GET MY DAD’S BIG LOTS SCOUTING REPORT HERE!
I spent my last three lunch breaks here with my dad.
Why you might ask? Well it’s because I was waiting on this email:
Instead of buying a bunch of products, I actually spent the time to do a little scouting.
I was able to find around 15 new items I will be purchasing this Saturday (on top of the 20 old finds that I will be buying again).
My favorite find?
I found a health and personal care product that costs $4 normally ($3.20 during the sale) that is currently for sale on Amazon for $24.99 (non FBA) and I will make $15.47 per unit for a return of 483%.
And that’s just the start of the list of items I put together yesterday.
You might be wondering why I’m so excited.
It’s actually pretty simple. The second store I ever sourced was Big Lots (per my dad’s recommendation).
I found these Benadryl lotions that were discontinued from main retail outlets. There were two full displays in the back of this Big Lots.
I did a quick search and saw that these lotions sold in a 2 pack for $25 with a sales rank under 10k in Health and Personal Care.
They cost a full $2 a unit at Big Lots. So I bought both displays.
Every single unit they had in stock.
And over the next month, I sold every 2 pack that I sent into Amazon.
I made a killing from one find at Big Lots.
Then I went to the next Big Lots and looked for more of these units. No luck.
So I went to another one. No luck.
The next one? Same thing.
No matter how hard I looked, I could not find any more of these lotions at any other Big Lots within a 3 hour drive of my house. They just didn’t carry them.
So I did a little research online and found this:
Its department stores sell a wide variety of merchandise, including packaged food and beverages, toys, furniture, clothing, housewares, and small electronics, much of which is closed out or overstocked merchandise. Many of the items in these stores sell out quickly: in the store one day, but gone the next, with no replenishments coming. Many other items, such as foodstuffs, are stocked continually.
Did you catch the awesome part there?
Many of the items in these stores sell out quickly: in the store one day, but gone the next, with no replenishments coming.
This is a reseller’s dream if competition is your biggest concern.
Once a store is sold out, there is a chance that the item will never ever come back in stock. And it might not even be available in another store.
You might literally be the one of the handful of resellers that can ever get your hand on this product.
If we take a quick look at the economics of this, you can see that a limited supply provides two major benefits.I’m not going to use charts this time – I promise (if you want some charts, you can see my full write up of the economics lesson here):
1 – The number of people that you will compete with on the listing is capped based upon the number of units still on the market.
2 – Since there is a limited supply, we are able to sell these units to people higher on the demand curve (a.k.a. at a higher price).
So if we take these two benefits into account, we can why I’m a little excited.
Oh. One more thing.
This isn’t my first rodeo.
When my dad (Jason Wilkey) first told me about this sale, I was not excited at all. Big Lots wasn’t one of my favorite stores and I honestly didn’t have the best of luck sourcing it at all!
That was until this time last year when my dad, my brother, and I headed down to Florida for a fun little weekend on Siesta Key.
We left the airport and decided we should stop for some breakfast. And what do you know!? There was a Big Lots around the corner.
My dad took us into the Big Lots and started showing us some of the items that he had bought tons of over the last few months. He then messaged his friend Travis Ross and got a few more items to look for at a new Big Lots.
And you know what? He found a few items that he hadn’t seen in ages.
That is when I saw where the real money is to be made at a Big Lots.
So I hope you are as excited as I am for this weekend.
And I hope you can now understand why I spent my last 3 lunch breaks scouting and scanning as many products as I could in my local Big Lots.
If you haven’t had the time to go out and scout out Big Lots before the sale, my dad can actually help with that one.
He has being going (I joined a few times) scouting over the last 2 weeks (6-8 trips total) and he put together a huge list (77 items to be exact) of items that meet our criteria for purchasing.
And these aren’t the same leads that were in either this list or this list from the last sale. These are brand new leads.
You can get the list here.
Side note:
If you want to get your coupon and sign up for the rewards club at Big Lots, you can do so below (I copied and pasted their tweet to make it easy):
Coming this weekend! Sign up free now to get early access! Click here: http://biglots.ly/60128ulHI to learn more.