Best items to resell on Amazon And why it matters less than you think

What are the best items to resell on Amazon when doing online arbitrage, is a very common question.
But believe it or not, it is very much an irrelevant question.
Things like profit margins are far more important, read this article if you are interested in understanding this a bit more: Why you shouldn’t look at ROI.

You see the nature of the product shouldn’t matter to you and I would even say it is better if you are indifferent to what you are selling.
And no, I don’t mean indifferent to the quality nor how a customer might receive it, but the actual product.

Far too often, Amazon sellers let emotions run their business and only sell stuff they would buy themselves, or better said put value on.

What’s bad about that you say?
This narrows down the potential reach or land you in a highly competitive market, crippling your margins to a few percent.

And that’s not even the worst of it.
What is worse than not earning money, you ask?

Well I would argue that if you don’t think outside of the box and stay in a niche you know or like, you will not gain new knowledge.
Next to that, you will be very vulnerable if you stick to only one thing, as if it disappears for one reason or another, you are done and done.

Take the fidget spinner for example, not too long ago many sellers were all jumping on it, believing it would be that gravy train.
And although a few made money, most sellers ended up with a lot of stock that wouldn’t move and dropped the prices just to get rid of them.
To make matters worse for these sellers,  Amazon set up rules regarding specifications and quality for them, as their platform was flooded with these things.
This resulted in a fair number of Amazon sellers having to take back their stock from the FBA warehouses or never being able to send their stock in.

This is of course an extreme example and in hindsight everyone is like: ‘of course it wasn’t a lasting thing’.

However the very same people jump on the Bitcoin hype, or kept investing in subprimes right before the housing bubble burst.
These people are not much different from you and I, the problem is however that they let themselves be led by emotion, in particular greed.

Now there is nothing wrong with a bit of greed, but once it takes over your rational thinking mind, you stop thinking as a business man or woman  and become a consumer.
This same overabundance of greed makes some people buy a course, where some guru promises you that it is easy to become a millionaire.
This is of course after they fed your greed, by showing amazing results and the assurance that if you follow the 12, easy to follow,  steps you too will become successful.

I am hammering down on this so much, as it is important to recognize that more often than not, your emotions run away with you.

And to project this back onto doing online arbitrage on Amazon;
I have had contact with an Amazon seller who’d rather sold a popular computer game with a very low margin(5%), over women’s shoes with a 57% margin … simply because he didn’t have an affinity with the product.

Now I understand that if you are building up a business where you have to develop something from scratch, put it in the market and work on it for years and years, you pick something you like.
But with online arbitrage that is not the point.

The point is selling and buying stock and increase your capital to either do something in Private label or go on a nice holiday.

So if there is no ideal product you should look at, then what should you look at?
Now that is a good question and the answer deceptively simple:

Turn of your emotions and only look at the numbers.