How to Make $100/Day With Health and Beauty Online Arbitrage

Do you want to learn how to make money selling on Amazon without leaving your house? 

Online Arbitrage is buying products from various websites and selling those products on Amazon (or another marketplace) at a markup. When most people think about online arbitrage, big-box stores come to mind -- Walmart, Best Buy, Target, etc. 

While these stores can be goldmines at certain points in the year (like Christmas), they aren’t a good way to build a profitable, stable business. There are thousands (and sometimes tens of thousands) of sellers looking at these big box websites, and chances are they are finding the exact same items you are. This leads to a high amount of competition and price dropping.

When I do retail arbitrage, I like to think about the products that are right under my nose -- small items I use every day that most sellers skip right over. Often, these products are found in obvious (but overlooked) businesses like drug stores and dollar markets.

Today, I’m going to walk you through how I use ProfitGuru to find high ROI health and beauty items. 

Why health and beauty products, you ask?

1. They are replenishable (customers buy them over and over)
2. Customers will pay a premium for beauty products they use consistently (i.e. they are brand dependent)
3. They tend to be smaller in size
4. They are generally low risk -- you’re much more likely to get an IP complaint about an electronic item than a bottle of lotion.

Let’s jump in. 

1. Go to the Products section

First, I go to the ProfitGuru products app from the dashboard.

2. Set product filters

Right off the bat, I set very specific filters. These are different filters than I’ve used in other guides and they’re specific to health-related products, so don’t skip this part. 

• I’m searching for health and beauty products, so I choose the appropriate category (health and household). I pick a common product to set as a keyword: chapstick. You can do the same thing with any specific keyword -- lotion, nail clippers, shampoo, etc. Choosing one thing just makes it easier to narrow down the results. 
• I set a pretty broad sales ranks -- 1 - 100,000. Since I’m looking for high-ROI items, I don’t want to exclude profitable items that move more slowly.
• I set my number of FBA sellers between 3-25. This weeds out private label products (who usually only have 1-2 sellers on their listings). When I’m looking for online arbitrage products, I don’t mind a high-ish amount of sellers. Typically, the more sellers there are on a listing, the more accessible the product is. You want something in-between: a little hard to find without taking hours of your time. Make sure to set this filter with a healthy dose of caution: If you find an item that only sells 5 units a month and there are 100 sellers, it’s obviously a no-go.
• I don’t want to compete with Amazon. so I turn the Amazon filter to off.
• I set the price filter between $8-100. This is one of the most important steps to ensure your research is efficient. I want products that are priced ABOVE what they would be at a typical store. I know chapstick is generally $1-3 a unit, so I want to eliminate any listings where it’s being sold at a regular price. This won’t be full-proof since it doesn’t eliminate products sold by the case, but it does cut down the list significantly and speed up the research process.
• Last, I set the weight filter to be 1 pound or less. I’m out to find items that are small and easy to prep.

Time to hit the search button!

3. Get the search results 

ProfitGuru gives me a solid list of products from my search. I do a quick scan to see which listings have the highest net profit per unit. These are the ones I want to try to source. The winner in a 3-pack of holiday chapstick. It hits all the parameters, good Amazon Sales Rank and 5 FBA sellers. This is also a limited edition, meaning it’s throughout the year. Most of the time I avoid seasonal products, but in the case of chapstick (and beauty products in general), I know people will likely continue searching for these flavors after the holiday. 

4. Find the product on Google

Next, I go to Google and type in the name of the product. I get lucky this time -- the item I’m looking for is at the top of the page, and I know it’s profitable. It’s an easy buy. When I click onto the store page there are two additional discounts -- a $1 off coupon and buy one get one 50% off. The end result is a tiny product with a massive ROI. I can easily sell about a unit per day (number of FBA sellers/estimated monthly sales.)

I’ll be the first to admit that this item was a bit of a fluke. Typically, I have to delve a little deeper in order to find profitable products. I use websites like Google shopping, Camel Camel Camel, and Bizrate to compare prices across the internet. I also pull the UPC or model number of a product  Amazon and plug it into Google shopping. This often yields completely different results than just looking up the name of a product. 

Overall, the process is pretty straight forward if you’re using the right ProfitGuru filters. I typically try to hunt down 10-15 of these products each week. Some weeks it takes more time than others, but I usually average just 45 minutes a day on research -- which nets me $100 a day in sales (sometimes more!)

Questions? Comments? Want to share your biggest arbitrage find ever? Drop a comment below.