Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to e-Commerce Documentation. Got a very special guest for you today. Romer the Roamer. He's in Barcelona, Spain, I think. Are you? Where are you?
Yeah, Barcelona, Spain at Jujitsu practice right now. So I apologize for, for the noise.
Oh, that's awesome, man. I'm
Here trying to learn Spanish and running my Amazon business and dancing, Living the Life!
<Laugh>. Dude, thanks for doing this. Let's talk Amazon. Let's talk books. Let's talk, let's talk about everything. Drop shipping. Where do you wanna start, man?
Well, I don't know anything about drop shipping, so we should probably start with what I know about, which is books and online arbitrage.
All right. Let, let's start with how did you get into this?
Yeah, so I sold my first book when I was in college like four years ago, not even four. Why didn't say four years ago? This is like 2017. How many years ago was that? Five? Yeah, it feels like 10 <laugh>, but it was only five years ago. Sold my first book and I found out how to sell on Amazon. And college textbooks are some of the most lucrative items that you could sell on Amazon, especially if you're able to get them at cheap prices. You can get 'em for cheap prices at Dollar Store, at thrift stores. You can get 'em for cheap prices from college students. You can get 'em for free from libraries sometimes. And so that's how I started my business, was just buying books from all my classmates and selling them on Amazon. And that summer I decided to start a landscaping company.
Found out it was a ton of work. I was still selling books on Amazon at the same time, and I was like, Holy shit, this thing is fucking real right here. Like, like Amazon is actually real. Like I'm making sales as I'm cutting grass and I didn't delegate anything in my landscaping business, but inadvertently Amazon kind of forced me to delegate fba. I wasn't prepping, packing the books, they were doing all of it for me. And I was like, this is a much better business than this. Now there's landscaping companies that are great, and I, if I knew more about business back then, I could've scaled it, but I didn't know shit. And so like, I was just like, Oh, this business is better. So I decided to grow that. And then long story short, I basically lived in my car for three months after,
Oh my God, after
That year. And I traveled the whole country and I went to thrift stores, libraries, college campuses, and I just scanned the crap out of all these books. And that's really how I started my business. And I, I've logged the whole thing on YouTube. I got a following, and that's how it started, man. And
Your YouTube's awesome, your YouTube channel for people who aren't following you rom or the ro your Instagram's sick to, you're dropping big bombs that people think you'd have to pay to get a course to reveal what you're sharing for free. So let's, let's break this down for people who don't know. One of the beauties of this business model is, you know, you don't have to outlay cash until you know exactly what you're gonna get for it on Amazon. So you can literally scan a book at a thrift store, right? And there's all different kinds of apps, right? But you can scan the book and see, oh my God, this is selling for a hundred dollars. Whoever has the buy box and you can buy it for 10 bucks and then you can ship it to an FBA warehouse and then they'll sell it for you. You're, you're exactly right. It's, it's hands off where you could, if, if they have 10 of them, if they have a hundred, you'll buy 'em all and you'll make the delta. It's a beautiful business model. So I, I know you share a lot of this. Let's kind of like, let's, let's help the viewers here. Where do you find these books? Is it mostly thrift stores? Are there private warehouses? Are there wholesale? Are you buying 'em by the truckload? What, like, people who wanna get into this just go to colleges and talk to people.
In 2019 was when I really started to scale my business. I went from, I think 2019 started. I did like 10,000 that first month. And I think, I think that's what might have been less. It might have been like five or six, but I ended 2019 at like 350,000 in sales. And at the time I was primarily going to thrift stores and libraries, Like those were my two main sources. And then every once in a while I would come across a liquidation deal. So like, think like a college closing down or something like that. I would just go and scan all the books. So like anyone starting out, the best place to go is Drift stores in your city, use bookstores and libraries. Go to those three places, scan the hell out of all the books, and then ship 'em to Amazon fba.
You, you can make easily, like if you actually put the time in, you can easily make a hundred k a year profit, which sounds ridiculous. Like, it, it sounds like absolutely ridiculous, but nobody puts that type of work in. And if you truly put eight hours a day, treat it like a job, like you, you can scale this business. I mean, you're, you're buying dollar books and selling them for 20, 30, 40 plus. Like, the math is just like, even if you do fuck up a lot, like it's hard to fuck up that much. Like you're not gonna make that many bad purchasing decisions, you know? Oh, and by the way, we didn't really mention this, but I use an app that tells me whether or not I should sell the book. And so the app turns green, I it's Scout iq, it turns green. If it's good, if it's good, that means it has fast sales velocity, a good sales rank and healthy profit. And so like literally if you just use the app, it's like impossible to lose money. So I just, I just used the app. I scanned thousands and thousands of, I, I wish I knew how many books I scanned, but probably, I probably scanned it like 500,000 books or something like crazy like that.
