Search formulas just for the top four needs of Zen Arbitrage members

The fun part of online book arbitrage is that there is no "right search." If there was a perfect search formula, everyone would do it and it would be obsolete overnight.

What keeps Zen Arbitrage sustainable is everybody finding their own search combinations. And there's a virtually limitless number of ways to structure profitable searches.

Here are four general formulas to apply to address your unique needs: Whether its limited funds, fast turnover, limited time to search, or maximum profits.

Big disclaimer, do not follow these to the letter. Always improvise.

Number One: Limited startup funds. You're cash-strapped and you want to know the best way to invest your money so you can turn into increasingly larger amounts of money.

• Set the max used prices for $10.
• Set a low number of max used offers (for example, less than 50).

When you're paying less per book, you are inevitably going to clutter your results with tons and tons and tons of low quality results that have tons and tons of low-ball FBA offers.

With this search, we're going to eliminate a lot of those by setting the max used offers to less than 50 because the lower we get that number, the higher the quality of the results, and the less FBA competition.

The downside with cheaper books is that your profits are going to be less.

If you're spending less than $10 or $15 per book, you're generally going to expect lower return on your investment. That's just the reality.

To start, you're just trying to turn $50 and turn it into $60 and then turn that $75 into $125 and just snowball it onward and onward.

Number Two:  Super-fast turnover/minimal risk formula. If you're one of those people that either has a just super low risk tolerance or need quick turnover (which are basically the same thing), this is the formula for you.

• Sales rank: 50,000 or better.

That's basically it. Because that's really only the thing that determines whether a book is going to turnover quickly is sales rank.

With 50,000 or better, we're getting into the most high-demand books

The downsides of this are:

1. The more high demand for a book, the higher the prices.
2. This dramatically limits the number of results you'll see.

The upside is the books in this range are going to sell really, really fast.

Number Three: Wanting maximum profits.

This is for people who don't care how much they have to spend, or how long you have to wait. You need the most amount of money you can possibly get for your books.

• Set the minimum use price to $30.
• Set the sales rank is to 750,000 or better.

What we're trying to do is find books that have super low FBA competition that allow you to price at $75, $100 or more.

By the nature of the fact a book costs $30 non-FBA, that means the FBA offers have a high likelihood of being $50, $60, $70, $80, $100 or up.

The downsides, or course, are that you'll be paying more per book.

The upside is that books in this range have the highest likelihoods of huge profits and (ideally) no FBA competition at all.

Number Four: You're short on time.

How do you set the searches so that the results are going to be extremely high quality?

One question that might come up with this is, "If there is such a way to set the search results so that it's only showing books that have a super, super high likelihood of having FBA resale value, why wouldn't I just always set the search results that way?"

The reason is that with this very specific search criteria I'm about to explain to you, you eliminate literally 99.9% of all results.

This is a formula that will show you results that have a higher than 50% chance, generally speaking, of selling for 50% profits or better.  But again, you are leaving lots of money on the table if you set your search parameters this narrow.

The rough formula is this:

• Minimum used price of $30.
• Sales rank of 750,000 or better.
• Max used offers of less than 20.
• Amazon price of $49.95 or up

These are books that have extremely low competition, right? And then set an . Now, you see what we're doing here? We are eliminating that price ceiling, right, because Amazon's price is always the ceiling, so we need to get that number kind of high. And, you know, honestly, you might even want to set that higher.

Upsides, again, are that the results have a high likelihood of being profitable.

The downsides are that you're going to see very few books. You might only see a couple of hundred.

And of course, if you're really short on time, shortcut past searching altogether and purchase leads on the Marketplace.

-Peter Valley

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