Founder, Aftermarket Arbitrage · 14 August 2026
▶ Watch the filmed trip behind these numbers (18 min)
The video above is a real trip. A spare couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon, a drive over to Bury, and a run around a few Tescos and Home Bargains with Beth and a cameraman. By the time we got home we’d bought stock the scanner priced at roughly £170 of profit. And I want to be precise about that word. Nothing was sold. It went in boxes that night and off to Amazon the next day. £170 is what the numbers said at the shelf, not money in my account. Some of it shifts in a week, some of it sits, and a price drop or a return takes a chunk out of any line on that list. That’s where the £85 an hour in the video title comes from: £170 split over the couple of hours we were out. We were out two to three hours, so it’s really £57 to £85 an hour. Now be careful with that number, because I was. It’s two of us working, not one. It’s estimated profit on stock that hadn’t sold yet. It’s before the £30 of fuel. And it’s one Sunday afternoon in one town. It isn’t a wage, it isn’t what next Sunday pays, it is not an hourly rate anyone can plan around, mine included, and I’m not suggesting you’ll see it.
So let’s answer it properly (how much can you actually make doing retail arbitrage in the UK?) without pretending one filmed afternoon is a salary. If you’re brand new and don’t yet know what retail arbitrage even is, start with my full retail arbitrage UK guide first. From here I’m assuming you know the basics and just want the truth about the money.
What the £170 actually looked like, store by store
Here’s the whole trip, with nothing smoothed over:
The itemised session, scanner’s estimates
Walking out I said it on camera: it’s not great, but it’s better than walking out with nothing. You’ve got to stay positive.
331% ROI on only four units. Slow seller at 15 sales a month, but when you’re tying up £8 to make nearly £25, you’d be stupid to leave it on the shelf.
I had a call booked for half past, so that was us done.
Total: around £170 profit for two to three hours out of the house. A decent hourly rate, if you ask me. But those are the numbers from one filmed Sunday afternoon, in one town, with everything I explain below going in my favour. Results vary massively. That figure is not typical, it is not a promise, and I’m not implying you’ll match it.
Where the money actually came from, because this is the part that matters
If you only take the headline number, you’ll learn nothing. Look at where the £170 was earned:
- Over a third of it came from one shelf-clear on a lead someone had already found. The £60 Home Bargains item was posted in our Discord before I ever walked into the store. I didn’t discover it. I executed on it, and then bought it again at the next branch, because chains like Home Bargains stock mostly the same products store to store. Rinse and repeat.
- A chunk came from experience. Beth spotted the Nicorette because we’ve sold Nicorette before and know it moves. You can’t know that on trip one, and that’s fine. You get it by doing the trips.
- A lot of it came from what we didn’t scan. I walked past small markdowns without lifting the scanner. A £7 product reduced to £5.25 isn’t reduced-to-clear, that’s just standard pricing. I guarantee it’s cheaper than that on Amazon. I want deep cuts: £19 down to £7.50, 50% and above.
Filtering before you scan is the single biggest thing separating a productive hour from a wasted one.
So the honest version of "£85 an hour" is: leads plus experience plus discipline, compressed into a couple of hours. The method behind all of that (where the reduced sections are, how the scanning works, what to check) is in the definitive guide, so I won’t repeat it here.
What your trip will look like next to mine
I’m not going to invent an "average beginner income" figure, because anyone quoting one at you is guessing. What I can do is show you the difference inside my own trip.
My first Tesco is the honest end of the day
Four units and £10 to £11 of estimated profit for the best part of an hour. I’m not telling you that’s what you’ll get. I’ve no idea what your stores hold on the day you walk in. It’s just the part of my afternoon nobody puts in a thumbnail, and it’s the part I’d want a beginner to have seen. I said it in the video and I’ll say it again: you can spend a lot of time scanning products that just don’t give you the return you want, or that aren’t on Amazon at all. It’s not easy. If your first few trips feel like that, nothing is wrong. You’ve got to stay positive, because every trip is teaching you what’s worth scanning and what isn’t.
