This is going to be a long one, covering just about every possible thing you can do wrong with Zen Arbitrage.
Most problems come in four forms:
Not repricing and keeping your prices competitive. This is the #1 mistake of all. It is the #1 cause of slow sales and lost revenue.
It cannot be stressed enough: if you're not repricing your inventory every day, that's your number one problem.
Repricing often but have an unrealistic expectations. It's smart if not all of your offers are matched with the lowest FBA price all the time. But understand that when you're not, those items are not likely to sell.
Focusing on extraneous data when you're setting your price. Ignore irrelevant figures like eBay prices, Kindle prices, etc.
Pricing against the exact condition of the book versus all books. Price Used against Used or New against new. Do not get more granular than that.
Pricing too far down the page. Again, to get the most for your books you will be pricing higher than the lowest FBA price a significant percentage of the time. But price too far down the page, and you risk that book never selling at all.
Underpricing other FBA sellers. This creates a "race to the bottom" price-war that no one wins. Match or price higher, don't underprice.
Buying slow-selling inventory. This is the biggest buying mistake, but also the easiest to avoid. To start, its recommend you buy books with an average sales rank of 500,000 or better. (As you get more experience, you can relax this standard.)
Buying "crowded" books. These are books with lots of competing sellers, which are more likely to have even more competing offers moving in in the future, further driving the FBA prices down.
The more offers total there are for sale for a book, then the more FBA offers that are going be for sale and the more competitive the book will be.
Using anything other than sales rank to gauge whether a book will sell. The edition doesn't matter. The publication date doesn't matter. Only the sales rank matters.
Not understanding the limitations of Keepa pricing charts. The two biggest mistakes here are 1. Keepa does not track the prices items sold for, only what they were listed for. 2. Keepa does not track FBA offers (the prices you see are for merchant fulfilled).
Buying international editions. These go by many other names, such as "global editions" or "world editions." These are different than the normal edition, and cannot be sold on the product page for the regular edition.
Thinking of your inventory as a collection of individual units instead of a single organism. If any single book or even a multiple books aren't selling, it is not a symptom that something is wrong with the system overall. It's just a single book. It is normal to lose money on a certain percentage of your books. That will happen. What matters is that you make money overall.
Getting overly fixated on condition. If you're ordering books, and finding the condition description was inaccurate over 10% or 15% of time, the problem is that you're probably being too strict with your standards.
Not separating the things that you can't control from the things you can. One example is getting fixated on other sellers underpricing you. That is something you cannot control. It is just one of those things that happens in a marketplace. We can't control everybody. So it's not useful to obsess whatever other sellers do.
Having unrealistic expectations. Zen Arbitrage is not a "get rich quick" system, Online book arbitrage is just about the highest return, shortest turnaround system in the world. But it is not push-button cash and it does take disciplined effort.
Making assessments based on a small inventory. Avoid making any assumptions about if you're doing things right based on a tiny inventory. Having a few books is too small of a data-set to reveal if you're doing this right.
Virtually anything that is not related to sourcing or pricing is a distraction.
Let that be your guiding principle, and you'll do well with Zen Arbitrage.
- Peter Valley