Tactical Arbitrage Beginners Guide

What is Arbitrage?

Arbitrage is the simultaneous purchase and sale of the same asset in different markets in order to profit from tiny differences in the asset's listed price.

Whether you are buying online or going into a retail store, the results are the same. You are purchasing a product at a lower price and then reselling it at a higher price for a profit.

To learn more about these business models check out this article we recently wrote https://oahunt.com/amazon-arbitrage-5-ways-to-find-products-to-sell

Online Arbitrage vs. Retail Arbitrage

When I first got into this business, I started in retail arbitrage. Retail arbitrage is physically going to stores, scanning products on shelves, and finding profit. To me, it was tedious, time-consuming, and often awkward because stores are so busy. As an introvert, this was not a lot of fun for me. 

I quickly pivoted to Online Arbitrage just so I didn’t have to go into stores and drive around town all day long. 

Online arbitrage carries the same concept as Retail Arbitrage, but you are purchasing from the online store instead of going into the store. You then have the products shipped to you or to a prep center for processing.

Tactical Arbitrage

There are a lot of tools out there to help you with your online arbitrage. One of the best tools that I have found is Tactical Arbitrage. I would say that this is also the most popular tool out there and is used by many. This is both a good thing and a bad thing.

The Good:
Because so many people use this tool, there is TONS of support for it. It is a paid tool. This payment allows the developers to continue adding new and exciting features to it that make your job as a reseller easier. 

The Bad:
With so many people using the tool, you need to work harder and get creative to find good deals. Many of the easy-to-find deals are also found by thousands of other resellers. The products you find can tank in price quickly due to competition and in turn, kill your margins.

What Is Tactical Arbitrage?

Tactical Arbitrage is a cloud-based sourcing software that works on both Mac and Windows computers. You won’t need to download any software, it’s all within the browser.

You will be able to source products from hundreds of sites that are already built into the software. It also has the ability to help you source through wholesale lists.

 

Getting Started
*Important Note: You will need a professional Amazon seller account to conduct product searches with Tactical Arbitrage. Make sure you have one before you sign up for your trial.

The first thing you want to do is sign up for Tactical Arbitrage. OA Hunt readers are offered an extended trial (10 days total) using the link below. 

https://tacticalarbitrage.com/?frnd=199

You have a few options when it comes to the packages that are offered. If you need to switch at any time they make it pretty easy. Here are the packages they offer:

I have always gone with the Online Arbitrage package. It has everything I need for doing online arbitrage. If you are looking into wholesale and amazon flips, you can get the full suite.

Product Search

This is the primary area of tactical arbitrage. It is where the magic happens!

Here you will put in all the parameters and details of what you want, what site you prefer, and how you want it searched, then you can kick off the search.

You can run 20 searches at a time. I would also recommend that you always have searches going. Some searches are done in an hour, others can take a full day. If you always have searches running 24/7 you will always have products to source and purchase. 

I would caution against using too many filters during this initial stage. Once you have the full search done, you can go in and filter from the final data.

Tactical Arbitrage has a wonderful UI that is easy to navigate and quickly learns the ins and outs of the program. I personally am a HUGE fan of youtube university. This means searching youtube for tutorial videos to help my learning curve. 

For those that don’t want to search, here is a great video I learned from:
 

Reverse Search

I ignored this feature for WAY too long. This, in my opinion, is one of the most powerful features in Tactical Arbitrage.

It will require you to gather a list of ASINs. There are a lot of plugins and programs that can help you do this. Once you source the ASINs, you will upload them all into the reverse search tool. Then the software will pull all that data and scan all its websites to find those products for you. 
With a standard search, it starts with the retail website and scans through then finds the product on amazon. With reverse search, it starts with the amazon product and then finds the retail site that carries the product.

In my experience, this has brought me more profitable products than a standard search. This feature finds products that are not always easily searchable on the retails website and shows you the information on them.

Wholesale

If you work with any wholesalers, you know how painful it is to manually run through their product sheets to find profitable products. Some wholesalers can have 40k+ products in their product sheet. 

Tactical Arbitrage allows you to upload the wholesaler’s product sheet and it will scan it all for you and show you which products are profitable for you to purchase. 

There are a lot of tools out there that focus on this. Tactical Arbitrage is not the only one. In my experience, I found Tactical Arbitrage to be a bit slow with the scans. Another tool you can look into is called ScanUnlimited.com

I have used this tool when doing my own wholesale scans. It’s VERY fast! 

One word of caution on both tools, the spreadsheet you upload is generally for single items. However, it can display Amazon items that are bundles or multipacks. So before you get too excited and start buying a bunch of wholesale products, do your research! Make sure that the pricing you are looking at matches the product quantity that is in the Amazon listing.

Amazon Flips

This tool is meant for Amazon to Amazon flips. If you have been doing arbitrage for any amount of time, you are very familiar with how often the prices fluctuate on amazon. 

This tool will help you find products that are great to flip!

The way an amazon flip works is simple supply and demand. When Amazon is in stock, you will notice the price of most items is low or equal to what you can find at a retailer. 

When Amazon goes out of stock, the price will generally increase by 3-6x or more!

When you come across an item that indicates Amazon going out of stock regularly, it can be a great item to buy from amazon, hold, and then sell it once Amazon goes out of stock.

For these items, you won’t generally buy today and flip tomorrow. These items are generally held for a longer amount of time while you wait for the item to go out of stock.

For more on Amazon flips and for a great tutorial on using the Amazon flips feature, check out the video below.

Library Search

The library search module is very similar to the product search but it’s for scanning and sourcing books. 

Check out the video below for a full rundown on using this great feature!

Always Be Scanning

Always be scanning is a great little tool that I used when I either forgot to keep scans running or when I ran out of scans to review. The always be scanning feature is exactly as it sounds. It’s a feature in Tactical Arbitrage that constantly scans through all the sites and finds you products. 

I would not recommend this as your primary focus. It’s more of a secondary scan that you can use when you run out. Maybe check it once a week and see what type of products are in there.

Sites

There are hundreds of sites for you to scan from! They are always adding more. Here is a link to all the sites they offer by country:
https://tacticalarbitrage.com/arbitrage-sites/

Xpaths

Xpaths are really cool once you understand them! Basically, an Xpath is a code that allows you to scan sites that are not on the tactical arbitrage sourcing list. 

Remember when I said that it can be tough because everyone is sourcing from the same sites? Xpaths give you an edge. You can find new sites and plug them into the software yourself. Now you have your own site that is not available to everyone else out there. 

Not all sites are compatible with an Xpath. There is a fair amount of knowledge required in order to create one too. I didn’t have this knowledge myself so I found a freelancer online that would create them for me. 

If you’re looking for a freelancer to help with this I would highly recommend checking out Fiverr:
https://www.fiverr.com/search/gigs?query=xpath&source=top-bar&search_in=everywhere&search-autocomplete-original-term=xpath