ExigoSource review

Basically, ExigoSource hunts for arbitrage opportunities between Amazon and other online vendors, upon which you could capitalize.

Not sure how well-known it is - I heard about it somewhere on Quora.

Here’s a review after a few days of use.

Signup and pricing

Pricing is $99/month for members. The website claims to have just a limited number of memberships, and will have you sign a form to join a waiting list.

In about 12 hours from when I got onto the waiting list, I was offered membership.

So this might just be a marketing gimmick, or there’s a very high turnover rate.

Layout of the service

There’s one area with a few guides, which aren’t anything really special. They suggest you buy a label printer, etc.

The main draw of the website is the dashboard. It’s clean and gets right to the point with the information you need.

The header of the dashboard (really it’s a spreadsheet) describes all the metrics - entry data, product image, link to the product on Amazon, category, retail price (what you can buy it for someplace on sale), Amazon’s lowest “Fulfilled by Amazon” price, Amazon sales rank, ROI as a percent, estimated monthly sales, net profit, weight and dimensions, then links to the item’s price history on Amazon.

As you’ll see as I walk through an example case, though, the metrics aren’t entirely forthcoming…

Example

Here’s a reselling opportunity from 9/17/2016 that was presented on ExigoSource. I’m going to blur the specifics so as not to compromise the privacy of the site.

Now, ignore the ROI and net profit seen in the screenshot because those are simply taking the lowest price on Amazon and subtracting the current retail price at Walmart.

Price at Walmart = $7.39 per unit

Lowest price on Amazon = $9.96 per unit

Let’s look into that Amazon price. The first thing you’ll notice is that Amazon isn’t directly selling this toy at all. Anyone that wants to purchase (sales rank was in the 10,000s so people were buying) has to do so through independent Amazon sellers.

Diving into that $9.96 figure, we’ll see that the vendor with that price is not using Fulfilled by Amazon and is therefore charging shipping. So, with FBA, what we could reasonably charge people is $15.74 like everyone else is.

Reasonable price on Amazon = $15.74

Now we’ll analyze the $7.39 we were quoted on Walmart. Say we plan to buy 50 units.

The total cost, since shipping is free, ends up as $399.06 with taxes included. However, maybe $399.06 in dollars at Walmart isn’t necessarily $399.06 in cash.

What do I mean? We could buy a gift card for Walmart at less than face value. I used Gift Card Granny, which searches many gift card resale sites, to figure out we can save 3.14%.

Saving 3.14% on $399.06 means our total for 50 units is now $386.53.

Real price at Walmart = $7.73 per unit

Now, we can’t ship directly from Walmart to Amazon. In order to use Fulfilled by Amazon there’s some minor prep work that Walmart warehouse employees won’t do for us, like barcode-labeling the boxes.

This creates a variable in the sales equation that’s difficult to gauge - how much prepping and shipping from us to Amazon will cost. For simplicity’s sake I’ll give a flat rate of $50.00 (or $1.00 per unit).

Real price to us = $8.73 per unit

Throwing some figures into Amazon’s FBA calculator…

After Amazon costs we’re left with $9.31 a unit, and we know each unit costs us $8.73, so that’s a lousy $30 profit for all this work. We also put over $400 at risk to make it happen.

What kinds of goods are researched?

From what I saw over a ~3 day span, kids’ toys and baby products. If you’re on some kind of list for doing weird things with kids and/or babies, you probably don’t want to be taking these shipments at your house.

When I’d go to crunch the numbers, everything seemed to turn out like the case above with low profit per piece. You’d need to buy hundreds of these items to make anything lucrative.

Bottom line

ExigoSource offers a 3-day refund from the time you sign up. As you can tell from my writing above, I wasn’t really enthusiastic and ended up getting the refund.

I will say their customer service is fantastic. Turnaround was very quick, no hassle.

ExigoSource overall is an interesting concept because I think their research is done by proprietary scraping software. If you saw my Scrabble Boggle bot, you know I’m into writing software to make money. Something along these lines may be a future project.