Many of you know that Rebecca and I (Stephen) are a team when it comes to our Amazon FBA business. While I mainly focus on retail arbitrage and wholesale sourcing, she is the specialist when it comes to online arbitrage… and specifically sourcing and selling shoes on Amazon.
Since Rebecca has such a wealth of knowledge about sourcing and selling shoes, I decided to sit down with her and record a Q&A interview video focused on the biggest lessons we learned when we first started selling shoes on Amazon.
In the video below, you’ll learn:
- Why we added shoes to our Amazon business model
- How adding shoes impacted our Amazon FBA business
- How shoes helped our ASP increase substantially
- What the competition is like in the Shoes category
- Why brand restrictions in shoes don’t have to be a problem for FBA sellers
- How selling shoes has changed our lives
- Why we choose to source shoes via OA instead of RA
- How sales ranks of shoes are different than most other categories
- … and more!
Enjoy the conversation.
So, what do you think about selling shoes on Amazon? Leave us a comment below the video if you have a specific shoe question and we’ll see about addressing that in a future blog post or video.
*Updated for 2022
The #1 way we source shoes to sell on Amazon is via online arbitrage.
If you want to add or improve your existing online arbitrage (OA) sourcing skills, then check out our course: The Reseller’s Guide to Online Arbitrage: Grow Your Amazon FBA Business With Online Sourcing Profits.
The course is a combination video course (5+ hours of OA training) and a 100+ page ebook. The videos and book both share the exact same content (so you can pick the format you most like to learn from). The course also comes with six time-saving and money-making bonuses all at no additional charge!
Digging that TaxJar shirt, Stephen! 😀
Thanks Jennifer! I love it… and thank you again for sending it to me. You’ll see it in some more videos soon. 🙂
Great to know how shoes sell. I have been intrested but was a little hesitant to take the plunge.
The whole reason I started shoes is due to this website. Thank you!
Now, I’ve sourced shoes using manual OA methods and I’ve come up empty every time. Without UPCs, I feel uncertain on the right match. Maybe I’m shopping the wrong sites, but OA for shoes seems to consume a lot of time and I’ve got nothing to show for it. Hopefully you’ll explain your process in upcoming posts!
Thank you so much, great little video! Sincerely appreciate that you’re willing to share this information and knowledge.
Nice video. I’m really interested in your OA techniques for finding shoes.
Thanks for the info. Looking forward to more.
Great information. I will certainly be looking at shoes as soon as I get my account reinstated. Do you have any recommendations on reinstatement of accounts for related account suspension? Thanks I appreciate your input.
Lydia, sorry to hear about your recent suspension. If that ever happened to me, the first place I would go is to this reinstatement service. I trust the people who run this service and would trust them with my Amazon account. I hope this helps!
Thanks for sharing Stephen and Rebecca. I can tell that you are both psyched with the shoe category….makes you feel good, I’m sure.
Great video thanks, would love it if you could do another video on what make a good shoe to buy. How can you use the very little information there is on Keepa to determine which is a good shoe to buy and perhaps more importantly which is not a good shoe to buy. I have bought a lot of shoes that have just sat there for months on months so obviously I bought the wrong shoe.
Would love to know what to look for in a good shoe.
With Keepa, I look at whether Amazon comes in and out of stock on the shoe, and I look at the pricing history to make sure I’m not priced crazy high.
I have been watching your shoe series with great interest. I just started FBA selling with books in January. I know I will need to branch into other categories as soon as I get book arbitrage down. I have a strong background in shoes so this seems the perfect next step. I look forward to the rest of the series and hopefully adding some value to it down the road.
I like sell shoes on ebay – easier than fba – no box requirements. Buy marshalls, ross, tj max gift cards for extra 10-19% discount.
Do you used TA for sourcing ?
We do… and we LOVE IT!!! We let TA source for hours for us… and then go buy items that fit our parameters. You can find out more here: https://www.fulltimefba.com/TA Use the code FULLTIME10 and get an extended 10-day trial of Tactical Arbitrage.
I love the strategy and I already have TA.
Are you guys still using lead lists for sourcing shoes?
We currently use Gated List: https://www.fulltimefba.com/gatedlist
I sell in clothing and get about a 10% return rate – often I cant resell these items. Can you talk about returns on shoes as this is a concern for me and holding me back from learning about your strategies.
When people first start thinking about selling shoes on Amazon, the #1 question people ask Rebecca and I is, “But what about the returns?” and, “Aren’t shoe returns a pain to deal with?”
As it turns out, shoe returns are actually one of the easiest kind of returns to deal with. Surprised? I was when I started selling shoes on Amazon.
Did you know that almost all shoe returns are returned back to Amazon in sellable condition and put right back into your inventory?
I looked at our personal data from over the last 3 months, and over 95% of our returned shoes were put back into our sellable inventory. That’s compared to only 20% of returned items from other categories that were placed back in our sellable inventory.
That’s less than 4% of shoe returns that are deemed as not sellable. That’s about as easy as it gets.
Here’s more info on dealing with shoe returns: https://www.fulltimefba.com/reduce-shoe-returns
Hope this helps!
Thank you Stephen and Rebecca for this video. The one thing you did not mention but was of absolute importance above all else, in my opinion, is the matter of returns. We see even in brick and mortar stores the returns of clothes and shoes, especially when people wear them and then return them. The return issue has been the main reason we have not ventured into shoes, even though I have “toyed” with the idea.
Could you respond to your experience with returns? Thank you.
Yes, this issue is on our schedule to talk about… In fact, when people first start thinking about selling shoes on Amazon, the #1 question people ask Rebecca and I is, “But what about the returns?” and, “Aren’t shoe returns a pain to deal with?”
As it turns out, shoe returns are actually one of the easiest kind of returns to deal with. Surprised? I was when I started selling shoes on Amazon.
Did you know that almost all shoe returns are returned back to Amazon in sellable condition and put right back into your inventory?
I looked at our personal data from over the last 3 months, and over 95% of our returned shoes were put back into our sellable inventory. That’s compared to only 20% of returned items from other categories that were placed back in our sellable inventory.
That’s less than 4% of shoe returns that are deemed as not sellable. That’s about as easy as it gets.
Here’s more info on dealing with shoe returns (and working the return fees into your ROI): https://www.fulltimefba.com/reduce-shoe-returns
Hope this helps!