Massive Scale Cross-Border Amazon Arbitrage

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

• MOST IMPORTANT Source more 'safe' brands to list: DONE
• Make at least 7 software improvements: 7 / 7
• Implement two process improvements with vendor: 2 / 2
• Figure out how to get documents approved for new marketplaces: NOT YET
• Get rates for other countries: NOT YET

I made improvements to the Shopify importer so that it got stuck less often and handled more cases.

My vendor implemented two more processes: one for handling returns at origin and another for received packages not found in our fulfillment sheet.

I also tracked down the local distributor for the products I wanted to buy wholesale. They told me they would connect me with someone that can give me a quote, but I have a feeling I am going to have to chase them.

 

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[freek]

Your consistency is amazing, very inspiring. Thank you for taking the time to write an update every day. Although it's a smaller market i could help you with the required documents for the netherlands.

 

[Tiago]

2023 Recap​

View attachment 53259
I ended the year with record weekly orders and profit.

I started the year with no personally owned business and high hopes for my full time job. I have a senior position in a medium sized company and I have an incentive scheme which is something like stock options. The company’s January results were great but after that the company performed poorly.

Over the course of the year it became clear that my three year incentive plan that I worked so hard for would be worth absolutely nothing. What’s more is that the company was not pursuing a strategy in line with my incentive structure, so I was stuck with just my salary and potentially an outsized share of the blame if the shareholders ever decided that enough was enough.

Since my anticipated windfall was out the window I looked for a way to supplement my income. I had an idea about automated product scraping plus dropshipping. My first attempt was a Shopify store selling beauty products. I had it up and running for a few months with zero sales and a few hundred dollars in ad spend. This was all before I started posting here.

Later I heard about this Amazon business model from a friend, and the very same day I dropped the Shopify store and started building the Amazon bot. Even though there were already established competitors in the field, I thought that I could carve out some of the market for myself through superior software and processes.

The bulk of the development work happened during six weeks over the summer when by chance I was living alone rather than with my family. Especially with development projects, extended periods of focus are great for productivity and I made the most of mine.

This business draws on several skills I have gained during my slowlane career: software development, logistics, and vendor/partner relationship management. These saved me some time on the learning curve, but I think that anybody could accomplish the same as me, regardless of past experience.

There were also many new things to learn, especially the peculiarities of working with Amazon, which is something like driving a clown car through a minefield with a blindfold on and a demon on your shoulder that only whispers lies. That’s not a complaint at all — it’s a level playing field since all my competitors have to deal with the same environment. But the environment itself is ridiculous in many ways.

The business is scalable to maybe an additional 5x in its current Amazon-only form, but this form violates the C in CENTS. One change of policy from Amazon could completely eliminate my business. One mistake in my product filters could trigger some automatic block of my account. One lost consol from my vendor could get me de-listed for not fulfilling on time.

So I’m often thinking about how to allocate my limited time to invest: either grow the existing revenue stream, which is easier but doesn’t mitigate my risk, or grow a new revenue stream which is much harder but does mitigate my risk.

But binary choices like these are often just delusions we create to discourage ourselves from taking action. There are infinite possibilities in the world, infinite ways to make money, and infinite ways to look at the same situation. I need to accomplish both goals: to grow the business and to mitigate the risks. There is a way, and I can find it if I make the effort.

My main perceived challenge is finding the time to devote to improving my systems considering I also have a full time job and a family, much like the main characters in the Great Rat Race Escape . I’ve already made adjustments in both of those spheres to try to free up time, but it is never enough and I never run out of things to work on. Again I am probably delusional and need to take an objective look at things to achieve what I want.

I want to move at 10x speed and I have full confidence that with that speed I can make 10x profit and even structure the company for a sale. This is all possible in the span of one year, in 2024. If it doesn’t happen then it is only because I chose the slowlane out of fear. And if it does happen then it is because I manifested it through directed effort.

Happy New Year.

Great way of thinking. It's not all black and white, there's nuance to decisions. Instead of mitigate risk vs grow business, it's grow and mitigate.

Thanks for sharing your thought processes here, excited to see what you'll create in 2024.

 

[GoldFibre]

Although it's a smaller market i could help you with the required documents for the netherlands.

Thank you for offering. The documents required aren't country-specific though. The same document will work for many countries.