Experience changes the shape of the day
What made my afternoon was everything a beginner doesn’t have yet: known winners I could re-buy on sight, a partner who’s developed the eye, other branches of the same chain, which I knew would have the same stuff on the shelf, and a community feed of leads already checked by other people. None of that is magic. It’s reps. The difference between store one (£11) and store three (£150 on the day) is simple: by store three I was buying things I already knew sold, not scanning things I’d never seen before.
Store one against store three
One more honesty point: we just missed a run on Brita filters that members of our server had been absolutely cooking on. Timing matters. Some weeks the reduced sections are generous, some weeks they’re sushi trays and 25p markdowns. No matter the time of year there are always profitable items out there. But not in every store, on every visit, at the same rate.
The maths that decides your hourly rate
Retail arbitrage isn’t an hourly wage. It’s a run of small buying decisions, and how strict you are on each one is what decides whether the afternoon was worth going out for. Here’s what I hold to, straight out of the video:
- ROI: when you’re selling on Amazon you want to be aiming for anything 30% plus ROI on these deep-discount finds. My absolute floor on anything I buy is 20% ROI. That’s after Amazon’s fees, and it isn’t greed: it’s the room I need for a price drop, a return, or a few weeks of storage before it sells. Under 20% there’s nowhere to go when one of those turns up, and one of them always does.
- Velocity: BSR ideally 50k and below, with estimated monthly sales actually showing. An item with unknown BSR and unknown sales is listed but nobody’s buying it. It’ll just sit in your inventory.
- Profit per decision: the £1.94 Philips item failed not on ROI alone but on time. Small profits on slow decisions kill your hourly rate faster than anything.
I rejected an item "saving £17" on exactly this rule.
Every one of those numbers depends on getting the fees right, because Amazon’s cut is where most beginners’ "profit" quietly disappears. Before you buy anything, run it through the Amazon profit calculator, and use the FBA fee checker to see exactly what Amazon will take on a specific product. A deal that looks like £3 profit on the shelf can be a loss once referral and fulfilment fees land.
What you need before any of this applies to you
You’ll notice the trip cost money before it made money: stock, plus about £30 of fuel. None of that comes out of the £170. That figure is the scanner’s profit-after-Amazon-fees added up, before fuel, before boxes and labels, before shipping it in, and before tax. Take those off honestly and the afternoon is a fair bit smaller than the headline. My standing rule is £500 minimum to start, £1,000 to be comfortable: enough to buy real quantities when a shelf-clear appears, because 29 units at £2.50 is a £72.50 decision you need to be able to make on the spot. The full breakdown of where that money goes is in how much money you need to start Amazon FBA in the UK.
And if driving round retail parks isn’t your life (no car, no local stores, no free afternoons), the same maths works from a laptop. That’s online arbitrage, and the discipline is identical: deep discounts, real sales data, strict ROI.
So, how much can you make?
Here’s my straight answer. On the filmed afternoon, with leads, experience and a disciplined filter, two of us turned a spare couple of hours into roughly £170 of profit. I can’t tell you what your early trips will hold. That depends on your stores, your money and the week you walk in. What I’d say is judge the first few on what you learned rather than what you banked, and don’t take one filmed afternoon as your benchmark. Some people stick at it and get sharper at spotting deals. Plenty try it and decide it isn’t for them. Nothing I’ve written here makes either one happen. Anyone promising you a fixed income from retail arbitrage is selling you something. What I’d say instead is smaller and more useful: you can check every number on every item before you spend a penny, so you never have to buy on hope. Whether that turns into money depends on your buying decisions, the stores near you and how long you stick at it. And for some people the honest answer is that it doesn’t.
A big part of my afternoon came from leads other members had already found and shared. If you want to see how that side works (the community, the lead channels, the support), have a look at what’s included in membership. Straight about it, though: joining doesn’t buy you £170 afternoons. Members see the same leads I do, and what anyone makes from them comes down to their own money, their own stores and whether they act on the day. Some members do well with it. Some don’t. I don’t promise either. And as always: my results are my results, from one documented day. Yours will vary, and nothing here is a guarantee of anything.
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.
