Founder, Aftermarket Arbitrage · 14 August 2026
▶ Watch the full sourcing day this article breaks down (20 min)
The video above is a full sourcing day I filmed (Smyths, TK Maxx, Boots, a couple of retail parks), and I left everything in, including the products I walked away from. Every number in here is mine, from the day I filmed. Results vary, they’re not typical, and none of it is a guarantee of what you’d make. This article isn’t a recap of it. It’s the bit people actually ask me about afterwards: the hidden tips. The small decisions I make on autopilot in-store that never get written down anywhere, because they only show up when you watch someone actually do this. If you’re brand new and need the fundamentals (what retail arbitrage is, the scanning apps, how selling on Amazon works), read my full retail arbitrage UK guide first. This page assumes you know the basics and want the edges.
Stack the odds before you leave the house
The single biggest tip in the whole video happens before I set foot in a shop. Before the trip I found profitable products online and reserved them via click & collect at multiple Smyths stores around our area. That does three things:
- The trip starts with something in the boot. If the shelves give me nothing all day, I’m still collecting stock I’ve already run the numbers on. That’s not a promise the day pays (orders get cancelled and prices move while you’re driving). It’s how I stop a quiet day being a completely wasted one.
- No delivery fee. I’m driving there anyway.
- Double up. If the same product is also sitting on the shelf when I collect, I buy the shelf stock too and increase the position.
This is blending online arbitrage into a retail day, and it’s the reason the day in the video was profitable within the first half hour. If you don’t yet source online, my online arbitrage UK guide covers that side properly. The click & collect blend is just the two models shaking hands.
Walk the store in the same order, every time
Watch what I do when I walk into Smyths: straight to the clearance table at the front, then the WWE figures aisle, then Funko Pops. No wandering. I said it in the video and I’ll say it again here: don’t waste your time scanning full-sticker-price models or variations. You only want to be looking at the discounted items.
A store routine sounds trivial. It isn’t. It’s the difference between covering a store in fifteen minutes and burning an hour scanning shelves that were never going to pay you. Every retailer has its two or three zones where the margin lives (clearance ends, markdown tables, the aisles where old lines go to be cleared), and once you’ve mapped them for your local stores, you stop scanning shops and start scanning spots.
Read the data, not the face value
I found two things in Smyths that day that looked great on the sticker. I put both back.
A £5 buy against a £13 sale price. The data showed nine sales a month, Amazon holding the buy box virtually all the time, and about £2.30 profit after fees.
Another had a strong-looking margin, but a second FBA seller was priced £10 under Amazon and still wasn’t winning the buy box. When Amazon hogs a listing like that, your real selling price isn’t the one on the screen, and on that item the realistic profit collapsed from around £12 to under a fiver.
It looked good on the sticker. I read the data and put it back. The sticker starts the conversation, the data ends it. And on that one the data said no. Before any buy, I want to know who owns the buy box, how often it rotates, and what the item actually sells for, not what it’s listed at. Run your numbers through the Amazon profit calculator with the realistic sale price, not the optimistic one, and check the fees on the FBA fee checker before the basket, not after.
Count the sellers before you count the profit
Related, but distinct enough that it kills different deals: oversaturation.
In TK Maxx, roughly 35% ROI and just under £5 profit, comfortably over my 20% ROI bar. It sold fewer than 25 units a month and had 45 sellers on the listing.
Forty-five sellers on a listing is way too many for a product that sells that slowly. That’s not a queue, that’s a price war waiting for you to join it.
Margin and ROI tell you what the deal pays today. Seller count against sales velocity tells you whether it’ll still pay by the time your stock lands at the fulfilment centre. Check both, every time.
Check the variation before you fill the basket
Quick note before the numbers start. Every profit figure in this article is what my scanner projected after fees at the second I scanned it, on the day I filmed. It’s an estimate on stock I’d just bought, not money I’d been paid. Prices and buy boxes move, and some of it sold for less.
CM Punk WWE figures on clearance at around £6 profit each, on a listing doing 100+ sales a month.
The best find of the first store came with a trap sitting right next to it: a near-identical gold-tint packaging variation of the same figure. Grab the wrong one while you’re moving fast and you’ve bought stock for a listing you’re not actually on.
Variations are where speed costs you money. Toys, trading figures, cosmetics shades, pack sizes: the shelf will happily hand you the wrong one. Match the barcode, not the picture, and slow down for the ten seconds it takes to confirm you’re holding the exact variation your listing sells.