Oh my gosh. That's, that's a lot of books. Books. So I know you talk about this, wanted to bring this up. What do you do if you scan a book that's restricted? You can't sell it on Amazon. You have to go through the hoops. Let's talk about that. How can you help? How does that work? What do, what do people do?
That's what really took me off in 2019 was so I got like 20 K sales just hustling, like, just going hard. And so that's why like anybody who's out there who's like, you know, I'm scared about starting the Amazon business, Start with books and you can get pretty good numbers even if you just go on Saturdays, you know? But what I found was a lot of people can't sell textbooks, but I could,
What's it called? A, is it a restricted asin?
Yeah, they call it restricted popular textbooks. It's, it's a, they call it popular textbooks. And they're restricted. And so me posting all on social media, everybody knew me as like the book guy. And so I found out nobody else could sell textbooks. I could, no new accounts could sell textbooks. And so I said, Everybody, send me your books and I'll sell them for you. The 50 50 split. So I started this business called,
It's very generous,
Restricted inventory.com. I pay 50% profit. People send me a hundred dollars textbooks, I sell 'em, we make 80 bucks from Amazon. You get 40, I get 40. And yeah, that business just took off. There was an obvious demand for it in the market. People didn't know what to do with, with those books. And it served me well. And so we're three years in business now and it's, yeah, that, that's how I'm able to travel and do all this stuff. Like I'm not out here in Spain going to thrift stores anymore. I have, you know, a, a business that operates in America and it, it's primarily restricted inventory.
Yeah, there's a lot of people talking about doing what you're doing, but they're not actually doing it. But you're doing it and you've gotten to that point. You know your shit. You've figured out this model. So this is great, man. So, okay, what's happening in my, Are you, do you live in Florida? Is your home base or you just travel around? I know you got the seller conference.
It was for two years, but I traveled so much my second year in Florida. Once Covid stopped that, I'm like, I'm just gonna travel all the time now. So it's my goal to travel to every country in the world before I die. And so it's like, why not just travel all the time? And so I go back home occasionally, see mom, dad, and then hit the road again.
So what's happening in Miami, talk to us about that. Is this, is this one of the first events?
This is a third year. We're doing
It. Oh, it's a third year, I'm
Sorry. Miami Sellers conference. Every year we get like literally the top Amazon sellers in the game. Scott Needham, he was number six on Amazon at one point out of all the Amazon sellers, he was number six in revenue. Amazon Lit, I'm pretty sure they're top 100 Amazon sellers at least. I mean, they're like the biggest guys posting on social media right now regarding wholesale. We have four, like, I think we have like 14 speakers. Like our speaker lineup is insane this year. We have a bunch of people who just started Amazon in the last 12 months and who are already up to a hundred thousand plus in sales. And so some of those people will be speaking. We got the buy box bandits. We got, I mean, I can't even think of everyone. We got Trevor Peterson, we got private label guys, wholesale guys, online arbitrage guys. It is going to be a fucking show. That
Sounds great. Yeah, I'm, I'm talking to my buddy. I'm, I'm really excited if he's going, I'm going. If he doesn't go, I still might be going. So I'm super pumped, man. Excited about this
Day. Two's gonna be on a
Yacht. You can now, now I gotta go, man.
You can, you can ask people about the event. Like, it, it's a lot of fun. So day one is just gonna be like, it's, it's kinda like we, we emulate Tony Robbins. Like we don't go as crazy as Tony Robbins, but we do get people up engaged, jumping around and you know, it's like these events are long, man, like from eight o'clock to like five o'clock at night, like you gotta focus, you gotta take notes. So we get people up moving, you know, lunch is free this year. We got some shit last year for making people pay for lunch. So it's gonna be free <laugh> this year after party's gonna be dope. But guys don't go too hard in the after party, cuz on Sunday we're gonna get a yacht and all drinks included, all food included on the yacht. You're gonna be able to like literally network with the top Amazon sellers in the bay of Amazon or Bay Bay of Amazon, Bay of Miami, Miami Bay, and the Sun in the most beautiful time of year, February. And yeah, like last year the yacht was crazy. People, people were going crazy. Yeah, I kinda could control myself the whole bit cause I was like, I was like daddy at this event, but like, I was seeing like seven figure Amazon sellers just act in a fool out there. And so that's my goal is to act a fool at the end of day too. At the end of day too. I'm gonna get shit, but up until I have to keep everything together to make sure everything doesn't fall apart.