They are looking for a utility bill with the correct name and address on it, but my company does not rent an office or pay utilities.

 

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[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

• MOST IMPORTANT Source more 'safe' brands to list: DONE
• Make at least 7 software improvements: 9 / 7
• Implement two process improvements with vendor: 2 / 2
• Figure out how to get documents approved for new marketplaces: DONE
• Get rates for other countries: NOT YET

I called seller support to ask why my documents got rejected, and they gave me some more information than the last time I checked. I submitted a similar document and it got approved, and then I had to do some photo verification which is now under processing. They told me I could verify everything under my personal name, and then switch my account back to my legal entity afterwards, which makes one wonder what the point of the verification is.

I had a call with my supplier to help them with paid marketing and we scheduled a weekly recurring call. This is part of my deal to get lower rates and so I should be holding up my end of the bargain.

After a very long time without selling any products with the wrong voltage, today I had two such orders. When I checked the listing attributes via the SP API, they had neither the 'voltage' nor 'corded_electric' attributes that I was filtering. So I have broadened my filter now to also exclude anything with any value of 'wattage'. Then after a while I thought better of it and just blacklisted the two brands. After all it has been months since this has happened.

I also had someone order live caterpillars. There was nothing in the API that would have hinted at this, so I just blacklisted the brand and canceled the order.

Other miscellaneous improvements:

• I fixed my weekly performance page, because it didn't handle the carryover of weeks across years
• I added some conditional highlighting whenever order quantity is greater than one, to prevent the mistake of ordering the wrong quantity
• I added a chargeable weight column to the fulfillment sheet so I can get a handle on my actual costs much earlier in the process and also automate updating them in my job accounting system

 

[Justinww11]

Today's Stats​

View attachment 53327

Weekly Goals​

• MOST IMPORTANT Source more 'safe' brands to list: DONE
• Make at least 7 software improvements: 9 / 7
• Implement two process improvements with vendor: 2 / 2
• Figure out how to get documents approved for new marketplaces: DONE
• Get rates for other countries: NOT YET

I called seller support to ask why my documents got rejected, and they gave me some more information than the last time I checked. I submitted a similar document and it got approved, and then I had to do some photo verification which is now under processing. They told me I could verify everything under my personal name, and then switch my account back to my legal entity afterwards, which makes one wonder what the point of the verification is.

I had a call with my supplier to help them with paid marketing and we scheduled a weekly recurring call. This is part of my deal to get lower rates and so I should be holding up my end of the bargain.

After a very long time without selling any products with the wrong voltage, today I had two such orders. When I checked the listing attributes via the SP API, they had neither the 'voltage' nor 'corded_electric' attributes that I was filtering. So I have broadened my filter now to also exclude anything with any value of 'wattage'. Then after a while I thought better of it and just blacklisted the two brands. After all it has been months since this has happened.

I also had someone order live caterpillars. There was nothing in the API that would have hinted at this, so I just blacklisted the brand and canceled the order.

Other miscellaneous improvements:

• I fixed my weekly performance page, because it didn't handle the carryover of weeks across years
• I added some conditional highlighting whenever order quantity is greater than one, to prevent the mistake of ordering the wrong quantity
• I added a chargeable weight column to the fulfillment sheet so I can get a handle on my actual costs much earlier in the process and also automate updating them in my job accounting system

I’m an Amazon Arbitrage seller myself, it’s super interesting to see all the different avenues there are to make money with Amazon. I look forward to more progress updates. Keep it up!

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

• MOST IMPORTANT Source more 'safe' brands to list: DONE
• Make at least 7 software improvements: 10 / 7
• Implement two process improvements with vendor: 2 / 2
• Figure out how to get documents approved for new marketplaces: DONE
• Get rates for other countries: NOT YET

I had a call with the distributor of the toys I want to buy wholesale and got a lot more information about the process. She is going to send me prices and delivery estimates on the SKUs I'm looking for and I will likely have to pay cash as I don't have any credit history with my company yet. She also invited me to come to the showroom next week.

I spoke to my supplier and they told me they are moving warehouses. The new warehouse will be much closer to my home, so this should be a good change for me. I also asked for the rates for my other countries and they promised to send them to me today. But of course I don't have them yet, even after I sent a follow-up email in the afternoon. I will keep following up each day.

