Founder, Aftermarket Arbitrage · 17 August 2026
▶ Watch the full sourcing day this article is built from
The video above is a full sourcing day I filmed with Sam, eight shops around two retail parks, and the chains I name on camera are Sports Direct, Superdrug, Boots, Smyths and TK Maxx. I left everything in, including the products I walked away from and the three chains that gave me nothing. This article isn’t a recap of the day. It’s the accounts: which shops paid, which were empty, and where £427 of expected profit actually came from. Every profit figure is what SellerAmp showed after fees at the second I scanned it. That’s the tool I use and that’s an affiliate link, we work with them, and I’d be using it either way. These are one day’s figures, mine, not a typical day and not a promise of what you’d make. If you need the fundamentals first, read my full retail arbitrage UK guide.
Sports Direct was a specific bet and it didn’t land
I went into Sports Direct for one thing. There had been decent clearance game stock going round online in the weeks before, and one title came back at over 33% ROI on the current buy box price. Then I scrolled down to the sellers.
Amazon in bold, holding the buy box, with a stack of others underneath. I bought nothing in there.
That 33% is measured against Amazon’s price, so if they sell out or rotate it I’m pricing against whoever is next, which on that listing probably meant losing money to win it back. While Amazon is on a listing, assume you won’t be holding the buy box much of the time, and stock that doesn’t hold it doesn’t sell.
The first Superdrug was paying inside the first hour
Two units sat on the clearance stand at £8 each. The 30-day average selling price was £31 and SellerAmp put it at £15 of profit a unit after fees, so about £8 of the £23 between buy price and sale price goes before I see anything, mostly Amazon’s referral cut and the FBA fee. That £8 is worked backwards from the profit figure, not a fee line off the screen, and the FBA fee checker gives you the real split. Then I checked the shelf behind the stand and found four more, so six went through the till.
First Superdrug, first hour
The stand is the advert and the shelf is where the stock actually is: on that product the stand held a third of what the shop had. The other find in there was the Nicorette line, and Sam took it to the till, but nothing in the box at the end is Nicorette, so I’m not counting it. Planning a quantity rather than standing at a shelf, I put the realistic selling price, not the sticker, through the Amazon profit calculator.
Boots and Smyths gave me nothing, and that’s in the video
Boots was the stop I’d have backed before I set off. The clearance was pretty much empty, the space it sat in absolutely tiny, and my honest read standing in it was that they’re on to us. Smyths was nothing at all. With the Sports Direct walk-away that’s three named chains producing not one unit between them, and all three are shops I’d go back into next week.
Those bits usually get cut, which is why people starting out think an empty shop means they’ve done something wrong. It doesn’t. It means somebody got there before you, or there was nothing to find that week. You can watch the rest of my filmed sourcing trips to see how uneven one day is against the next.
Budget time for the empty shops the way you budget money for the stock.
The shops in between paid, and none of them paid much
The third stop is a bomb site every time I go in, and it still paid: a £6 item at 44% ROI and a Revolution line at £20 a unit, taking the running total to £116 about an hour in. The first shop at the second park had terrible clearance and one electric toothbrush at £20 of profit. The listing was showing 5,500 sales a month, but I was holding a variation the app put at 2% of that, around 100 a month. Read the sales figure for the variation in your hand, not for the parent it hangs off. That share is an estimate rather than a measured split, and still a better basis than the 5,500.
TK Maxx gave me £8, three Pokémon items at about £4 a unit, and I took two because there were 15 sellers on that listing already. That park was on £28 before the Superdrug at the end of it. Two of those three shops I never name on camera, so I’m not going to send you to them.
The second Superdrug is where the day actually landed
The same product was there, stocked pretty heavily, at the same price, and I loaded up. I never say the quantity out loud on camera: the box at the end holds 20 of them, six came from the first Superdrug, so 14 came from this one, and that subtraction is mine. Next to it was a variation of the same line I hadn’t seen before, over £8 of profit a unit at over 100% ROI on 500 sales a month, and I took seven, counted on camera at a flat £8 each: £56.