Okay, dude, What, what's like your best Amazon, was it a book? Was it a fine? Was it like there's gotta be a crazy story that you
Have? I do, I do. I I have a few, but to date, the best single item I've sold was a Jewish set. So I was at this library sale and it was like, if you've ever been to a library sale books, sale finder dot com's great to find library sales. If you've ever been to a library sale, like everybody, everybody goes crazy for like the first hour and then everyone leaves. It's like a class of kids when the test is over, all the kids get up at the same time. You ever seen this, like when you're taking a test, everybody just gets up at the same time and finishes. It's like the same thing at journal library sale, everybody's done. And so everybody was like done. And I went and I looked at this giant set of books that didn't have a barcode, it was a Jewish set and it was like a 5 million sales rank and it was selling for 1300 bucks. At the time I fba it, there was no FBA offers, so I shipped it to FBA and it sold for two grand, like a few months later.
Oh wow.
Yeah. So that was my biggest flip singular flip to date. I'm sure that, I mean, I've sold some stuff this, oh, last year I did like 40,000 in one day in chlorine. I sold chlorine and, and sold 40 and that was
Like pool chlorine.
Yeah. That, that was insane for me. Yeah. You didn't know about the storage?
No, I heard about it. So you found some chlorine at like a sale and you just bought a bulk shipment and then Dude,
No, no, no. I went to Costco. I, I flew people all over the country to go pick up this chlorine. It was pretty crazy. And I don't know how many units I sold, probably not even that many units. They were selling for like 200 bucks a pop. So two 40,000 divided by 200, what is that? 200 units probably is what I sold. Wow. And that was 40 K one day. And honestly, that's really what, what made me shift my attention. I still sell books. I still do well with it. I've sold over half a million of books this year. But just seeing like the velocity of other items, one ASIN selling 40,000 in one day. I was like, holy shit. Like there's a lot of opportunity outside of just books. And so that's why I'm learning online arbitrage and yeah,
That is fucking amazing, dude. When you start to really scour Amazon, there's obviously millions of products, but sometimes you'll come across some gyms where it had a high velocity and then it dropped off and there's just no inventory. And either Amazon doesn't have it, the seller doesn't have it. There's been a runout. And the beauty of this model for, for, you know, this, everybody listening is you don't have to create a product. You don't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars white labeling some product in China, then worrying about getting it over here, then paying all the fees, then shipping to Amazon, then crossing your fingers and praying that, you know, your Chinese supplier doesn't launch the same product and you over. Right? I mean, and trademarks, and this is, you're, you're, you're le you're kind of hijacking the demand for these products, textbooks and other categories that are already out there that there's demand for every semester. There's millions of kids that go to college that need these textbooks. It's a beautiful model. I mean, I've got a ton of books behind me, but
There's so many, so many things you can sell on Amazon and yeah, you made a good point. You don't gotta wait two, three weeks or even months to get items from overseas. Like yes, the profit margins look good on paper, you're paying a penny to 8 cents or something. But after the shipping fees, after waiting that long, there's so much unpredictability in what's gonna happen with the price. Like taking advantage of selling used books and also name brand products via online arbitrage is is in my, it's huge.
Okay, I'll tell, I'll tell you my quick story. I know I'm interviewing you, but can I tell you a quick story? Is that okay?
Go for
It. Yeah. Okay. Do you know who Dan Erian is? Yes. Okay. You know his book, The Setup?
No, I didn't know he had a book,
But, okay. He wrote this book and I was watching this podcast on YouTube one day and he was promoting his book and I was like, Oh, this is interesting, but you had to go to his website to get the book. And I go, what if the book's on Amazon? So I go to Amazon, somebody's selling the book that's like 20 bucks for $150 and they've got the buy box. And I went, Hmm. So I was like, Hey, I'm just gonna drop ship this. So I undercut 'em a hundred bucks. And then if somebody ordered, I would buy from Ignite, which is who they, and then ship it to them. And I'm going, this is pretty cool, but what if I could like go big? So I contact Ignite and I go, Hey, can I order like a thousand copies of this book? And they go, Yeah, we'll give it to you for like 15 bucks.
And I go, fuck, like 15 grand. I'm like, Okay, yeah, I'll, I go, I'll take it. So 15 grand wired it, they sent me this huge pallet of books and I'm like, Okay, well now I've gotta drop the price because it's gotta be, I wanna do volume and not have, Right? Yeah. So anyway, so I did it. I, I ordered it, I got it, I shipped everything to Amazon and they started selling for 30 bucks a pop. And I'm going, Oh my god, 30 grand. So I go, I gotta do this again. So I ordered another thousand. So it was 60 grand and I, it was cra I think I made about $15,000 after it was all said and done. Yeah. And then I called 'em again and I go, I need another, I need 5,000 books. And they go, We're not selling to you anymore, we're doing a deal with Amazon. I went, Fuck
<Laugh>.
So they went vendor.
