If you are using the OA model to resell products on Amazon, you would need to have certain knowledge and skills to be able to find profitable products. We’ve all been through that stage wondering, how to find profitable Amazon OA products that sell quickly and have high return on investment.
There are different sourcing methods that you can use while doing the sourcing of the products, but the most common are Manual Sourcing, Reverse Sourcing, Storefront Stalking and some of the sellers also use automated software like Tactical Arbitrage or Source Mogul to help them find products faster.
Of course, there is another option which is great if you don’t want to do the hard work yourself. You can always join an Amazon OA Lead List, and outsource the product research. However, it is important to be careful when choosing the company that provides OA leads. Most of them hand out oversaturated products which can be difficult to sell.
That’s why we at OA Wizard strictly limit the number of people we send the product lists to, and we make thorough analyses of each product. If you want to learn more about how we determine the quality of products and whether or not they sell, click here.
Let’s dive deeper into some of Amazon OA product sourcing methods and find out which is best.
Manual Sourcing
Manual Sourcing is perhaps the best way to source profitable products. Manual sourcing is when you go on a retailer’s website and look for products that are on sale, or clearance or have options to stack coupons (adding multiple coupons to the order) to have the lowest possible buying price and to increase your profit.
You will then need to make a proper analysis in Keepa (The most important software for OA) to determine the stability of the price, the competition, and the demand so you can decide if a product is profitable for you and how much quantity you should buy from it.
There are coupon sites like Rakuten, Retail Me Not, Coupert, etc. where you can see which websites currently are doing sales and are having big discounts so you can look deeply into those retailers to see if you can find any profitable products that match your criteria.
Advantages of Manual Amazon Product Sourcing
Low Initial Investment:
It eliminates the need for expensive sourcing software or subscriptions.
Exploration:
Manually sourcing allows you to explore unconventional or less competitive products that automated tools might overlook.
Market Insights:
Manual sourcing helps you gain a deeper understanding of the market, consumer behavior, and product trends.
Skill Development:
Enhances your skills in product research, negotiation, and strategic planning.
Disadvantages of Manual Amazon Product Sourcing
Time-Consuming: Manual sourcing is significantly more time-consuming compared to automated tools. It requires continuous effort and can be exhausting.
Human Error: There’s a higher risk of making mistakes, such as misjudging product viability or overlooking critical data.
Less Comprehensive Analysis: Automated tools can process vast amounts of data quickly, providing insights that might be missed when manually sourcing.
Market Saturation: By the time you identify a profitable product manually, the market might already be saturated with competitors who used automated tools.
Reverse Sourcing
Reverse Sourcing is a method where you look for products on Amazon and afterward search them at other retailers to see if the buying price is affordable for you to make a profit. The reason why the efficiency for this method is lower compared to the manual sourcing method is simply because you are not looking for products that are on sale, you are first looking at the metrics on Amazon and then hoping that you could find some that would be profitable to you if you purchase them outside of Amazon.
The process for doing this is by copying the title name of the product on Amazon and you will do a Google Search where there will be a lot of retailers who are selling that product. You would need to find the retailer that is offering the product at the lowest price.
The benefit of this sourcing method is that even though you are not looking for products that are already on sale like in the manual sourcing method, with reverse sourcing you are not limited to one website, instead you are looking for that product across all the websites that are selling that product.
Storefront Stalking
Storefront Stalking is a similar method to Reverse Sourcing, where you go through the sellers’ storefronts and look for products that match your criteria (selling price, BSR, category) and afterward search the product on Google, just like in the Reverse sourcing method. It has the same pros and cons as the reverse sourcing method.
Using Automated Software
All the previous methods are methods that are very time-consuming and exhausting. The reason for that is that you are manually going through a lot of stores and retailers to be able to find the winning product. However, because of the nature of the sourcing, you may not be able to find products fast and you may lose your patience.
That’s why some of the sellers use software tools that help them automate the sourcing and free up their time. They use tools like Tactical Arbitrage, Source Mogul, etc. where you input your criteria and metrics, and the software searches for products having those criteria all across the web trying to find the product for you. However, while it helps you save time and automates the business, there is a risk of saturation of the products you sell.
Saturation is a term where a lot of sellers are joining the same listing and there is a lot of supply for that product, leading the prices to tank. That way, you will either sell at a lower price to get your money back and reinvest it in a different product or you will wait for the sellers to sell out and the price to go back to normal so you can make your profit.
But how long will you wait? How long can you afford your money to be tied up in that product?
Your criteria and metrics may be the same with a lot of sellers. If you are all using the same software tool, you will all get the same result from the software, therefore saturation on the listing and tanking of the prices.
Therefore, even though it is much more time-consuming and exhausting, the methods where you are not using software tools would give you better results and better ROI for your products. However, not everyone has the time to source products themselves and decide to use software tools instead. If you still decide to do that, make sure to be creative and to be different from what other sellers may search.
The golden rule of sourcing is: IF IT’S EASY TO FIND, IT WOULD BE DIFFICULT TO SELL. IF IT’S HARD TO FIND, IT WOULD BE EASY TO SELL.
