Amazon Shoe Flipping 101
Shoe Flipping Basics
If you are ready to join the masses of Amazon sellers who are making a lot of money with huge ROIs, then it is time to get into the shoe flipping business. But before you take the leap, there are a few things you should know.
Never use your Prime account
It is against the Amazon terms to use your Prime account to buy items to resell on Amazon. So don’t do it, or else you might get your accounts closed (sellers and Prime). Instead, just create another account to buy flips with. It is fast, easy, and free. Or better yet, you could start an Amazon business account.
Shoe flips can be slow sellers
I hate to say it, but it’s true. Not all shoes are going to be winners, and not all shoes are going to sell at lightning speed. When they do sell, they have the potential for big profits with high ROI. Just don’t go into this thinking it will make you a millionaire tomorrow; think of it more as an investment in a long-term strategy.
Start with Keepa
Ready to get started? Great! Our first stop to find shoe flips on Amazon is the deal page over at Keepa (Keepa Deal Page). It is the logical place to go since Keepa has been tracking the ranks and prices on Amazon for the past few years. And since they also have this cool page that lets you filter down to items that meet your criteria, it makes for some pretty low hanging fruit.
Once you are at the deal page, you want to start setting up your search. Start with the “Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry” category, and then we can drill down from there. Personally, I also set a few other conditions to make things easier as well. For example, I set the Limit Drop Interval to Day; the Drop Percent Range to 50% – 100%; the Drop Range from $50 – $100+; and I start with the Sales Rank Max # of 10,000. If there are no good results I move the max rank up to 100,000 and then finally 1,000,000.
Now that you have your deal page open and your search filters in place, it is time to start checking the results. Just go through each shoe and click the item to open a Keepa graph with additional information. The important things to note is that the Amazon price is the yellow area, and the sales rank is the green line. Keepa is basing their price drop information on the average Amazon price from the past 90 days, but that can be a little misleading sometimes. We are looking for some consistency with the Amazon price being high, and sometimes going on sale (or better yet, going out of stock). We also do not want the rank to trend too high. Some items rank will jump into the millions, or tens of millions when Amazon has a high price. But ultimately, we want to match the Amazon price when it is up, and sell our shoes then. The higher the Amazon price, and the longer that price holds, the better.
The top 1% of items in Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry have a BSR of 862,000 or less. More info on our free Rank Chart (updated daily).
Check out the example below. While it is not the best example because it is hard to read some of the information, this shoe has been priced at $99 for the last three months, and just went on sale for $42.96. During that time the rank stayed below 500k (top 0.5%) and seems to hover mostly around the 100k mark. That checks the boxes for rank and price, so it looks good so far. Tip: to search more quickly I only look at items with a price that half of what the typical sale price is. I know we set that as a search condition, but it is not always accurate, so use your judgement.
The next thing we want to look at is the size, color, and reviews. Naturally sticking with common colors and sizes is best, but that does not mean others cannot sell as well. This shoe happens to be a size 10 wide (minus one point for size and minus one point for being wide), but that does not automatically make it a bad flip. Just know that women’s size 6-9, and men’s size 9-11 in “standard” colors are best.
We also want to look at the reviews and see how many line up with our size and color. The more the better because that means people are buying them! You can use a Chrome extension for this, or just glance through to get an idea of what sizes and colors are most popular. The review below is a bad review in general, but supports our decision to buy a wide size (point redeemed).
Finally, we need to make sure there is profit in the flip. Personally, if I am going to buy a slower selling item, then I want a higher than normal profit and ROI. So I look for at least $20 profit and 50% ROI at a minimum, and ideally $50 profit and 100% ROI or better. Every account and situation is different though, so do what is best for you. Again, you can use a Chrome extension to calculate the profits for you, or you can do it the old fashioned way with a calculator or excel.