How'd you get in touch with that? Was it like a big publishing company or was it
No, they were selling direct. So, so I was like, I think Dan Arians with Ignite. So I, I reached out to Ignite and I go, Can I actually buy this book? And they, cuz they go, Who the hell are you? You want cbd? And I go, No, no, I just want the book. Can I order the book from you? And they go, Yeah, we'll sell the book too. And so for people out there listening, like, you don't have to invent a product, you just like, Bill's 15 grand and I didn't do anything. I just got some books and Shipp a Manson dude. Is there anything else, any other bombs you want to drop? I know I, I know you, we've got like five or six minutes left.
I, I would just say like, there's a lot of people out there who are scared to get started and they don't think this is real and it's absolutely fucking real. Like, there, there's so many people doing this. And just find somebody that you like, find somebody that you know, you, you actually like as a person who's doing big numbers and follow their stuff, emulate what they're doing, literally just do what they're doing and you'll see the same success. You know? So that's like a very basic level of how to actually get started.
Follow Ramer, the ro set up your Amazon professional seller account, probably set up a, you know, an LLC with an E so you can be official, right?
If, if that's what makes it official, do it. You know, if that, if that mentally makes you say, I'm now on business, fucking do it.
But keep track of your expenses, right? Yeah.
And it's just limited liability corporation. It separates you in case you ever get sued or something. It's not on you, it's on the company. And, and so yeah, there's not a huge barrier to entry to get in this business.
Yeah, it's a, it's a great business. It's real money. One last thing I want to ask you. Amazon, losing your inventory. How do you deal with it? What do you like, what do you recommend?
There's a few different ways Amazon can lose your inventory. They can lose their inventory in the check-in process. And so what I recommend there is open a case and if you have invoices, this is a good thing about online arbitrage or wholesale, upload the invoices and they'll pay you. This is something that's really easy to do. You should always check for inbound shipping discrepancies. Number two, shit just happens, you know items get lost in the warehouse. I don't even really look that deep into it. So I recommend some type of refund software. I've used Refunds Manager, they were all right. I used Jata. They were also pretty good. So either of those I recommend, we're trying to get one of, actually I master refunds manager to sponsor, but Gita's talking about sponsoring Miami 2023. But I mean, like you should just have a refund service software working on the back end. Because as time goes on, the opportunity to get reimbursed from Amazon goes away because they have a policy that after certain number of days you can't get money back. So hop on that, you
Know, no geta, and I'm not plugging them by any means. I've just used them.
That's how you say it. Geta, Geta, I, I always called it
Tita. We're saying the same thing. We're saying the same thing. They're great. And they go, We don't charge you anything and if we do recover something for you and a lost shipment or whatever, we just take half. And I'm going, I think that's fair. Cause I wouldn't have found it anyway. And it's automated. So yeah, I think,
I think you take like 30%. Do
They take that go down? I think it depends on how much volume you have, but
Okay, I thought it was 30, but maybe it's half. Either way it's like, either
Way,
You know, I'm not gonna build a bunch of systems to find lost inventory. Like I'm just gonna focus on systems to find more profitable inventory.
That's it. Okay. And I know that I said that was my last question, but I got one more for you. Do you think that this model with what you're doing, you could, I mean, hire people to go scour for you or tell people hundred people at thrift stores? Hey, if you get any textbooks, like call me and I'll cut you in.
Yeah, there's a lot of things you can do, man, from, like, if you zoom all the way out at the top Amazon sellers, like at one point, I think it was like two out of the top 10 Amazon sellers were book sellers. And I'm pretty sure it's still like that. Like they, the Amazon sellers are always changing who's on top. But like if you want to go big, big into book business, you can, it's gonna be a different book business than than small. Obviously on the small side you have cherry picking on the big side you have bull and you have, you have that. So can you systematize it and make a business that you know runs while you're doing something like this? Like I'm in Spain right now and my business is running back home. You absolutely can. How would you do that?
You can get scouts, like you said, that's a hard thing to scale, but it's certainly very lucrative at the beginning. I know a guy who sourced 40,000 books paying somebody else $1 per book that they found paying like a kid, $1 per book that they found. He sourced 40,000 books over the course of two years now. He probably made at least $4 profit off of each book this dude made. What is that? 160 grand in two years. Not even doing anything. Just having somebody else go get books for him, you know, It's a great
Business. Yeah.
So that, that's like a, a small, on a small scale how to delegate it. But I mean, I have a friend in San Diego who does like around 750,000 a year in books. Pretty healthy margin. And he works with libraries. He gets them on consignment, he gets their books. He has somebody run, pick up all the books once a week, drop them off like this. This is a real business. You know, most people when they talk about books, they talk about cherry picking books, but you can also put systems in place to scale it to the next level. And so
I love it, man. Scalability, more profits, more books. Ramer. The roamer, everybody. Where can people find out more? Where do you want to find you brother?
Wherever. Instagram, YouTube, Facebook. I'm all over the place. Tiktok
Awesome. I'm out there. Well, thanks man, I appreciate you doing this, This my
Seller conference.
