Saturday 17 September 2016

How We Turned Date Night Into Over $12,000 In Profits

By The Selling Family

We Source For Inventory On Date Nights

So, we may be weird because our Date Nights often turn into a combination work night.  Seriously, we just can’t help it. 
We enjoy the hunt.  The thrill of finding something spectacular that is going to make huge profits!  We usually start out with no plan of looking for inventory, but if we start doing the “I don’t know, what do you want to do”, we turn that into “Want to go make some money?”.  Now, as I write this I realize it could sound really bad to someone who isn’t familiar with our business.  We shared this in our Amazon Boot Camp Facebook Group and quickly realized that we are not alone in the Date Night Hustle mentality. 
Especially amongst the sellers who have both partners working the business. That is just super cool in my book!
Ok, now let’s get back to the story on how we turned date night into $12,000.  I’ll start off by saying that we did NOT spend $12,000 to do it.   
We decided to visit one of our favorite Liquidation Stores.  It’s been about a month since we’ve been there so we figured it was ripe for the picking.  And we were right!  There were are few really awesome items that night.  One of which will probably take us a year to sell through!
I may need to back up just a bit.  Our favorite way of sourcing is buying discount products from local liquidation stores. 
These are stores that buy “pulled” inventory from manufacturers and retail stores like Costco and CVS.  Then they get sold in discount stores for a fraction of what they cost originally (often 50% or more off).  If you’ve been to a Grocery Outlet or Big Lots, this is very similar to what we visited.  We get great deals using this strategy from the chain stores too. But tonight we went to a one of a kind, mom and pop type store that doesn’t have multiple locations.  
When we source from stores like this, it’s really like looking for adiamond in the rough.  We scan way more items than we pull the trigger on.  Many of the products in the store are not appropriate for reselling, because they are either expired or damaged.  So in a huge store, we only came out with 3 products that we wanted to purchase.  We found about 10 items that had margins around 50%, but we were looking for large quantities.  That just fits our business model better right now.  But, if we were needing to spend a certain amount of money we would have bought a few more items.
On this night we purchased 3 items that had great margins, and a good quantity available.  I’ll share the details about them below.

Lotion Selling For $80 For A 3 Pack!

The first item we got was some lotion that is selling for $79.99 a 3 pack.  This particular line has been discontinued and is hard to find.  

We paid $4/bottle so a cost of $12 for the 3 pack.  We purchased 22 packs total.  The profit per pack is $49.
  • Total Cost: $264
  • Potential Sales Price: $1559.58
  • Potential Profit: $1,078
Not bad for some lotion!  

Turkey Brine Selling For Almost $40 For A 3 Pack!

The next item we got was some Turkey Brine that is selling for $37.97 a 3 pack. This comes out yearly, but is seasonal.  

We paid $1.50/bottle so a cost of $4.50 for the 3 pack.  We purchase 9 packs total.  The profit per pack is $21.50.
  • Total Cost: $40.50
  • Potential Sales Price: $341.73
  • Potential Profit: $193.50
Would you think that buying 9 packs of something would be “worth it”?  

And The BIG Money Maker!  Discontinued Tea Selling For $15 A Box!

Now the product that makes the whole trip worth writing about.  We found a pallet of tea that is selling on Amazon for almost $15 a box.  We will be selling these in 2 packs to get a higher profit margin. $15 a box probably seems like nothing.  But when you are talking about making over $8,000 off of a purchase it is in more perspective.  Our cost was only $1.25 a box.  Talk about awesome profit margins!
It’s buying quantities of great finds like this that make the hunt so worth it.  If these sell for a year, it could bring in almost $750 a month for a full year.  I share more examples like this one in our recently updated Liquidation Gold guide.  
3 finds like this a year can mean making a couple thousand dollars extra a month, and not having to source inventory again all year!  Of course, we still keep hunting for inventory, but when you don’t want to make or work a lot, you can do it easily with liquidation.  

We paid $1.25/box.  We purchased 1104 boxes of this tea (552 - 2 packs).  The profit when sold as a 2 pack at $30 is: $19.95.  
  • Total Cost: $1,380
  • Potential Sales Price: $16,560
  • Potential Profit: $11,012
The reason we are going to sell these in 2 packs is because the customer gets close to the same purchase price, but it will increase the profit over $1,000 extra.

A Date Night That Turned Into Over $12,000

So, as you can see, our date night turned into a profit potential of $12,283.  The total we spent on this trip was $1684.  As we sell through the different items we will be sure to update with the actual profit seen.
The tea will most likely take us about a year to sell through. 
Which is common for large purchases like this.  We try to get a few of these per year.  The more the better obviously.  But, full pallets worth buying aren’t everyday occurrences.

You Can Do This Too!

If this type of sourcing seems like something you would like to try out.  Check out our newly updated (Jan 2016) Liquidation Gold guide.  This sourcing is done locally at stores, not online.  If you don’t have the one of a kind stores like we do, remember these same strategies apply to stores like Big Lots and Grocery Outlet. For those, we just never get the quantity all from one store.  But we drive to multiple locations to see the same results!  Read all about it in our guide today. 

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