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CAPITAL ON TAP REVIEW

*** Disclaimer. This is not financial advice! ***

My friend Paul Sheriffs asked for opinions on the Capital on Tap Credit card, None were forthcoming so he took the plunge and gave it ago. I asked if he’d do an impartial review about his experience, which he agreed to, so here it is (at the end he also shares how you can get a free £75 to get started 🙂 )Go Paul:A couple of months ago I applied for a Capital on Tap (CoT) credit card in order to grow my Amazon business. Here is my experience of it.

TLDR

Firstly, for those who just want to just cut to the chase, here it is:

  • A CoT card is an excellent way for small businesses to get their hands on capital. The application process is quick and easy, and they seem more willing to lend to small businesses.
  • Appealing features include 56 days interest free, no fees on foreign transactions, and a choice of cash back or Avios reward schemes. Customer service is also very good.
  • The ease with which you can borrow, together with the possibility that they may require a personal guarantee from you, does mean that you need to give thought to how much you can afford.
  • Scroll to the bottom for a referral code giving you £75 when you sign up.

APPLYING

  • QUICK APPLICATION PROCESS AND DECISION. This is one of the things that is attractive about it. It only took a few minutes to fill in the form, and I received a decision very quickly – within about ten minutes if I remember correctly.
  • THEY DON’T PLAY GAMES WITH YOU OR MAKE YOU SECOND GUESS. When trying to raise the credit limit on a business Barclaycard they make you name a specific amount that you want. If you ask for too much they’ll give you nothing. If you ask for too little then you’re left wondering whether you could have got more (and you can’t apply again for three months). If you manage to speak to someone they refuse to give you an indication of what would be a good level to request. Why do they do this?!? It seems unnecessary and almost like they enjoy wielding this power over applicants.

CoT, on the other hand, specifically state that if you ask for more than they are willing to give they will still make you their best offer. They don’t make you play games. I found this so refreshing. I asked for £8,000 and they gave me £4,100.

  • APPLYING DOESN’T IMPACT YOUR CREDIT SCORE because it is not a credit card. (Technically it’s a pre-pay debit card). That removes one of the barriers for some people.
  • THEY SEEM MORE WILLING TO LEND MONEY TO SMEs THAN TRADITIONAL LENDERS. There are reports of people getting credit with only a few months of trading.
  • THERE ARE NO PARTICULARLY TRICKY QUESTIONS IN THE APPLICATION FORM. And, significantly for many of us smaller sellers in the FBA game, there is no need to write a business plan. Barclays have been trying to sell me a business loan for ages. But they say I’d need to submit a business plan with the application. Doing that has put me off, as may be the case for others who haven’t run businesses before.
  • TRUST PILOT SCORES ARE VERY GOOD, which I found reassuring
  • Be aware that even if you’re applying as a Limited Company THEY MAY WELL ASK FOR A PERSONAL GUARANTEE which I guess would effectively nullify the limitation of liability specifically for CoT. I was ok with this, but weigh up your own circumstances and habits.

FEATURES

  • A DECENT (UP TO) 56 DAYS INTEREST FREE if you pay off in full.
  • NO FX FEES ON FOREIGN TRANSACTIONS. Used it for paying a supplier in the States, via PayPal. I added the card to my PayPal account and opted to pay in USD (rather than paying in GBP and letting PayPal handle the conversion). Consequently it cost me £2,328.00 instead of £2,428.72. So that’s a £100 saving right there.
  • A DECENT REWARDS SYSTEM, although there is an optional fee for this. If you want cashback then you can pay a £99 annual fee to get 0.5% on your spend, or a £249 fee to get 1%. And you can get a signup bonus of £50 or £200 respectively if you spend £5,000 within three months.

If you prefer to collect Avios points you can get 0.5 points per £1 for the £99 fee, or 1 point per £1 for the £249 fee. The signup bonuses are 10,000 and 20,000 points respectively.If you’re not already in a rewards scheme then this could be good. Spending £2,075 per month on it will cover the £249 annual fee, and if your spend is bigger than that you’re quids in. Spending £1,650 covers the £99 fee.