There it is. I'll be there. See you. All right man.
I'll see you brother.
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Yeah, Barcelona, Spain at Jujitsu practice right now. So I apologize for, for the noise.
Oh, that's awesome, man. I'm
Here trying to learn Spanish and running my Amazon business and dancing, Living the Life!
<Laugh>. Dude, thanks for doing this. Let's talk Amazon. Let's talk books. Let's talk, let's talk about everything. Drop shipping. Where do you wanna start, man?
Well, I don't know anything about drop shipping, so we should probably start with what I know about, which is books and online arbitrage.
All right. Let, let's start with how did you get into this?
Yeah, so I sold my first book when I was in college like four years ago, not even four. Why didn't say four years ago? This is like 2017. How many years ago was that? Five? Yeah, it feels like 10 <laugh>, but it was only five years ago. Sold my first book and I found out how to sell on Amazon. And college textbooks are some of the most lucrative items that you could sell on Amazon, especially if you're able to get them at cheap prices. You can get 'em for cheap prices at Dollar Store, at thrift stores. You can get 'em for cheap prices from college students. You can get 'em for free from libraries sometimes. And so that's how I started my business, was just buying books from all my classmates and selling them on Amazon. And that summer I decided to start a landscaping company.
Found out it was a ton of work. I was still selling books on Amazon at the same time, and I was like, Holy shit, this thing is fucking real right here. Like, like Amazon is actually real. Like I'm making sales as I'm cutting grass and I didn't delegate anything in my landscaping business, but inadvertently Amazon kind of forced me to delegate fba. I wasn't prepping, packing the books, they were doing all of it for me. And I was like, this is a much better business than this. Now there's landscaping companies that are great, and I, if I knew more about business back then, I could've scaled it, but I didn't know shit. And so like, I was just like, Oh, this business is better. So I decided to grow that. And then long story short, I basically lived in my car for three months after,
Oh my God, after
That year. And I traveled the whole country and I went to thrift stores, libraries, college campuses, and I just scanned the crap out of all these books. And that's really how I started my business. And I, I've logged the whole thing on YouTube. I got a following, and that's how it started, man. And
Your YouTube's awesome, your YouTube channel for people who aren't following you rom or the ro your Instagram's sick to, you're dropping big bombs that people think you'd have to pay to get a course to reveal what you're sharing for free. So let's, let's break this down for people who don't know. One of the beauties of this business model is, you know, you don't have to outlay cash until you know exactly what you're gonna get for it on Amazon. So you can literally scan a book at a thrift store, right? And there's all different kinds of apps, right? But you can scan the book and see, oh my God, this is selling for a hundred dollars. Whoever has the buy box and you can buy it for 10 bucks and then you can ship it to an FBA warehouse and then they'll sell it for you. You're, you're exactly right. It's, it's hands off where you could, if, if they have 10 of them, if they have a hundred, you'll buy 'em all and you'll make the delta. It's a beautiful business model. So I, I know you share a lot of this. Let's kind of like, let's, let's help the viewers here. Where do you find these books? Is it mostly thrift stores? Are there private warehouses? Are there wholesale? Are you buying 'em by the truckload? What, like, people who wanna get into this just go to colleges and talk to people.
In 2019 was when I really started to scale my business. I went from, I think 2019 started. I did like 10,000 that first month. And I think, I think that's what might have been less. It might have been like five or six, but I ended 2019 at like 350,000 in sales. And at the time I was primarily going to thrift stores and libraries, Like those were my two main sources. And then every once in a while I would come across a liquidation deal. So like, think like a college closing down or something like that. I would just go and scan all the books. So like anyone starting out, the best place to go is Drift stores in your city, use bookstores and libraries. Go to those three places, scan the hell out of all the books, and then ship 'em to Amazon fba.
You, you can make easily, like if you actually put the time in, you can easily make a hundred k a year profit, which sounds ridiculous. Like, it, it sounds like absolutely ridiculous, but nobody puts that type of work in. And if you truly put eight hours a day, treat it like a job, like you, you can scale this business. I mean, you're, you're buying dollar books and selling them for 20, 30, 40 plus. Like, the math is just like, even if you do fuck up a lot, like it's hard to fuck up that much. Like you're not gonna make that many bad purchasing decisions, you know? Oh, and by the way, we didn't really mention this, but I use an app that tells me whether or not I should sell the book. And so the app turns green, I it's Scout iq, it turns green. If it's good, if it's good, that means it has fast sales velocity, a good sales rank and healthy profit. And so like literally if you just use the app, it's like impossible to lose money. So I just, I just used the app. I scanned thousands and thousands of, I, I wish I knew how many books I scanned, but probably, I probably scanned it like 500,000 books or something like crazy like that.
