculous, but like I was so into this. Charles was so into it. We had, and we just built it. And we, we said, come in for free to this telegram chat. I think we had 500 people come in or something. Maybe that's a little high. But we had 200 people become paying members of the first month. So we basically started it out free. And we're like, guys, this is going to be paid. We're going to basically drop everything we're doing and start building this thing. It's going to be 50 months now. It's a hundred a month. Um, so the soft, the soft launch like that with a lot of like excited people from a podcast that, that took off and had a lot of excitement, like I was just so pumped about, like I was in person is telling everyone I knew and like nine out of 10 people were like, that's great, man. And it really got, it took off on the podcast and, uh, yeah. So we started with that group and then we did our primarily marketing is only on Twitter and word of mouth. And right now we want to market a lot more. Uh, we kind of want to transition. We, we did this kind of more of the bad-ass like crypto type people in the beginning. We want to transition to more of a. Like welcoming to all walks of life, because this type of business can really help somebody, uh, like a soccer mom or somebody that, uh, yeah, wants to make some side money, but if they really have a little bit of a business acumen and desire to build a big, it's super scalable too. Yeah. No, it makes sense on the Twitter point. Totally hear that. I feel like a lot of the courses that I sell, a lot of the pay news that I've done, Twitter has been a amazing resource, amazing traffic driver for that. On the word of mouth and referral side, are you incentivizing, uh, current members, like through, you know, an affiliate type thing, or they're just kind of sharing because they've got so much value they're sharing without any incentive or reward in return. Yeah. Up until last month, it was just friends. I think we just got our affiliate thing installed. So we're not seeing meaningful, meaningful numbers from that yet, but that's one of our plans where we're rewarding our members either 10 or 15% ongoing for anybody that comes in. So I would love for friends of friends to be coming in because we already have such a good community that would just make it even better rather than use some new source, like YouTube ads or something, and suddenly we just get this massive influx of new people. We don't know if they've kind of got the same mindset as us. Yeah. It makes sense with, with the employees you have, have any of them come from either the free group initially or the paid group, you know, have you found any business partner from your group? Like what other opportunities outside of just recurring revenue has like the group presented you? Oh my God. I mean, the group, like, I think every educational provider will probably say this and probably be lying half the time, but I'm serious. My business makes way more than the group. And the group took tons of my time. And, uh, but, but I've met eight figure sellers through the group, like guys that just randomly saw us on Twitter. They're like, who are these guys shouting by Amazon? I've been in here for six years. I know what I'm doing. Like one guy just ---- on one of my leads. And I'm like, who is this? I'm like, I'm the king of this account. I don't have that big account. And, uh, he became, he's in the group, eight figure seller and me and him talk all the time. And a seven or eight, an eight figure seller of flying ducks. Like I met him on Twitter and, and now he's in the group and he helped me get to the next level. So the connections are number one. And yeah, the group does present a lot of, Amazon's got all these side businesses you can do. I mean, the guys in the group, Amazon just straight up, if you want to build big, fast, you got to get some capital because it's an inventory business. Well, some of the guys, and I'm saying you got to like, look, if you have the numbers, get the loan, but that can get dicey for some people. Uh, but others, they can sell their leads to somebody with capital. So like, if somebody got really good at buying and understands how to buy it, they can't spend their own money yet, sell the leads. So that's just an example of prep centers. People in the group are building their own warehouses to take a dollar 50 a unit to prep stuff and send it in Amazon. So all these things are kind of spawning from the group. Yeah. I I've been part of a group kind of for like the marketing sphere called like utopia. And I haven't been as involved lately, other than doing like a monthly or, you know, bi-weekly call with kind of some experts there and bringing them in. But I feel like with that group, with this group, with other groups, like as you build that community, inherently the value that you're bringing is outside just the content alone. A lot of it comes in the form of connections. Like someone could literally have like essentially like an agency, right. In the group. And they have now a bunch of clients. Obviously you want, you don't want to be spamming. You don't want to just be promoting yourself and whatnot, but as you build relationships, there's so many opportunities to make money from other people, help them make money. Right. And ultimately be better off. So I'm imagining like the journey, I think you kind of alluded to it as like you in the beginning, how to put so much into it. I'm sure obviously your time commitment still is pretty strong there, but over time, right? Like the group members, the community members, the moderators, whatever you want to call it. They really step up. Right. And now it's way more community led and community source versus founder or kind of starter source. Like how, how has your time shifted? Like how much time do you think you used to spend in the early days versus how much time do you spend now actually creating content and facilitating discussion? So I like to brag at how little I work because that's, is always my mantra. Like I'm always trying to that's literally, I thought it was laziness. That's what allowed me to build my store. So well, because I delegate and I've like the last three months, I've been barely working on my store. It's been doing a million a month and now I'm in there cleaning up and realizing I'm going to get back to the community that you got to have that top-down attitude because a lot of things have kind of fallen to the wayside. And I need to do a lot of cleanup now in the community. It's even more prominent. Like if the owners and the top guys step out the monitors, the moderators slow down and then, and not like we're asking them to do anything, but it's just an attitude of passion from the top. If they see us posting new things, they're getting excited. Like they're posting new things that just flows all the way down. Then you have your like lowest members posting awesome content. Uh, so yeah, it totally. And, and yeah, that we've made that a priority because we made it a priority to get back some of our time because the early stages, yeah, we were the only guys posting and inciting all talk. And that's just from a business owner. That's just not, I'm so big on high value time. Like that's so much time and it burned us out. We've all burned out at different times. So now we've hired a full-time guy that grew up for as an OG from one of our members, he's making in the six figures with us and he's like our primary guy. And, uh, so that makes us feel like we have like a little bit of room to do what we do best, which I love mindset stuff. I come in and do, um, two hour call every week for our members and group coaching, I call it. Ask any question about Amazon. We'll, we'll walk through it. And yeah, mindset posts and you know, calls our tech guy and Charles does all kinds of things with wholesale distributors and marketing and he gets on everybody's asses when they're not working hard enough, so we got a cool thing going on. And yeah, we have, the owners have been able to step back a little bit, but we got to make our presence felt to, to make the group run. Yeah, I do a hundred percent. Well, this was, this was fascinating. I definitely learned a lot. I didn't know really much about any of this, so this was cool. Uh, where can people either find you personally, you know, you and kind of your community? How can people find, you know, your, your Twitter, your website? Like where can people find you and whatever on online? Uh, arbitrage jobs. Twitter is probably where we're at the most at the moment, but we're going to expand arbitrage jobs.com. And, uh, yeah, just join us. We're open at the moment. We used to lock down our membership. We're open at the moment. It's a money back guarantee after the first month. Uh, so we're happy to give that back. We ask a lot. Like if you join our group, we're not asking you to get a couple of quick flips and make, make a little bit of money. You can do that. We have some quick flips, but like, we're asking you to build a business. So we expect certain people to come in and be like, all right, this is a little, a little more than, than I wanted, but like the people that want to build a big business that's scalable and automatable, like literally Amazon. There's nothing you can't teach. You're finding cheap stuff. Amazon takes care of the rest. Now it sounds ridiculous, but you don't have to get overly crazy about your business. Uh, rambling at this point, but yeah. Join us at arbitrage jobs on Twitter.com. Sweet, man. I appreciate you being here. Thank you for your time and your wisdom. Yeah. Thanks Chase.