First Profit Bandit meetup – part 1

Last Friday we hosted our first ever Profit Bandit meetup here in Portland, Oregon.

We invited Profit Bandit users in the area to join us for an afternoon of sourcing at a local Grocery Outlet. It’s a store not far from our offices with a variety of grocery and home goods. The stock changes constantly so you never know what you’re going to find.

The $50 Challenge

Two local Amazon sellers, Edson and Keith came out to meet us. They asked us questions about Profit Bandit and about selling on Amazon in general.

And as a special surprise, we decided to do something fun! We gave them $50 each to spend in the store and split up. I went with Keith and Austin, head of Profit Bandit support, went with Keith. I thought of it as a mini $100 Amazon Challenge.

It was interesting how we all had different strategies. Edson, a more experienced seller, looked for higher-return items that he could sell on either Ebay or Amazon. Keith, a newer seller was looking for items that would be solid, “sure-thing” investments to sell on Amazon. And it was very tricky because, with only $50 to spend, we wanted to maximize our profit rather than just picking up a dollar here or a dollar there.

Here are Edson and Keith comparing their purchases:

The Haul

And here’s what they bought. You can see that we’ve blurred out individual items. We’ll be checking back in with Edson and Keith later in the year to see how much profit they made and we’ll reveal their purchases then. So make sure you stay tuned:

As we went around the store and found items that we wanted to buy, we used Profit Bandit’s buy list feature to create a file that we could export and email to ourselves. Then we could use it to create a file to upload our new inventory items to Amazon or import into repricing software. SellerEngine Plus has this feature built in and can directly upload a file from Profit Bandit directly to Amazon.

One part of the store that we really avoided was the grocery area. Many items at Grocery Outlet are either nearly expired, or in some cases, already expired. There are just too many risks in buying and selling items with short shelf lives.

Any guesses as to what they bought?

Coming up Next Time

Later this week we’ll have Keith and Edson share their thoughts on the day.

I’ll leave you with this picture of the four of us. From left to right there’s Austin, head of Profit Bandit support here at SellerEngine, Edson, Keith and myself.

Want to Join Us?

Would you like to take part in the next Profit Bandit meetup? “Like” the Profit Bandit Facebook page and be on the lookout for future events. We’d love to do something like this a few times a month.

Where do you think we should go next time? Would you like to host a Profit Bandit meetup in your town? Let us know!

And make sure you join our new Profit Bandit Facebook group!