Oh my gosh. That's, that's a lot of books. Books. So I know you talk about this, wanted to bring this up. What do you do if you scan a book that's restricted? You can't sell it on Amazon. You have to go through the hoops. Let's talk about that. How can you help? How does that work? What do, what do people do?
That's what really took me off in 2019 was so I got like 20 K sales just hustling, like, just going hard. And so that's why like anybody who's out there who's like, you know, I'm scared about starting the Amazon business, Start with books and you can get pretty good numbers even if you just go on Saturdays, you know? But what I found was a lot of people can't sell textbooks, but I could,
What's it called? A, is it a restricted asin?
Yeah, they call it restricted popular textbooks. It's, it's a, they call it popular textbooks. And they're restricted. And so me posting all on social media, everybody knew me as like the book guy. And so I found out nobody else could sell textbooks. I could, no new accounts could sell textbooks. And so I said, Everybody, send me your books and I'll sell them for you. The 50 50 split. So I started this business called,
It's very generous,
Restricted inventory.com. I pay 50% profit. People send me a hundred dollars textbooks, I sell 'em, we make 80 bucks from Amazon. You get 40, I get 40. And yeah, that business just took off. There was an obvious demand for it in the market. People didn't know what to do with, with those books. And it served me well. And so we're three years in business now and it's, yeah, that, that's how I'm able to travel and do all this stuff. Like I'm not out here in Spain going to thrift stores anymore. I have, you know, a, a business that operates in America and it, it's primarily restricted inventory.
Yeah, there's a lot of people talking about doing what you're doing, but they're not actually doing it. But you're doing it and you've gotten to that point. You know your shit. You've figured out this model. So this is great, man. So, okay, what's happening in my, Are you, do you live in Florida? Is your home base or you just travel around? I know you got the seller conference.
It was for two years, but I traveled so much my second year in Florida. Once Covid stopped that, I'm like, I'm just gonna travel all the time now. So it's my goal to travel to every country in the world before I die. And so it's like, why not just travel all the time? And so I go back home occasionally, see mom, dad, and then hit the road again.
So what's happening in Miami, talk to us about that. Is this, is this one of the first events?
This is a third year. We're doing
It. Oh, it's a third year, I'm
Sorry. Miami Sellers conference. Every year we get like literally the top Amazon sellers in the game. Scott Needham, he was number six on Amazon at one point out of all the Amazon sellers, he was number six in revenue. Amazon Lit, I'm pretty sure they're top 100 Amazon sellers at least. I mean, they're like the biggest guys posting on social media right now regarding wholesale. We have four, like, I think we have like 14 speakers. Like our speaker lineup is insane this year. We have a bunch of people who just started Amazon in the last 12 months and who are already up to a hundred thousand plus in sales. And so some of those people will be speaking. We got the buy box bandits. We got, I mean, I can't even think of everyone. We got Trevor Peterson, we got private label guys, wholesale guys, online arbitrage guys. It is going to be a fucking show. That
Sounds great. Yeah, I'm, I'm talking to my buddy. I'm, I'm really excited if he's going, I'm going. If he doesn't go, I still might be going. So I'm super pumped, man. Excited about this
Day. Two's gonna be on a
Yacht. You can now, now I gotta go, man.
You can, you can ask people about the event. Like, it, it's a lot of fun. So day one is just gonna be like, it's, it's kinda like we, we emulate Tony Robbins. Like we don't go as crazy as Tony Robbins, but we do get people up engaged, jumping around and you know, it's like these events are long, man, like from eight o'clock to like five o'clock at night, like you gotta focus, you gotta take notes. So we get people up moving, you know, lunch is free this year. We got some shit last year for making people pay for lunch. So it's gonna be free <laugh> this year after party's gonna be dope. But guys don't go too hard in the after party, cuz on Sunday we're gonna get a yacht and all drinks included, all food included on the yacht. You're gonna be able to like literally network with the top Amazon sellers in the bay of Amazon or Bay Bay of Amazon, Bay of Miami, Miami Bay, and the Sun in the most beautiful time of year, February. And yeah, like last year the yacht was crazy. People, people were going crazy. Yeah, I kinda could control myself the whole bit cause I was like, I was like daddy at this event, but like, I was seeing like seven figure Amazon sellers just act in a fool out there. And so that's my goal is to act a fool at the end of day too. At the end of day too. I'm gonna get shit, but up until I have to keep everything together to make sure everything doesn't fall apart.
Okay, dude, What, what's like your best Amazon, was it a book? Was it a fine? Was it like there's gotta be a crazy story that you
Have? I do, I do. I I have a few, but to date, the best single item I've sold was a Jewish set. So I was at this library sale and it was like, if you've ever been to a library sale books, sale finder dot com's great to find library sales. If you've ever been to a library sale, like everybody, everybody goes crazy for like the first hour and then everyone leaves. It's like a class of kids when the test is over, all the kids get up at the same time. You ever seen this, like when you're taking a test, everybody just gets up at the same time and finishes. It's like the same thing at journal library sale, everybody's done. And so everybody was like done. And I went and I looked at this giant set of books that didn't have a barcode, it was a Jewish set and it was like a 5 million sales rank and it was selling for 1300 bucks. At the time I fba it, there was no FBA offers, so I shipped it to FBA and it sold for two grand, like a few months later.
