Massive Scale Cross-Border Amazon Arbitrage

[GoldFibre]

General Stats​

• Active listings: 136,193
• Account health score: 136 (At Risk)
• Policy violations: 4

Weekly Goals​

1. WIP Schedule trial with at least one vendor in Oregon
2. DONE Start pick and pack of UPS shipments from original vendor warehouse
3. WIP Complete automated international document generation features
4. Automate more fulfillment tasks

Actions​

• Dropped off one UPS package at the local warehouse in the morning. They used the new screen to mark the orders as packed.
• Since my software wasn't fully ready and tested yet, I created the AWB label and commercial invoice myself and shared them with the team.
• Another UPS packaged arrived at the warehouse at 3pm, not giving us much time to complete the packing. Called UPS and arranged to do my own pickup from them at 9am for all future shipments. This will save us a day of transit time and lower my costs, since they won't be doing the delivery for me anymore.
• Pushed my warehouse guys to complete the packing anyway and made the courier do a second pickup at 5pm so that we complete the same-day dispatch. We got everything out on time.
• 225(!) orders are arriving tomorrow. These are mostly late orders due to delays by my old vendor. I'm glad I've got my own solution going now to avoid some of these problems.
• Continued working on integration with UPS. Had a lot of trial and error trying to get the addresses to come correctly. The API documentation didn't fully explain how to bill to me even though I'm in the destination country. Finally I think I got the addresses correct, although there is one single difference with the labels that come from the Windows application. My account manager reviewed it and said it doesn't matter. Next thing I need to do is generate invoices. There is supposed to be a way to do this in the UPS API, or I can just make my own PDF. I'll probably try with the UPS API first because then I don't need to write a bunch of formatting code.
• Had a call with a vendor in Oregon and explained everything to him. He seems quite open to the operation and was really curious about the software I made. One really good thing about this vendor is that he can operate on Saturdays and can receive packages on Sundays. This will improve my transit time a good deal because my other vendors only run five days per week. So if I start with this vendor he will get a split of the orders for most of the week but then for two days he will get 100% of the orders since he is the only one open on the weekend. He is going to speak to operations and then we will decide about starting the trial.
• Since transit time is the most important thing in the world right now, I want to start reporting out on it on these daily posts. But I have a ton of other work to do, so the reporting has to wait for my other priorities. Let's see if I can work it in later in the week.
• While doing procurement I found a few more optimizations to the cost and transit time. Automating this 100% is going to be quite a project. I think the first step will be to not actually procure, but to scan the items and delivery locations and make a procurement plan. Then I can review it and either pull the trigger or change the plan.

 

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