Squeezing Out Extra Profit

These tools will give your margins a boost.

Before we get into this post, I want to make a quick announcement: Starting next month, I’ll be launching a leads list. If you want more info, there will be a post with the details coming out later this week.

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Welcome back!

Today’s post will cover some ways that you can cut down on costs, as well as collect a few extra dollars when purchasing inventory. I recently made a tweet about “manufacturing” your own leads:

I will go more into detail about these methods, showing you how to buy inventory cheaper and get paid to do so.

Coupons and Discount Codes

Discount codes are one of the things that separates good Amazon sellers from bad ones - while most noob sellers will spend their day scanning Walmart and Target with Tactical Arbitrage, chad sellers will use discount codes to get items for cheaper than what they cost on the aforementioned websites.

Where to Find Codes

There are typically two ways I come across discount codes - emails and extensions.

Email Lists

While typically you want to avoid a large amount of marketing emails coming through your inbox, in the context of arbitrage you want to do the opposite - it is to your advantage to sign up for as many email lists as possible. By being subscribed to these lists, you’ll be one of the first people to know when a website is having a sale or offering discount codes for certain types of products. A good example of a store that cycles through discount codes every week is Walgreens:

15% off code from Walgreens email

Browser Extensions

The other way to find discount codes is through extensions. The main extension I like to use is called Invisible Hand CNET Shopping (they rebranded after I started drafting this), which will give you a list of all of the known coupon codes for a certain website:

Thanks to this extension, I’ve managed to get 10-15% off discounts on items that weren’t profitable initially. Between this and signing up for lots of email lists, you’ll have a good chance of getting the lowest possible price for a product.

Discount Gift Cards

Something that a lot of new sellers should be taking advantage of is discounted gift cards. There’s a decent amount of websites out there that allow people to sell their unwanted gift cards for a percentage of it’s value, which is perfect for arbitrage sellers because an extra 5-10% off can make some items worth purchasing.

The most common website for this is Raise, which has the fastest delivery times (almost instant once your account is up and running) but also the lowest discounts. I’d recommend using it for less popular sites like Kohl’s for convenience.

There are some smaller sites where you can get bigger discounts like GiftCardBin, however the delivery times are slower (1-2 business days) and you risk the item you want to buy going out of stock. If you have sites that you like to regularly source from it can be worth it to use these smaller and slower sites, but it really just depends on what type of item it is and where you’re buying it from. Try looking through the different sites and see which ones will give you the best discount.

Cash Back

Cash back is another tool that you can use to squeeze out some extra dollars. While I personally don’t like to factor cash back into my cost of goods and prefer to use it as a bonus to purchase things like flights, some sellers will use cash back as a means of increasing their bottom line.

In general, cash back is overrated if you don’t spend a lot but severely underrated if you have a lot of expenses. If you spend $500,000 a year on a 2% cash back card, you get back $10,000 of free money to use on something like a vacation.

Credit Cards

Regardless of what kind of business you’re running, if you aren’t putting your expenses on a cash back credit card you just hate money. I personally use the Capital One Spark Business, which has an annual fee of $99 and gives 2% cash back on everything. The card has paid for itself through spending bonuses and cash back from buying a lot of inventory.

Rakuten

While there are a handful of cash back extensions out there, my personal favorite is Rakuten. Rakuten is an additional source of cash back that you can stack on top of your credit card to harvest some extra rewards. On most sites you can expect to get between 2-5% cash back, but there will always be promotions where some sites will give you 10%+ cash back for a day / weekend (e.g Adidas or Vitacost). This year alone I’ve accumulated about $250 in cash back from Rakuten across two accounts.

Rakuten also provides deals / discount codes for certain websites, but I didn’t mention it earlier because CNET Shopping had more codes / discounts available from my experience using both of them.

If you don’t have Rakuten but want to try it, you can sign up from this link and we’ll both get a $30 bonus.

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Between all of the methods I mentioned above, you should be able to get anywhere from an extra 10-30% discount when sourcing inventory which should ultimately lead to more money in your pocket. As always, I’ll be available to answer questions via Twitter or Discord.