There are some delays due to the New Year and Amazon has paused my account several times for having too many unshipped orders. Today my account was inactive for most of the day. All this should clear out by early next week as I have a massive consol coming in with all the delayed orders.

Software improvements:

• I made a bunch of formatting improvements to my order page. It has actually become much better to use from all of the enhancements I've made recently.

 

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[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

• MOST IMPORTANT Source more 'safe' brands to list: DONE
• Make at least 7 software improvements: 10 / 7
• Implement two process improvements with vendor: 2 / 2
• Figure out how to get documents approved for new marketplaces: DONE
• Get rates for other countries: NOT YET

Overnight my account got disabled for 'unauthorized distribution', which is a violation that I have not seen before. After some investigation I found that the ASINs concerned are on my Shopify store, and considering that only ~1% of my Amazon listings are on my Shopify store, I decided to play it safe. I put my store behind a password, effectively taking it down, and then I submitted an appeal and plan of action.

My biggest competitor lists millions of Amazon products on their own independent site but still are able to sell on Amazon without issue. I checked and their website copies the exact product names, descriptions and images from Amazon.

I contacted my account manager and the other people I know at Amazon, told them what happened and sent them the documents they asked for. I called them more than 10 times throughout the day but didn't get any material update.

However in the evening my POA was rejected. I will have to wait out the weekend with no sales until I can get more information about how to improve my POA.

With my sales suddenly at zero it was hard to keep my motivation up today. I'll take a little bit of time to feel sorry for myself and then jump back on the horse.

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Two orders for about 30 USD profit (these were from country 2)

Weekly Goals​

• MOST IMPORTANT Source more 'safe' brands to list: DONE
• Make at least 7 software improvements: 10 / 7
• Implement two process improvements with vendor: 2 / 2
• Figure out how to get documents approved for new marketplaces: DONE
• Get rates for other countries: NOT YET

I called the account health team and asked for more information about the account deactivation. They didn't give me specific information, only general information, even after I kept probing over and over. "I'm not asking what the policy is. I'm asking what happened in this specific case." "Sir, the policy says..." Anyway they think (but aren't sure) that this is a general complaint from the brand owner to remove all listings against their brands. I'm skeptical though, since there are still several sellers listing the brand today.

Anyway I added more detail to my POA specifically around these points and resubmitted. About two hours later I called account health again to ask them for feedback and see if maybe a different agent would give me more information than the first one did.

Then I went to the warehouse because we have about 120 orders to dispatch today. I sat with the guys doing the pick and pack and within 30 seconds pointed out an improvement that should cut their entire operation time in half.

They were printing out the full stack of packing lists and labels ahead of time, and each time they looked for the correct documents for an order they would leaf through the stack one by one from the top. I told them that the list is printed out in ascending order of the order number, so they can guess how deep it is in the stack by the number itself, dramatically reducing the number of documents they need to leaf through.

I was only able to stay in the warehouse for about an hour, so I left with the hope that they can dispatch everything today.

Even after dispatching all these orders I had nine more that needed to be confirmed by today but which were not in the pick list. I messaged all of the customers to inform them that their delivery will be late. I hope that this proactive communication will reduce the instances of a-to-z refund claims against me that have been increasing recently.

 

[msufan]

They were printing out the full stack of packing lists and labels ahead of time, and each time they looked for the correct documents for an order they would leaf through the stack one by one from the top. I told them that the list is printed out in ascending order of the order number, so they can guess how deep it is in the stack by the number itself, dramatically reducing the number of documents they need to leaf through.

Isn't it wild how some people just don't think about what they are doing? What was obvious to you in 30 seconds, they might never have figured out. Unreal.

 

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[Bounce Back]

So I've read this entire thread over a few days and have to say kudos for the sheer grit/hustle shown.

However I cannot help but notice from the get go this venture doesn't really fit fastlane ideals. You have very little control (and in fact rely on Amazon itself for the bulk of your products too - at least I think so but little fuzzy here so could be completly wrong). Every other post is a reminder of this in other ways (Amazon completly shutting you down over and over again).

I can't help but wonder if you would've put this effort (and future efforts) into something more closely following concepts mentioned in the fastlane book how much better it would've been. Though I am at least a little hopeful from the posts where you mentioned you may try to directly source some of the items you are re-selling.

