Things You Will Face While Trying Retail Arbitrage In India

Ajay Singh
6 min readJun 26, 2020

One of the infamous types of eCommerce business is retail arbitrage. Basically it means buying stuff at low prices from discounted stores and selling it to make a profit via online services like eBay, Amazon, etc.

Various tools or software like Scoutify, scoutly, etc are used to scan items and then later are listed online at Amazon FBA or eBay, etc to sell them.

Visiting a garage sale and picking stuff up to sell to make a little profit while learning marketplace, supply in demand, etc. attracts a lot of people who want to be in eCommerce business and a lot of people have made this their full-time business.

With Youtube channels like Rezzy Reseels and Gary vee who introduce flipping challenges, it sounds a lot of fun and a real way to make a buck over the weekend! And its true but there are few things that became obstacles when you are trying that in India.

So here are things I faced while doing that:

eBay Is Not Available:

Image by Simon Steinberger from Pixabay

A huge bummer is that eBay is not available! This is one of the major issues I faced while flipping stuff online, I mean eBay which has more than 182 million users (as stated by Oberlo) is one of the giant leaders of the e-commerce industry and a lot of people are using it to literally make fortune in many countries and it's not available here.

It is one of the best places where the majority of people flip stuff so much and so often!

The major absence of eBay is realized when you want to reach a higher and wide marketplace or make people bid on your items, you can't find a major collection like eBay anywhere else!

The thing is actually, eBay was available in India a few years ago but after eCommerce sites like Flipkart came in few things changed, and eventually, eBay India was gone!

Now you can browse through ebay.com as eBay.in is no longer available, the difference is that ebay.com is international so if you are listing your items here(India) than even if your buyer is in India you will have to ship your item internationally(as answered by the ask eBay on twitter), so you can only imagine the shipping costs and whatnot!

Now you can only use eBay in India to buy products internationally and with high shipping costs.

It's not that you will go dark without eBay in flipping stuff but the local alternatives like Olx, Quickr, or even Facebook Marketplace have a little fewer features like eBay.

How Stuff Works With PayPal:

Image by CopyrightFreePictures from Pixabay

Things with PayPal are not that bad, but mostly you might be needed to create e-wallets with local apps like Paytm and GPay because the majority of people keep PayPal as the last option or no option at all.

I never had anyone send me payment using PayPal so far even when they were in a different city.

This might not be a major issue but due to RBI guidelines at the end of the day, your PayPal balance will be transferred to your credit/debit card and your PayPal balance will be 0$.

So it is a great idea to have accounts in the local e-wallets like Paytm which is most commonly used by almost everyone.

It's not much of a hassle but it would have been great if we only had to use PayPal every time.

Amazon Requires An Additional Identity Verification:

Photo by Bryan Angelo on Unsplash

I tried creating an amazon seller account, I read the instructions on the site and although verifying identity is a good thing but amazon India requires you to even set up GST verification!

If you are having standalone business it would require a little paperwork to create an Amazon seller account and would take typically a week to verify it.

But unlike other countries verification process is quite a lot here, and don't think if you want to sell just books you won't be needing id, I have called the customer service and to be honest few of them said it is OK without having GST number for selling books while others said you need to have a GST for selling any item.

If somehow you can manage that you would be fine(Probably).

It's not a disaster but just an additional step to watch out for!

Having said that a lot of people have grown business with Amazon and who knows you might too!

Garage Sales/Dollar Store Are Almost Non-Existent:

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

If you ever watched shows like Reezy resells or trash talk by Gary vee you might have seen that sometimes they visit the local garage sale or yard sale to grab items at low prices.

Basically peoples in America put their old stuff out in their open garages or gardens etc and sell them at a low price sometimes too low, they do so to get rid of the old stuff or probably when they are moving to another place.

Anyone can stop by and buy some stuff! This is a great place for the people who want to flip stuff online as they can easily buy, negotiate, and see their items.

Garage Sale

Now, that's great! But it doesn't happen in India, there are online Facebook pages about your local city garage sales but I didn't found a physical place, so that's another bummer.

Things would be a lot easy if this happened but as an alternative, you can try finding cheap bookshelves, or shops that sell stuff at low prices or huge markets where people sell stuff at insanely low prices.

Also, there are no stores like the dollar store or pound store where each item is priced around that number. So finding things to flip would become harder than outside, but it will be possible!

Major Retail Stores:

Photo by Morning Brew on Unsplash

There are great retail stores or bookstores available like Crossword etc where you can scan books or maybe other items to sell but you might struggle to find a variety of stuff to flip online.

The whole idea of retail arbitrage is based around making a profit by flipping stuff and to flip stuff you first need to buy it from retail stores which sell that in discounted price and the major stores that do that like Walmart, Goodwill, Target, etc are limited or non-existent so you have to look harder at normal retail stores to scan items and come up with a better stock of stuff to sell.

Don't get this wrong, local retail stores might be enough for you! But the thing about Walmart and others is a whole stock of variety and great compatibility with the scanners.

Conclusion:

The thing about Retail arbitrage is that its real and not some clickbait because the logic and process are quite simple and almost anyone can do it and I have been flipping stuff for a while and although I don't do that on Amazon I do it with places like OLX, Facebook Marketplace. But with the major things missing like eBay etc it becomes a little harder than usual. Anyway, that shouldn't stop you from finding new ways to do it.

Thank You For Reading!

Let me know what you think.

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