Oh wow.
Yeah. So that was my biggest flip singular flip to date. I'm sure that, I mean, I've sold some stuff this, oh, last year I did like 40,000 in one day in chlorine. I sold chlorine and, and sold 40 and that was
Like pool chlorine.
Yeah. That, that was insane for me. Yeah. You didn't know about the storage?
No, I heard about it. So you found some chlorine at like a sale and you just bought a bulk shipment and then Dude,
No, no, no. I went to Costco. I, I flew people all over the country to go pick up this chlorine. It was pretty crazy. And I don't know how many units I sold, probably not even that many units. They were selling for like 200 bucks a pop. So two 40,000 divided by 200, what is that? 200 units probably is what I sold. Wow. And that was 40 K one day. And honestly, that's really what, what made me shift my attention. I still sell books. I still do well with it. I've sold over half a million of books this year. But just seeing like the velocity of other items, one ASIN selling 40,000 in one day. I was like, holy shit. Like there's a lot of opportunity outside of just books. And so that's why I'm learning online arbitrage and yeah,
That is fucking amazing, dude. When you start to really scour Amazon, there's obviously millions of products, but sometimes you'll come across some gyms where it had a high velocity and then it dropped off and there's just no inventory. And either Amazon doesn't have it, the seller doesn't have it. There's been a runout. And the beauty of this model for, for, you know, this, everybody listening is you don't have to create a product. You don't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars white labeling some product in China, then worrying about getting it over here, then paying all the fees, then shipping to Amazon, then crossing your fingers and praying that, you know, your Chinese supplier doesn't launch the same product and you over. Right? I mean, and trademarks, and this is, you're, you're, you're le you're kind of hijacking the demand for these products, textbooks and other categories that are already out there that there's demand for every semester. There's millions of kids that go to college that need these textbooks. It's a beautiful model. I mean, I've got a ton of books behind me, but
There's so many, so many things you can sell on Amazon and yeah, you made a good point. You don't gotta wait two, three weeks or even months to get items from overseas. Like yes, the profit margins look good on paper, you're paying a penny to 8 cents or something. But after the shipping fees, after waiting that long, there's so much unpredictability in what's gonna happen with the price. Like taking advantage of selling used books and also name brand products via online arbitrage is is in my, it's huge.
Okay, I'll tell, I'll tell you my quick story. I know I'm interviewing you, but can I tell you a quick story? Is that okay?
Go for
It. Yeah. Okay. Do you know who Dan Erian is? Yes. Okay. You know his book, The Setup?
No, I didn't know he had a book,
But, okay. He wrote this book and I was watching this podcast on YouTube one day and he was promoting his book and I was like, Oh, this is interesting, but you had to go to his website to get the book. And I go, what if the book's on Amazon? So I go to Amazon, somebody's selling the book that's like 20 bucks for $150 and they've got the buy box. And I went, Hmm. So I was like, Hey, I'm just gonna drop ship this. So I undercut 'em a hundred bucks. And then if somebody ordered, I would buy from Ignite, which is who they, and then ship it to them. And I'm going, this is pretty cool, but what if I could like go big? So I contact Ignite and I go, Hey, can I order like a thousand copies of this book? And they go, Yeah, we'll give it to you for like 15 bucks.
And I go, fuck, like 15 grand. I'm like, Okay, yeah, I'll, I go, I'll take it. So 15 grand wired it, they sent me this huge pallet of books and I'm like, Okay, well now I've gotta drop the price because it's gotta be, I wanna do volume and not have, Right? Yeah. So anyway, so I did it. I, I ordered it, I got it, I shipped everything to Amazon and they started selling for 30 bucks a pop. And I'm going, Oh my god, 30 grand. So I go, I gotta do this again. So I ordered another thousand. So it was 60 grand and I, it was cra I think I made about $15,000 after it was all said and done. Yeah. And then I called 'em again and I go, I need another, I need 5,000 books. And they go, We're not selling to you anymore, we're doing a deal with Amazon. I went, Fuck
<Laugh>.
So they went vendor.
How'd you get in touch with that? Was it like a big publishing company or was it
No, they were selling direct. So, so I was like, I think Dan Arians with Ignite. So I, I reached out to Ignite and I go, Can I actually buy this book? And they, cuz they go, Who the hell are you? You want cbd? And I go, No, no, I just want the book. Can I order the book from you? And they go, Yeah, we'll sell the book too. And so for people out there listening, like, you don't have to invent a product, you just like, Bill's 15 grand and I didn't do anything. I just got some books and Shipp a Manson dude. Is there anything else, any other bombs you want to drop? I know I, I know you, we've got like five or six minutes left.