/end my two cents

Regarding your wifi troubles by the way if your laptop has an ethernet port you can go wired very easily - checkout powerline adapters. They let you put your internet signal through your electrical outlets (as insane/weird as that sounds).

 

[GoldFibre]

However I cannot help but notice from the get go this venture doesn't really fit fastlane ideals.

Yes the Amazon-only model is very risky due to lack of control, but very strong in other ways. I'm trying to mitigate the risks and buy myself enough time and money to diversify my income streams.

 

[Andy Black]

So I've read this entire thread over a few days and have to say kudos for the sheer grit/hustle shown.

However I cannot help but notice from the get go this venture doesn't really fit fastlane ideals. You have very little control (and in fact rely on Amazon itself for the bulk of your products too - at least I think so but little fuzzy here so could be completly wrong). Every other post is a reminder of this in other ways (Amazon completly shutting you down over and over again).

I can't help but wonder if you would've put this effort (and future efforts) into something more closely following concepts mentioned in the fastlane book how much better it would've been. Though I am at least a little hopeful from the posts where you mentioned you may try to directly source some of the items you are re-selling.

/end my two cents

Regarding your wifi troubles by the way if your laptop has an ethernet port you can go wired very easily - checkout powerline adapters. They let you put your internet signal through your electrical outlets (as insane/weird as that sounds).

I have similar concerns but think @GoldFibre will figure out how to sell the high volume/margin products from his own site eventually.

I worked for a company doing paid search arbitrage. They bought 1m visitors a day via Google Ads and sent them to crappy landing pages where they made money when people clicked Adsense or Yahoo ads to leave. €120k/day spend for €150k/day revenue.

One day the team of 35 Google Ads specialists went into work and all the Google Ads accounts had been suspended. They all had to be let go. (Thankfully I'd moved on at that stage.)

I always wondered why the company never made better use of the data they acquired. If these arbitrage campaigns for, say, care hire in the US were working enough to be profitable with that low value add model, then become an affiliate and setup a price comparison site. Or partner with a large car hire company and get paid per lead or sale.

In all the years they ran getting 1m visitors a day they never even captured a single email address. Imagine all the emails they could have collected and sent similar offers to over the years?

@GoldFibre... you're not just making revenue and profits. You're buying super valuable data. What can you build that's independent of Amazon so if you're system stops working you'd just shrug and work on fixing it while other revenue was still coming in?

 

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[GoldFibre]

What can you build that's independent of Amazon so if you're system stops working you'd just shrug and work on fixing it while other revenue was still coming in?

The Shopify store is the start of that. Assuming that having the independent store is not the reason my account got deactivated this time, I will be investing more effort into it.

 

[GoldFibre]

Weekly Update​

So I was headed for a record week until my account got deactivated. I accomplished almost all of my weekly goals except for getting prices for other countries. But on Monday I have a F2F meeting with my vendor and should get those prices there.

I only have one goal for the coming week: Get account reactivated

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

2 orders for about $40 profit (from country 2)

Weekly Goals​

• Get account reactivated NOT DONE

I was out pretty much the entire day. I haven't heard back from my contacts at Amazon but will be all over them come Monday morning.

 

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[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

No orders.

Weekly Goals​

• Get account reactivated NOT DONE

I finally got something back from my inside contacts at Amazon, but the response was completely generic. I kept following up to try to get more information but it looks like I'm on my own. I rewrote part of my POA and resubmitted.

The one thing that the generic response did hint at is that it was my listings that were infringing. Which suggests that it isn't something I was doing outside Amazon, like my Shopify store. So I reactivated my store and if that really is the cause, then I guess I'll just have to go all-in on it and abandon selling on Amazon. If it isn't the cause, then I need to use it to diversify the revenue.

I restarted my product upload script for Shopify as well and will keep letting that run.

I also had a meeting with my vendor today and figured out why there has been so much delay in getting pricing for more countries - the vendor himself doesn't know his cost. I tried to sit with him to figure it out on the spot, but we ran out of time. I did get a picture of his prices and what I will do is add some margin to account both for his own profit and any potential error, and then propose that as the price until he comes to me with something more definite.

In any case it is much more expensive than my current shipping so I'm doubtful I will get more traction without consols going out.

While there I learned that he might be lowering his own cost to my existing countries, and if that's the case and I can lower my prices even further then I can definitely boost my revenue once the account is back online.

