Supermarket Arbitrage UK: How I Made £530 in 6 Hours

By Jack Bayliss
Founder, Aftermarket Arbitrage · 14 August 2026

The video above is me doing the most ordinary version of this business there is: walking into UK supermarkets and high street stores, scanning discounted products off the shelf, and buying the ones where the numbers work, then selling them on Amazon FBA. I’ll be straight with you the same way I was in the video: the title says one day, but I actually did it in about three hours across two days, six hours of sourcing in total. I told a bit of a porky and I owned it on camera within the first minute. What you see is the real, filmed haul from the video I published in July 2026, and it came to roughly £530 in profit: TV remotes, charging cables, LEGO, a £2 clearance find that sells for £85, and a Boots stop-off on the way back from the gym. This article turns those two trips into something you can actually copy.

The method, turned into a repeatable process

What I did in the video isn’t luck and it isn’t a trick. It’s retail arbitrage (buying discounted stock in physical UK stores and reselling it on Amazon), done the same way I’ve done it hundreds of times. Here’s the haul broken down into the steps that actually matter.

1. Go where the discounts live

Full-price shelves are a waste of your time. Almost everything at RRP loses money on Amazon once fees come out. That’s normal, not a failure. So you head straight for clearance ends, yellow-sticker sections, seasonal markdowns and promo bays. That’s where the money hides: the £2 item that sells for £85 came straight out of a clearance section.

2. Targeted scanning: know exactly what you’re looking for

There’s a myth that you should scan everything in the store. That’s wrong. Scanning everything is a waste of your time. You’d be there four hours and most of what you scan is full-price stock that was never going to work. I scan with intent, and the targets are always the same: deep discounts (usually 50% off or more), clearance shelves and ends, yellow-sticker sections, and multi-buy offers where the per-unit price quietly drops below what the Amazon market notices. Those are the signals that say ‘margin might live here’. Then, once something’s in my hand, the decision flips to pure data. I said it plainly in the video: we are not bothered about what product we’re selling, we care about the numbers underneath it. I bought TV remotes because the scan showed £4.55 profit a unit, not because I have opinions about remotes. Target the discount signals; judge on the data.

I scan with SellerAmp on my phone: every candidate, in the aisle, before a penny leaves my pocket. Full disclosure: I have a partnership with SellerAmp. I used it long before that, and I’d tell you to use it either way. It shows the live Amazon price, the fees, the sales rank and the profit in seconds. One product from that haul paid for months of the subscription on its own. Anyone doing Amazon FBA in the UK should be using it.

3. Check the numbers properly before you commit

A scan tells you the headline. Before I buy in any depth I want the real profit after Amazon’s referral fee, the FBA fulfilment fee and VAT, because that’s where beginners get destroyed. If you want to sanity-check a product from your sofa first, run it through my Amazon profit calculator and the FBA fee checker. The fees on a cheap, bulky item can eat a margin that looked healthy on the shelf.

4. When a deal is real, buy the depth

A good deal found and half-bought is money left on the shelf for someone else. Obviously depth has limits (check how fast the product actually sells before you clear a bay), but timid buying is one of the most expensive habits in this business.

5. Use small wins as box fillers

Every FBA inbound box you send has empty space in it, and empty space is wasted postage. Small, high-ROI items (like the seat rails I found at £2.65 profit and 106% ROI) exist to fill those gaps. They’ll never headline a haul, but they turn dead air in a box into another fiver.

6. Fit it round your life, and always do the next store

None of this was a planned sourcing day. The Boots haul happened because I stopped in after the gym. The LEGO was bought at nine o’clock at night because I was bored at home. That’s the point of this as a side income: it slots into a routine you already have. And the single most important habit is going to that next store when you’re tired and the last two gave you nothing, because that’s exactly when the £2-to-£85 gems turn up. If you’re someone who gives up, you will miss the golden opportunities.

To me the money is already mine, sat on a shelf somewhere. I just have to go and find it.

The real numbers from those two days

Here’s the full tally from the video, exactly as I counted it on camera:

Total: £530 profit from six hours of sourcing across two days, the haul from the video I published in July 2026. And let me frame that honestly, because I’d rather under-promise: that was one filmed stretch on one specific set of days, from someone who’s been doing this for years and knows which shelves to walk to. Your results will vary. Some trips you’ll come home with £30 of finds; some trips you’ll come home with nothing, and coming home with nothing is better than coming home with stock that loses money. Nothing on this page is a promise, a typical result or a guarantee. It’s a documented example of what the method produced on the days I filmed it.