I, I would just say like, there's a lot of people out there who are scared to get started and they don't think this is real and it's absolutely fucking real. Like, there, there's so many people doing this. And just find somebody that you like, find somebody that you know, you, you actually like as a person who's doing big numbers and follow their stuff, emulate what they're doing, literally just do what they're doing and you'll see the same success. You know? So that's like a very basic level of how to actually get started.
Follow Ramer, the ro set up your Amazon professional seller account, probably set up a, you know, an LLC with an E so you can be official, right?
If, if that's what makes it official, do it. You know, if that, if that mentally makes you say, I'm now on business, fucking do it.
But keep track of your expenses, right? Yeah.
And it's just limited liability corporation. It separates you in case you ever get sued or something. It's not on you, it's on the company. And, and so yeah, there's not a huge barrier to entry to get in this business.
Yeah, it's a, it's a great business. It's real money. One last thing I want to ask you. Amazon, losing your inventory. How do you deal with it? What do you like, what do you recommend?
There's a few different ways Amazon can lose your inventory. They can lose their inventory in the check-in process. And so what I recommend there is open a case and if you have invoices, this is a good thing about online arbitrage or wholesale, upload the invoices and they'll pay you. This is something that's really easy to do. You should always check for inbound shipping discrepancies. Number two, shit just happens, you know items get lost in the warehouse. I don't even really look that deep into it. So I recommend some type of refund software. I've used Refunds Manager, they were all right. I used Jata. They were also pretty good. So either of those I recommend, we're trying to get one of, actually I master refunds manager to sponsor, but Gita's talking about sponsoring Miami 2023. But I mean, like you should just have a refund service software working on the back end. Because as time goes on, the opportunity to get reimbursed from Amazon goes away because they have a policy that after certain number of days you can't get money back. So hop on that, you
Know, no geta, and I'm not plugging them by any means. I've just used them.
That's how you say it. Geta, Geta, I, I always called it
Tita. We're saying the same thing. We're saying the same thing. They're great. And they go, We don't charge you anything and if we do recover something for you and a lost shipment or whatever, we just take half. And I'm going, I think that's fair. Cause I wouldn't have found it anyway. And it's automated. So yeah, I think,
I think you take like 30%. Do
They take that go down? I think it depends on how much volume you have, but
Okay, I thought it was 30, but maybe it's half. Either way it's like, either
Way,
You know, I'm not gonna build a bunch of systems to find lost inventory. Like I'm just gonna focus on systems to find more profitable inventory.
That's it. Okay. And I know that I said that was my last question, but I got one more for you. Do you think that this model with what you're doing, you could, I mean, hire people to go scour for you or tell people hundred people at thrift stores? Hey, if you get any textbooks, like call me and I'll cut you in.
Yeah, there's a lot of things you can do, man, from, like, if you zoom all the way out at the top Amazon sellers, like at one point, I think it was like two out of the top 10 Amazon sellers were book sellers. And I'm pretty sure it's still like that. Like they, the Amazon sellers are always changing who's on top. But like if you want to go big, big into book business, you can, it's gonna be a different book business than than small. Obviously on the small side you have cherry picking on the big side you have bull and you have, you have that. So can you systematize it and make a business that you know runs while you're doing something like this? Like I'm in Spain right now and my business is running back home. You absolutely can. How would you do that?
You can get scouts, like you said, that's a hard thing to scale, but it's certainly very lucrative at the beginning. I know a guy who sourced 40,000 books paying somebody else $1 per book that they found paying like a kid, $1 per book that they found. He sourced 40,000 books over the course of two years now. He probably made at least $4 profit off of each book this dude made. What is that? 160 grand in two years. Not even doing anything. Just having somebody else go get books for him, you know, It's a great
Business. Yeah.
So that, that's like a, a small, on a small scale how to delegate it. But I mean, I have a friend in San Diego who does like around 750,000 a year in books. Pretty healthy margin. And he works with libraries. He gets them on consignment, he gets their books. He has somebody run, pick up all the books once a week, drop them off like this. This is a real business. You know, most people when they talk about books, they talk about cherry picking books, but you can also put systems in place to scale it to the next level. And so
I love it, man. Scalability, more profits, more books. Ramer. The roamer, everybody. Where can people find out more? Where do you want to find you brother?
Wherever. Instagram, YouTube, Facebook. I'm all over the place. Tiktok
Awesome. I'm out there. Well, thanks man, I appreciate you doing this, This my
Seller conference.
There it is. I'll be there. See you. All right man.
I'll see you brother.
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