Introduction
Haha sorry for the clickbait title. I was going to go with, “I finally sold those holiday BB Mini 4’s,” but thought I’d get a rise out of you. Anyway, like most all of you resellers, I LOADED up on those Best Buy iPads during Christmas. I tried to buy more Mini 4’s than Air 2’s since the Mini 4’s had just come out. I knew we wouldn’t see a Mini 5 for a year. However, I didn’t think an Air 2 successor would come in March since I thought the iPad Pro was the “new” Air 2. Well, once I had heard rumors of an Air 3, I knew it was time to liquidate fast! That’s when I decided to just get rid of all my iPads (see above pic.)
The waiting game
The chart above is for the Mini 4 Gray. You can see from the bottom chart that the number of sellers peaked around Christmas time due to the Best Buy sale. If you had sold them then, you were most likely selling them for around $300 to $315, which means you were eating into your Apple Pay 20%. In fact, I may have even bought it from you:
Haha yes, that happened. Have you guys seen “The Big Short” yet? Great movie although I thought the ending was a bit abrupt. Anyway, yes, I double downed on the bounce back of the Mini 4 price. And looking back, I should have bought more from those panicked sellers.
Backordered items are your friend
I had set my price at $375 when I mailed them in 2 weeks ago because I wanted to draw a line in the sand at that price. At that price, I’d still make about $25 per unit after taxes and fees, and if you include the 20% AP, that increases to $100 profit per unit.
As you can see from the screenshot, everyone below $382.99 is back-ordered. If you had tried to match the lowest priced seller at $342.99, you would have left $40 on the table. Impatient customers with Prime want items in 2 days! They are not going to wait for a back-ordered item. Sure, I left $7 on the table for not raising the price closer to $382.99, but like I said, I had to draw the line somewhere.
Lessons Learned
If you have the patience, float, and confident a replacement product isn’t on the horizon, then by all means, wait it out. Timing is important in the reselling game. If you aren’t first to market (first boxes to hit the FBA warehouse,) then it might behoove you to wait out the desperate sellers.
How did you get approval to sell iPads through FBA? I think Amazon classifies them as electronic products and you will need approval from Amazon to sell them as new. Thanks.
You don’t need approval to sell iPads through FBA.
I’m counting about 22 ipads … and what are those in the red/black boxes, beats? … did all of this get you to your $10k to max out AP + Discover IT 1.5x (doubled) promo?
Those are Flip 2 that I found at like Marshall’s, so a one-off. I maxed out 3 Discover AP’s
What site did you use to track price history?
chrome extension – keepa
Thanks. Do you prefer that over camelcamelcamel?
You know, I’ve never even used CCC so not sure.
I agree with Vinh, the keepa chrome extension is the best as it will show it to you right on the Amazon page. CCC is good as well and use it when not getting the data I want from Keepa. I then usually use CCC to set price alerts for AZ flips.
What is the thinking on buying from Amazon and then reselling there? Is it possible to get shut down doing that (very bad result!)? I haven’t tried it because it seems like a fairly large concern.
I know they def frown on buying goods FROM Amazon [the seller] and reselling it on FBA. However, I bought from Marketplace and resold on FBA, which I may be blindly assuming is more lenient.
Its against AZ Terms of Service to buy with PRIME to resaleit doesn’t matter if its AZ or 3P seller. They just don’t want you using PRIME. The best approach is to open up a 2nd buyers account (you can have as many buyers accounts you want) that does NOT have prime and use that for AZ flips. Also you can set it up as Biz account and still get 2 day free shipping. I buy from AZ all the time, just never use prime.
Thanks for clarification
It seems like more and more the Amazon marketplace is turning into amateur hour with newb sellers dumping items for way below cost, and this drags other sellers down and pretty soon a few sellers erode the value of an item to the point it is totally dead. And this is happening more and more regularly. Great for buyers, terrible for resellers.
May be due to all those MS’ers moving into reselling and doing it for the points instead of the money.
I expect this phenomenon to slow down…maybe. The first couple of things I sold, I may have also sold items in a “race to the bottom” fashion. But since being in the game a little bit have developed more patience. I think that people are only going slash their prices to sell quickly if they aren’t selling a lot. Frankly if you’re trying to meet minimum spend, you may be tempted to just get your money back and move on. If you’re reselling repeatedly, you’re probably going to decide that it’s not worth your time to just barely make your money back. Then again, maybe I’m overly optimistic.
Yup, I’d thought of that too. But losing money is only sustainable for so long, and almost daily I see a new seller popup.
Econ 101…increased competition drives profits to 0.
Impressive. Sometimes that is the hardest thing to do in this game, waiting out the lowballer panicked sellers. Even more impressive to double down and buy out there stock. I do love me an AZ Flip, but very ballsy to do it on a $315 item.
I was 98% confident the price would rebound, so why not double down? if you have an 11 and the dealer is showing a 6, you double down all day right?
all day everyday and odds are even less in your favor in the Blackjack example.