Those two lines are also why velocity matters. The one I’d been buying all day does 19 sales a month, the variation next to it does 500. Same chain, same aisle, two different businesses, and my depth went the wrong way round: 14 of the 19-a-month line against 7 of the 500, because there were only seven of the 500 on the shelf. It went on the slow line because £15 a unit is worth waiting for, and given the choice again the extra units go on the 500. The same reasoning left a TK Maxx item at about £4 a unit and 13 sales a month sitting where it was: take the slow one only when the money per unit is big enough to sit still.
So £356 of the day’s £427 came out of two branches of one chain. The same line at the same price in both is what I expect from Superdrug, but it isn’t something I’ve audited: plenty of chains mark down store by store, where one branch tells you nothing about the next.
Where the day landed
The best ROI I scanned all day was in that same shop and I left it on the shelf.
A Burt’s Bees line at £4.45 of profit a unit on 178% ROI, which works back to about £2.50 to buy, but apply to sell in the aisle came back wanting 100 units before it would let me list.
That was my account, that brand, that day, so don’t take 100 as the number you’d be shown. The same wall had already cost me a £20 profit item earlier that day. My ungating guide sets out what those restrictions are, and the place to check is the aisle, not at home with the stock already paid for.
How the five named chains behaved on the day
Most UK retail parks hold some version of these chains, so here’s the honest read from that one day rather than a general recommendation.
Five chains, one did the work
Outside Superdrug the day came to £71, and only £54 of that is something you actually watch me pick up, the other £17 sitting in the box without a shop attached. Which is why I say on camera that if you’re not going to retail parks, I don’t know what you’re doing. Eight shops in three and a half hours only works because most share a car park, and a park drops the cost of a miss to ten minutes and a walk rather than a drive and most of an hour. So before you plan a route, count how many branches of a nationally priced chain sit inside a short drive, because that count decides whether a find turns into 20 units or six.
Where the numbers don’t quite tie up
The £427 adds up. Twenty units at £15 is £300, seven at £8 is £56, then £6 I put down to Tesco, two separate items at £20, a £2 item, £8 of Pokémon and a last line of £15. Two lines in it are softer than the total makes them look. The last £15 goes down against Burt’s Bees, which I’d just left on a Superdrug shelf because I was gated on the brand, having said on camera I’d never sold it. All of that can’t be true at once, and the £2 item never appears in a shop on film either.
The £427, line by line
In store I say three £20 figures out loud and only two make the final sum, because the one I was gated on I never bought. There’s also a second Revolution at full price I say we’ll try for, which would take that line to £40, and the tape never says whether we got it. Two and a half hours in I say we’re at around £350, estimating out loud in an aisle. The only spend figure anywhere in the video is that £45 at the first Superdrug, so there’s no day-level ROI here and I’m not going to invent one.
The £427 is SellerAmp’s per unit profit multiplied by quantity, and that figure already has the buy price and Amazon’s fees off it, so it isn’t a number you take the stock cost off twice. What it doesn’t carry is anything that happens after the scan: a price drop, a return, storage while it sits, and, if you’re VAT registered, whatever VAT does to the sale. My online arbitrage UK guide works the money through properly.
What that £427 is worth, and the honest bit
The day came to £427 of expected profit across three and a half hours including the travel, which is the bit people leave out when they tell you what they made. Expected is the important word. That’s a projection on stock that hadn’t sold a single unit when I added it up, and it isn’t cash in the bank. Some of it will sell for less than the app showed, and some of it will sit longer than I’d like.
I’ve had days worth a fraction of this and days worth more, and I’m not putting any of that up as a range you can plan around, because I’ve also had days that came to nothing at all. Those are my figures from one specific day, and results vary, they’re not typical, and nothing here is a guarantee of what you’d make. If three shops giving you nothing would make you quit, this business finds that out quickly. Persistence is most of the job.
Three of my eight shops gave me nothing and I still counted it a good day.
I’ve written up how much money you need to start Amazon FBA in the UK, and the honest answer for a day like this is that the money came from being able to take 20 units of a line rather than two, a question about your float, not the deal. And if you’d rather have deals, data and people doing this alongside you, that’s what Aftermarket Arbitrage membership is for.
Watch it back with this breakdown next to you: two branches of one shop made the day, and the rest was the price of finding them.
About the author
Jack Bayliss is the founder of Aftermarket Arbitrage, where a team and a purpose-built sourcing engine find and verify Amazon UK deals for members every day. Meet the community on the community page or book a free call.