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

2 order for about 40 USD profit (country 2)

Weekly Goals​

• Get account reactivated NOT DONE

I got some more info from Amazon. They gave me a long list of ASINs to delete and then my POA should get approved.

The tricky part is that when your account is deactivated you lose access to both the API and excel uploads, so there isn't a truly bulk way to delete listings from your account. Luckily I have experience creating scripts that automate the seller portal, so I should be able to easily write one that will do all this for me.

 

[freek]

It seems like amazon has caused you a lot of trouble already. You are obviously very smart and skilled why do you let them have this power over you? The sooner you start selling on shopify the better in my opinion. Isn't this the second or third time they have closed your account? It seems like they can take away what you have built in just a few seconds.

 

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[GoldFibre]

The sooner you start selling on shopify the better in my opinion.

I'm working on it!

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

1 order for about 15 USD profit (country 2)

Weekly Goals​

• Get account reactivated NOT DONE

I needed to delete some 50k 'risky' ASINs from my account and since API access and excel upload access was revoked I wrote a Puppeteer script to automate the seller portal and delete the listings one by one. It deleted about one per second, so I set it running and then went to my job.

When I got home the node heap ran out of memory and only 10k ASINs had been processed. So I thought "Why don't I try running five pages at the same time in Puppeteer?" I refactored it and set it running again. It was not 5x faster but maybe 3x and should finish overnight.

I also realized that I only had about 40% of my catalog vetted by Amazon, so I broke my catalog into batches and shared it with my account manager to get further vetting.

For quite a while I had my Google Ads campaign running with a dynamic ad, but there was only a single impression over the first week. But the past two days it finally started showing and I got a couple of clicks on my products:


I also got my first Google Shopping organic click recently:


I'm continuing to add products through my script. It would be great if the organic side of this could build up over time and eventually make some money.

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

2 orders for about 40 USD profit (country 2)

Weekly Goals​

• Get account reactivated NOT DONE

My script finished deleting the list of 'risky' ASINs I got from Amazon and I resubmitted my POA, but it got rejected again. I am still waiting on a more comprehensive list and once I've deleted those too I will try resubmitting again.

I looked through some premium Shopify themes and found one that I think is a really good fit - it is focused on large stores and has good search functionality. Since I have millions of products, search needs to come first. I started customizing it and finished the product page, and then worked on a simple home page to start with. Then I purchased the theme for $380 and published.

I've been putting off Shopify integration and so I decided to pick a relatively simple task and do that one first. The product descriptions that were imported by the third party app included html that sometimes had inline styling that made the text overlap itself. So I wrote a script that cycled through all the products on my Shopify store, strip out all the style attributes from the html, and then updated the product.

Some follow up things I need to add:

• Set compare to price
• Update price based on DB
• Update availability based on DB
• Set product tag based on Amazon product types
• Create collections based on distinct Amazon product types

I coded some of these but didn't finish testing them today.

 

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[freek]

I looked through some premium Shopify themes and found one that I think is a really good fit - it is focused on large stores and has good search functionality. Since I have millions of products, search needs to come first. I started customizing it and finished the product page, and then worked on a simple home page to start with. Then I purchased the theme for $380 and published.

How fast you are doing things is amazing! This whole thread is just execution, execution and action everyday, a perfect example and a kick up the a$$ for me. Thank you

 

[Spenny]

This badass thread - reminds me to do better.

The Amazon issue is nuts. They don't even seem to care. Keep persisting & I'm sure you'll persevere.

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

0 orders

Weekly Goals​

• Get account reactivated NOT DONE

I chased my account manager to give me the remaining 'risky' ASINs. They were advising me to simply delete all of my listings for now, but since I can only delete using my script when my account is deactivated, this would take a really long time. Better I try to delete the risky ones first and resubmit. If that doesn't work I will start the script to delete everything.

In the evening I received a list, but it was clearly wrong, and then despite chasing more I got nothing useful today.

