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.
The Deals
This is what will make or break this sort of service, no matter how good it looks and what information is displayed, the most important bit is the deals need to be good (profitable and sell). I’ve signed up to the Silver Plan which means I should be getting 7-10 deals a day (at the moment it seems a bit less than this). I’m finding the deals to be decent and I generally purchase about 50% of them. The ROI is upwards of 30% and the BSR in the top 1%.
Compared to Sourcing Lists
With all deals being equal how does the service compare to other sourcing lists:
- More information is displayed (and hopefully more will be added)
- Deals become available when they are found and allocated. This is both a pro and a con IMO. If you do all your sourcing at a set time then you will be looking at deals that were available to others hours before so could be sold out. If you source throughout the day (not many of us have that luxury) then it’s great.
- With a list you share the same deals with the same sellers which can lead to problems (two aggressive sellers can crash a price). With OAD the deals are shared between different sellers which is a MASSIVE advantage
- You cannot copy and paste a deal from OAD as you can from a list
Pricing
The packages start at £99 (+VAT) and go up to £249 per month. The only difference between the packages is the number of daily deals that you receive. In a worse case scenario that you have the silver package and receive 5 leads a day, which equates to about 100 leads a month. Say we only buy 50% of them but we buy 3 of each product, that’s 150 potential sales. Even with a low profit of £2 per product the service can generate a nice profit.
You need to make sure you have enough funds to invest to buy enough stock from the list, I’d recommend at the very least £1,000 so that you can buy enough stock to justify the fee.
Conclusion
The tool is still very new and there are a few things to sort out (it doesn’t work on mobile or tablets) and I have seen reports of people not getting as many deals as they expect (minor, but please fix the image scaling).
I’ve known Karen for a while and she is very professional so I expect all these issues to get resolved. I do use the service and will continue to do so as long as the deals are good. You can subscribe and find more details on their site Online Arbitrage Deals. It’s kind of nice having a name that represents exactly what it is.
If you use Online Arbitrage Deals and would like to share your experience or you have any questions please let us know in the comments.