What is Online Arbitrage (OA)?

Online Arbitrage is basically flipping products. You buy discounted or low-priced items from online retail stores, then resell them on Amazon for a profit. You don’t need a warehouse or a ton of startup capital — you just need good leads, a seller account, and some systems in place.

It sounds simple, but the key is finding profitable products that you’re actually allowed to sell (aka “ungated”), and where competition won’t kill your margins in two days. That’s where things get tricky.

I Tried to Start On My Own — and Failed

When I first started with OA, I figured I could just find the deals myself. Seemed easy enough: find low prices, run some numbers, send to Amazon. But I quickly learned how much of a grind product research actually is.

I was spending 3–4 hours a day combing through stores, comparing prices, checking Keepa charts, only to find a few maybe-okay leads. A lot of them were either:

• Gated (couldn’t sell the brand or category)

• Already tanked (prices dropped fast)

• Or just too competitive to bother

It started feeling like a waste of time. I wanted to build a business, not spend all day manually searching for decent leads. That’s when I started looking into lead lists.

Why I Decided to Invest in a Lead List

I knew I had to treat this like a business — and that meant buying back my time. After reading reviews, checking Reddit, and comparing providers, OASource.com kept popping up as one of the most reputable. People said their leads were well-vetted, had decent ROI, and didn’t tank right away.

So I signed up for their daily list — 5 leads per day. Figured I’d test it out for a month and see if it was worth it.

My First Month — The Results

Here’s how it played out:

• 70% of the leads were ungated for me out of the box.

• For the gated leads, I still ordered 10 units of a couple brands to try and get ungated.

• I spent about 1 hour per day ordering, prepping, and packing for FBA.

• I used Amazon’s default repricer — nothing fancy — and still landed the Buy Box on most of my listings.

• No major price drops or tanking. The leads held steady and sold well.

After one full month of selling, I made $1,500 in profit. Not crazy money, but considering how careful I was (I skipped leads I wasn’t 100% confident in), I was really happy with that. It proved the model works. And now I feel confident enough to scale it up.

Looking Ahead — Scaling Up & PL Goals

Now that I’ve validated the process, I’m ready to reinvest. I’ll be upgrading my OASource plan from 5 leads per day to 15, which should give me more chances to find consistent winners. At the same time, I’ll start building up capital for my private label product, which I plan to launch later this year. I’m also putting more focus on ungating popular brands and categories — the more I unlock, the more value I can pull from every lead list.

Conclusion: OASource Was the Right Call

OASource.com delivered exactly what I needed: consistent, profitable leads that didn’t waste my time. If you’re starting OA and want to skip the frustrating early grind, a solid lead list can fast-track your results.

Just make sure you’re ready to take action, send in inventory consistently, and work on ungating as much as you can — that’s where the long-term money is.