260: From Flipping Textbooks to $4 Million in Sales: How to Scale Your Amazon FBA Retail Arbitrage Business
A lot has changed in Ryan's "buy low, sell high" business built on Amazon's FBA program. This week’s episode is a “where are they now?” show as I catch up with Ryan Grant from OnlineSellingExperiment.com. Ryan first appeared on the show back in 2014 on episode 61. Back then he had just quit his $50k a year job to sell online full-time using retail arbitrage. (He’d started out flipping textbooks in college and then got into Amazon FBA retail arbitrage; buying low from stores locally and re-selling on Amazon.) Fast forward 3 years and Ryan’s business has grown at an incredible pace. Note: Click here to download Ryan’s top tips for starting and scaling a retail arbitrage business from this episode. He’s had some pretty impressive media exposure off the back of a Reddit AMA and is on track to sell more than $4 million worth of stuff in 2017. What were the driving forces behind this accelerated growth? “I wanted to make it a true business,” Ryan said. He now has a team of 11 people working for him, has put processes in place to find more items in retail stores, has started buying at wholesale, and can now use his own time more efficiently to work on growing his business and finding expansion opportunities. Ryan’s success is proof that retail arbitrage is still a viable side hustle. In this episode he explains what he’s learned over the last 3 years, and how the retail arbitrage landscape has changed for new sellers. Tune in to hear Ryan explain how he grew his business into a multi-million-dollar operation, how he grew his team and developed processes to scale up, and what he’s focusing on in 2018.