Every night I do a series of transactional tasks like procurement, updating tracking info, and looking into returns. One of the things I have to do is confirm orders, but last night I totally missed it and about 15 orders were flagged as late by Amazon. I need to make absolutely sure that I never have a brain fart and miss this, because if I have too many late shipments it can also result in either losing the buy box or getting my account deactivated. To help with this, I set up a generic checklist that I will go through every night:


In my Shopify theme the selector for color options tries to display the actual color, but often this doesn't understand whatever Amazon is calling the color and so they look mostly black:


I didn't see a way to change this, so I wrote to the developer of the theme to see if there is a setting somewhere that I couldn't find. If there isn't then I can edit the theme directly and make the selectors display text instead of colored dots. Another easy hack would be to rename the option from 'color' to something else.

For the Shopify integration I added more parameters:

• Price
• Compare to price
• Product type -> tag

I realized that most of my products don't have the Google & YouTube sales channel turned on, and it turns out that there is no way to edit this with the Admin API. So probably the best way to automatically turn these on is with Puppeteer. This will be my next task tomorrow.

 

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[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

• Get account reactivated NOT DONE

I decided to try to accomplish three things today:

• Add sales channel updates to Shopify script using Puppeteer DONE
• Get my bot to work even when one or more accounts are deactivated DONE

In the morning I made the Puppeteer script to activate the Google & YouTube sales channel for each product. Then I combined it with my existing product update script. It took about 90 minutes of focused effort, mainly because Shopify obfuscates its UI with random class names and IDs in the HTML. I also added a retry mechanism because there were some random failures with both the API and Puppeteer.

This change was important because only a small percentage of my products from the Shopify store were listed in Google Shopping. So after running the script one time, the number of products went from about 3k to 60k. I'm hoping that this can at least get me a couple of organic product clicks each day.

But there is a rate limit in the normal Shopify plans. After 55k variants, you can only add 1k variants per day. The way to uncap this is to change your plan to Shopify Plus, which costs 2k USD per month. I will probably make this upgrade once I can prove that this model can work with whatever smaller catalog I can upload.

I started refactoring my bot to handle the case in which one or more countries is deactivated. This refactoring also preps a few other big improvements:

• Decoupling the listing destination from Amazon (so I can also list on Shopify)
• Enabling an arbitrary number of Amazon marketplaces (currently I only list in two, but I had planned to list in more)
• Segregating blacklist logic into Amazon-specific, country-specific, and global (currently this is lumped together, but I want to let Amazon's strict policies prevent me from listing those products on Shopify)

I got the bot to not crash now, and country 2 is being updated even though the country 1 account is deactivated.

 

[jjspano]

@GoldFibre After a recent trip to Uruguay I discovered there are some restrictions local residents face when trying to buy things overseas. Folks are limited at $100 USD worth of foreign bought goods per year AFAIK. People buy from the Amazon International page or a forwarder like Planet Express

With your current model, do you target certain countries? Maybe Uruguay is an untapped market, I know anecdotally that there is a lot of demand for US wares.

Thanks for keeping this thread up-to-date, I find it fascinating as I'm sure many others do! Keep it going

- JJ

 

[GoldFibre]

With your current model, do you target certain countries?

The way you are describing how people get US goods in Uruguay sounds like 'back to back'. Meaning one order gets shipped in one box from the US and goes all the way to the customer's home.

What I'm doing is consolidation. We collect up all the orders for a fews days, then ship them at less than 1/10 of the cost of shipping back to back, then deconsolidate at destination and dispatch with a local courier.

In order to do this there have to be people at the destination country who can take care of the handling. So the challenge with bringing this to Uruguay or any other country is sourcing and setting up a trusted vendor.

 

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[jjspano]

The way you are describing how people get US goods in Uruguay sounds like 'back to back'. Meaning one order gets shipped in one box from the US and goes all the way to the customer's home.

What I'm doing is consolidation. We collect up all the orders for a fews days, then ship them at less than 1/10 of the cost of shipping back to back, then deconsolidating at destination.

In order to do this there have to be people at the destination country who can take care of the handling. So the challenge with bringing this to Uruguay or any other country is sourcing and setting up a trusted vendor.

Ah! I see now, the lion's share of it is saving money on shipping costs and expanding your network of trusted vendor's. I mis-understood your model, thanks for clearing that up.

 

[Bounce Back]

What I'm doing is consolidation. We collect up all the orders for a fews days, then ship them at less than 1/10 of the cost of shipping back to back, then deconsolidate at destination and dispatch with a local courier.

One of the softwares I maintain as part of my business is a freight forwarding software which sounds very similar to this space. Am I getting the terminology mixed up here?