Which stores, and why

The honest answer from that haul: supermarkets and high street stores all across the UK, and the only one I’ll name from the video is Boots, because that’s where the £15-to-£73 find came from. But the pattern of where money hides is consistent, and it’s worth more to you than a list of shop names:

• Supermarkets (Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, Morrisons) are strongest on clearance electronics and accessories, seasonal lines, toys and home. Cables, remotes, that kind of line are classic supermarket-clearance finds: stock the store wants gone, at a price the Amazon market hasn’t caught up with.
• Health and beauty chains (Boots and Superdrug) run deep markdowns on branded products with strong, stable Amazon demand. That’s exactly what the £41-a-unit find was.
• Discounters (B&M, Home Bargains and friends) are a different animal: their everyday price is the discount, so you’re scanning the whole store, not just an end cap.

Why does any of this exist? Because a physical store’s problem is space, not price. When a line is discontinued, a season ends or a planogram changes, the store needs the shelf back more than it needs the margin, and Amazon’s price doesn’t move just because Tesco’s did. That gap is the entire business. It’s also why online arbitrage works on the same logic from your laptop: same gap, different shelf.

The rules that make it work

Six hours and £530 looks casual on camera. It only works because of rules I never break, and every one of them exists because breaking it costs real money.

• Match by barcode, never by title. Scan the barcode and confirm you’re on the exact Amazon listing: same product, same size, same pack count, same variation. A title that looks right is how you end up selling the wrong item, and a wrong match is worse than no match: it costs you money, returns and account health.
• Hold a 20% ROI minimum. That’s my bar and I’d give it to any beginner. Under 20%, one price drop from a competing seller or one misjudged fee wipes you out. Several of the finds in that haul were 100%+ ROI. The bar isn’t there to be scraped, it’s there so the deals that pass it can absorb a knock.
• Price in every fee before you buy. Referral fee, FBA fulfilment fee, VAT. The shelf price versus the Amazon price tells you nothing on its own. Two minutes in the profit calculator or the fee checker is the difference between £6 a unit and a loss you discover after you’ve shipped the stock in.
• Check it sells, not just that it profits. A juicy margin on a product that sells twice a year is a storage bill, not a deal. Sales rank and sold-per-month estimates are part of every scan.
• Start with enough money to matter. I tell people £500 minimum to start this properly, enough to buy real depth when a deal like those Belkin cables appears. Here’s my full breakdown of what it costs to start Amazon FBA in the UK.

The mistakes that would have killed that haul

It’s worth being explicit about the ways that exact haul goes wrong for a beginner, because I’ve made most of these mistakes myself at some point:

• Judging products instead of data. Nobody’s beginner instincts say “buy seven TV remotes”. Mine didn’t either. The data did. Skip the “weird” products and you skip £35 of that haul’s total for no reason.
• Eyeballing the listing instead of scanning the barcode. Cables and accessories come in a dozen near-identical variations. Match the wrong one and your best line of the day becomes a stack of returns.
• Forgetting fees on cheap items. The gap between £2 and £85 looks like free money. It’s £63 after Amazon takes its cut, and on smaller gaps, the fees are frequently the whole margin.
• Buying one unit of a great deal. Same find, twenty times the outcome.
• Going home after two dry stores. The Boots haul came from a stop-off I could easily have skipped, and the gems only appear if you don’t give up. The person who gives up at store three never sees store four’s shelf.

Questions I get asked

Is supermarket arbitrage legal in the UK?

Yes. Buying stock at retail and reselling it is completely legal: ordinary trade. The store sets its price; what you sell it for afterwards is your business. What you do need to handle properly is the business side: register with HMRC, keep your receipts as proof of supply, and be aware that some brands are gated on Amazon, meaning you’ll need approval before you can list them. None of that is a reason not to start; it’s just the admin of running a real business.

How much money do I need to start?

My answer is £500 minimum. You can technically list your first item with less, but you can’t buy depth with less. And depth is where the money in that haul came from. Twenty-two cables, not one. Four Boots units, not one. I’ve written up exactly where a starting budget goes if you want the detail.

Can I actually learn this, or is it a “you had to be there” skill?

It’s learnable, and faster with someone pointing at the shelf. Everything in the video (the scanning, the 20% bar, the fee checks, the buy-depth decision) is exactly what I teach inside Aftermarket Arbitrage. You can start free, and it’s £40 a month if you decide to continue. You’ve just read what six hours of this method produced on the days I filmed it; the masterclasses are me teaching you to run the same process yourself. No guarantees about your numbers (anyone who promises you those is selling something else), but the method is the method, and it’s all on camera.

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.