  • Apparently HMRC accept CoT, so YOU CAN EARN REWARDS ON YOUR VAT BILL!
  • Note that if you opt for one of the rewards schemes, the annual fee you pay is exempt from VAT, therefore you can’t claim VAT back on the £99/£249
  • Once you have your card your credit limit will automatically reviewed after either 3 or 6 months. You can’t request this review, so you just have to be patient and see what happens. Bear in mind that if your circumstances or usage warrant it they could reduce your limit (although I’m hoping that they increase mine).

EXPERIENCE

  • CUSTOMER SERVICE IS VERY GOOD. I’ve contacted them a few times and they are always easy to get hold of and responsive (by phone or chat). They answered my queries, even ones I thought a typical company might not.
  • AN EASY CONNECTION TO XERO. My accountant is happy with this. Much smoother than my Barclays connection.
  • AN EXCELLENT WEBSITE. Nice design, easy to navigate, and does everything you’d expect. By contrast, the Barclaycard site has been ‘experiencing technical issues’ for over a year now, meaning I sometimes have to give up and come back later.
  • BUT THE WEBSITE DOES JUST HAVE A SIMPLE LOGIN. There’s no secondary password or code, which seems unusual these days for a financial account.
  • THEY (FINALLY) HAVE AN APP. They only released v1.0 of their android app on 31st July 2019. It seems like a clean reproduction of the website. I haven’t used it enough to know if it’s buggy, but an early review average of 4.4 is encouraging. I’m not sure about an iOS app.
  • Even the way that they present your card shows that THEY THINK A LITTLE DIFFERENTLY from the traditional big lenders, and perhaps have more in common with a disruptor type of mindset. I thought it was a nice touch.

SIGNUP BONUS

As mentioned, you can GET A £75 BONUS when signing up if you use this code: 1REFJ737X19. I was about to chase mine up when I saw it had come through on my statement. But you have to actually use the card before it’ll be paid. You can signup at Capital on Tap

CONCLUSION

If this seems like an overwhelmingly positive review then that’s because it reflects my experience. I’ve not come across many negatives. They have given me access to capital to grow my business that others may not have – certainly not with such ease.
Thanks again Paul for sharing this, much appreciated. If anybody else would like us to share an impartial review that will benefit our audience please get in touch. I am happy to share them here and on the main site.

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Long Term Storage Fees Tips

Tomorrow (August 15th 2019) long term storage fees will quick in for any products that have been in an Amazon warehouse for 365 days or more and they’re not cheap. In the UK the fees are £4.30 per cubic foot (with a minimum charge of 10p per item).

In the past I’ve always avoided LTS Fees by automatically getting items returned before LTSF kicks in. However I’ve been trying to run down my inventory some what so thought it was worth looking at what my fees were going to be and if it was worth me sucking up the LTSFs and leaving the inventory in an Amazon warehouse ready for Q4.

The easiest way I’ve found to find your items that will incur LTS fees is to download the FBA Inventory Age Report as a CSV. Then upload this to Google Sheets and do the following:

  • Click ‘View -> Freeze -> 1 Row’ this means the column headers are always visible
  • I’m only interested in co.uk at this point so I select the entire sheet and do “Data -> Sort Range -> Sort by ‘Column B’” This sorts the spreadsheet so amazon.co.uk are the first rows. I then delete all rows that are not co.uk (you can also do this by filtering).
  • To find the items that will be hit by LTSF, I filter out all items whose inventory age is not 365+. To do this: “Data -> Create Filter -> In the heading for column N (inv-age-365-plus-days) and deselect the zero”

You now have a sheet that shows all your products that are subject to LTSF.

If you go to the end of the sheet and scroll to column ’N’, you can enter the equation =SUM(N1:N???) (where ??? Is the row number above the row that you’re on). This will give you a count of the number of items.

