Building A Successful Amazon Business With Replens

What Is A Replen?

One of the best moments as a seller on Amazon is when you find a product that will sell very profitably and is easily sourced. Most RA (retail arbitrage) sellers love focusing on clearance deals. This can be a very good place to look, but it can also be very unreliable. It is virtually impossible to know what you may or may not find when you walk into the store since clearance items are very unpredictable. You could come away with some great profit makers, or you could go away empty-handed.

This is the beauty of Replens (replenishables). These are items that you can sell profitably while still buying them at full price and can be found at any time from your source. When you are focused on these kinds of items instead of the clearance items, you will rarely, if ever, come away from a store without buying any product to resell.

The downside of replens is that they are generally much smaller and lower-priced items than the big scores you find in the clearance aisle. As a result, you need to constantly be sourcing and adding new ones to your list. You also may have other people jumping on listings over time and see the prices of your good ASINs crash. Again, you need to keep adding new ones to your list and keep growing.

As you keep adding to your inventory of profitable replens, you will find you are growing a scalable, systematizable business creating a more predictable level of income.

So the question arises, how can you continuously keep finding those replens?

Where to Start

There are nearly as many techniques to go about finding replens for your business. While very time-consuming and, at times, frustrating, it is good to make some effort to be in the store physically looking for products on the shelf. You may spend a lot of time in there only finding a few products to sell, but the experience you gain can be priceless. Eventually, you will begin recognizing what good replens will look like. You will be able to find them rather quickly, and with this experience, you will be able to make better decisions when you start using other methods.

When you are in the store, don’t simply scan barcodes. Think of how many other sellers focus on barcodes and are finding the exact same listings you would be. Also, in your experience shopping on Amazon, when was the last time you searched for a product you wanted to buy using the barcode? Unless you are a rare one, you have never done that. Very few people search for things to buy using the barcode, so you shouldn’t rely on those as a seller either.

The more organic method shoppers use when searching Amazon is keywords. For example, if you are shopping for peanut butter, you might search for the Brand and the term “peanut butter”, so that is what you should search for as a seller as well. When you are in the store looking at the shelf, use those kinds of search terms and the results that come back will give you a lot more options that barcodes would leave out.

For example, scanning a barcode for an 8 oz jar of Jif creamy peanut butter would show you the listing for that specific jar, and in some cases, it may show you a listing for 2 or 3 jars. Whereas, if you typed a search for “Jif peanut butter 8 oz” you will see a greater variety of listings, giving you more options that the other guy who is depending on his barcode scanner wouldn’t see.

Online Searching

Once you have spent some time searching in the store, you might get tired of being there and want to bring your searching back home to a more comfortable setting. There are a variety of methods for doing this as well.

You could start in the store and take pictures of the shelves and do the same kind of searching from a comfortable chair at home rather than a busy store aisle.

You could also make use of some programs that do more of the heavy lifting for you. Some of these programs can be very valuable for Amazon sellers. But, to be clear, I do not recommend signing up for any of those expensive softwares as a beginner. There is only one that I recommend and that is because I feel that EVERY Amazon seller needs this software.

This one is called Keepa. It is an invaluable program that tracks most ASINs on Amazon. You can find it by going to their website or you can install the browser extension that puts the graph on the Amazon listing page. There is both a free and paid version. But the free version will not give you the data you really need to make informed decisions about the products you are looking up.

The paid version is around $200 USD if you pay annually which comes out to less than $17 per month. Compared to most other software for Amazon sellers, this one is very cheap and is the most useful.

I also like to use Keepa for a technique called reverse sourcing. This method has been the most fruitful for me, and the only software you need to replicate it is Keepa.

Reverse Sourcing

What is reverse sourcing? Basically, I am finding other sellers on Amazon and looking at their inventory, and using this list as though it is the shelf in the store I am looking at. I look at their products and then do a quick internet search to see where I can source each product. If I can source it easily for a low enough price for it to be profitable, I will add it to my list of products to test. After I have a long enough list, I will go and buy those items and send them into Amazon.

I made a video here where you can see the process in action and notice just how simple it can be to start finding profitable products to sell on Amazon over and over again.

Building with a Proven Model

When it comes to building a successful business selling on Amazon, whether as a beginner or if you are a seasoned vet, you will benefit greatly by adding easily replenishable products to your catalog. It will save you much time and effort in this way.

Don’t sleep on this highly advantageous model that can bring great success to your business.