One TK Maxx winner is a nationwide winner
TK Maxx is where a lot of brands go to die. And that’s exactly why it’s useful. When TK Maxx clears a line, they clear it everywhere. Every TK Maxx I’ve walked into has had these on the shelf. So when I found a repeat item there (about £3.50 profit at 70% ROI, roughly 50 sales a month, one I already held around fifteen of), I knew the same item would be sitting in every TK Maxx I visited. And it was.
One good TK Maxx find isn’t a purchase, it’s a route.
So the tip: when you find those winners, go and clean up at every single store. The same logic applies to any retailer that clears stock nationally rather than per-store. One thing to know: more people are catching on to nationwide clearances. That’s why getting round the other stores quickly beats scanning more shelves.
Know when gating kills a deal, and walk away fast
In Boots I found something I’d have guessed at around £10 a unit, maybe £50-worth on the shelf. I couldn’t check properly, the app wouldn’t load in store. Left the lot anyway, and the guess is the point: I didn’t need the exact number. I’m gated in the brand, and ungating would have needed a 100-unit invoice from a distributor. For fifty quid of shelf stock, that maths doesn’t work, and no amount of staring at the margin changes it.
The hidden tip isn’t “check gating”. Everyone says that. It’s make the walk-away decision quickly and cheaply. Check whether you can sell it before you calculate what it makes, because a deal you can’t list is worth exactly nothing regardless of ROI.
The double bubble: targeted revisits plus the clearance sweep
The back half of the day wasn’t blind scanning. The plan was targeted: hit more Superdrugs to see if any had Nicorette in stock, get back to Boots for the pumps (products I already knew were working) and sweep the clearance shelves in the same visit. That’s the double bubble: I’m going in for something I’ve already checked, so the drive is justified before I get there. Anything the clearance shelf adds on top is a bonus. Some days it adds nothing. The pumps I’d found earlier at Boots that day are why the targeted list earns its place.
Boots, same route
Clearance pricing is wildly inconsistent between branches of the same chain. It’s annoying when you’re the one paying £8.25 for something you picked up at £2 last week. But that’s also exactly why the same route keeps paying.
Box fillers: the pennies that fill dead space
Scattered through the day I picked up items making £1.70 to £2.50 each. On their own, not worth a trip. But I’m already paying to send that box, so I don’t want any dead space in it. Small, dense stuff like this slots into any gap. On that day they filled the corners of a box I was already paying to send, and added a couple of quid a unit to it. Small money, and it depends entirely on what’s going in the box. I call them box fillers, and I take them almost every time.
Be honest about your geography
Retail arbitrage is notoriously harder in big city centres (London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds) simply because more resellers are walking the same shelves. Rural areas are the other way round: fewer resellers walking the same shelves. I hear far less competition talk from places like North Wales than I do from the big cities. That’s a difference in competition, not a promise the shelves out there are full. My own Birmingham routine still works (train station, TK Maxx, Boots near the Bullring, on the ten-minute walk to the office), but it works because it’s a tight, repeated route, not a hopeful wander.
If you’re urban and the shelves are picked clean, don’t force it. Run the online side harder and use click & collect exactly the way I did at Smyths. That play works from any postcode.
Run these in the aisle
- You only want to be looking at the discounted items.
- The sticker starts the conversation, the data ends it.
- Count the sellers before you count the profit.
- Match the barcode, not the picture.
- Check whether you can sell it before you calculate what it makes.
- When you find those winners, go and clean up at every single store.
What the day looked like on the numbers, and the honest bit
Add up everything that went in the basket and the app put that day at £150 to £200 of expected profit, across three and a half to four hours. Expected is the important word. That’s what the numbers said after fees on the day I filmed it, not cash in the bank. None of it is real until the stock sells at the prices the app was showing, and some of it won’t. Earlier the same week I’d done about £200 in a single hour at one retail park. I’ve had days that came to £50 and I’ve had days that came to £800. The £800 ones are rare and I remember every one of them. I’m not putting 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 those specific days: results vary, they’re not typical, and nothing here is a guarantee of what you’d make. Some days are empty, and that’s the real test: if you walk into five shops when you’re starting out, find nothing, and want to quit, starting a business isn’t for you. Perseverance is the model.
If you’re weighing up whether to start, get your budget straight first. I’ve written up how much money you need to start Amazon FBA in the UK, and my short answer is £500 minimum, £1,000 to be comfortable. And if you’d rather have deals, data and a community doing this alongside you rather than working it all out alone, that’s what Aftermarket Arbitrage membership is for.
Watch the video back with this list in hand and you’ll see every one of these tips fire in real time, including the deals I left on the shelf. Knowing what to walk past is half the job.
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.