To get the amount that you will be charged you need to do a bit more. Select the entire sheet again and do “Edit -> Find and Replace ->  ‘Find: GBP ‘ and Replace with an empty string”, what this does is removes the GBP so we just have a number that we can do equations on. If you copy the Sum equation you put in the last row of column N to the last row of column S you will now have an estimate of what your long term storage fees will be.

I did this and it turns out I have 439 units that will incur fees of  £208.07, which is a lot less than I was expecting (I have been better at repricing this year, especially any over size items). If I got all these items removed the removal cost would be 439 * 0.60 – £263. So I’m going to deactivate automatic removals, do a bit of manual removing of stuff that will never sell and hold onto the rest for Q4. Removal costs are being reduced (in October I think) so I can always remove stuff then.

Any questions let me know.

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Free Tools for Amazon Sellers

The is a many tools available to help Amazon sellers, many of which you need to pay for. However there are a fair few free ones too. Here we share some of the ones that we use. If you know of anymore please let us know in the our Faceboook Group or the comments below (we will add to this list as new free tools are discovered).

Free Analysis Tools


Probably the best and most used free tool for all Amazon sellers. Keepa displays millions of products sales and price history on all the Amazon marketplaces.


Another tool that tracks historic prices on Amazon, CamelCamelCamel. Not sure where that name came from.


Google offer a wealth of free tools. Google Trends can be used to see what is currently trending.

Fulfilment by Amazon Revenue Calculator (Beta)
This free tool by Amazon calculates and shows you the fees and profits when you sell any of their products. It’s available for all marketplaces: co.uk, .com and the other AZ marketplaces.


You can using Google Ads to research keywords and their popularity.

Free Finance Tools and Services


If you’re doing OA you need to be using cashback to mazimise your profits. TopCashback is currently the best one out there, for number of merchants and percentage return. Signup here.


Another cashback site is Quidco. They generally have a  lower rate than TCB but when they have an exclusive they can be very good. Signup here.


Transferwise is a free international bank account that gives you a much better exchange rate than Amazon. This can save sellers £x,xxx’s when doing exchanges.


Zeek is a service where you can buy (and sell) gift cards at a discounted price. So you can effectively get extra savings. When combined with a cash back site you can get consecutive discounts. Signup page.

Miscellaneous Free Tools and Services


The whole Google Office suite is an essential free tool. Google Sheets is especially useful for Amazon sellers.

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Online Arbitrage Deals (The Tool) Review

We originally wrote this review in October 2018, since then the OAD tool has seen many changes so please bear that in mind. We will update this review when time allows.

What is it

Online Arbitrage Deals is a new tool/service by Karen Hutson of BookableVA. Originally BookableVA sold sourcing lists of viable products, they have now replaced these lists with the Online Arbitrage Deals tool. As the name suggests its a tool for finding OA deals.

How it Works

The tool works by feeding you deals throughout the working week. The number of leads you get is dependant on your subscription (there are three different levels). When a new a deal is available for you the browser pings (you can turn this off in Chrome by going to the sites settings) and the deal is automatically loaded at the top of the page and they look like this:

The layout is clean and it puts a lot of valuable information to help you make an informed buying decision. Most sourcing sheets will display the product, fees BSR, ROI, profit etc. The great thing about this tool is it displays more information like number of sellers and the Sales Rank and New Price graph from Keepa. I would it find it useful if it displayed a bit more info (breakdown of fees, 90 day average BSR, breakeven price). Currently it doesn’t say anything about VAT. If you’re not VAT registered you’ll need to add VAT to the fees and if you are VAT registered then you need to take that into account with your profit calculation. In the future it will be getting integrated with BuyBotPro (review coming shortly) which will provide a lot more useful data but that is another subscription cost. Continue reading “Online Arbitrage Deals (The Tool) Review”

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Seller Tools Reviews – Coming Soon

We are busy working on the site.

The aim of Seller Tools Reviews is to provide honest and unbiased reviews of the various tools and services available to Amazon sellers.
There are a bewildering variety and quantity of tools and devices  available. Some of which are suitable for different budgets, skill sets and Amazon business models. We aim to help our readers to find the tools that are right for them at whatever stage of their Amazon business journey they are at.