What is Tactical Arbitrage?

Tactical Arbitrage is an online arbitrage software program that is primarily targeted to sellers who are looking to do online arbitrage and retail arbitrage. It has a variety of functions and features that allow sellers to most of the manual product research automatically. This will be an in-depth review of Tactical Arbitrage and all of the functionalities it has.

I will cover the costs, features and my own personal experience with using this product. Tactical Arbitrage has a ton of features for all kinds of Amazon sellers, but I’ll be mainly focusing on their online arbitrage product. Let’s explore each of the features for online arbitrage sellers below:

Dashboard

When you first login to Tactical Arbitrage, you will be greeted by the dashboard. The dashboard is the homepage setting for Tactical Arbitrage and it gives sellers a good overview of what Tactical Arbitrage is doing for their Amazon business. The first few windows in the dashboard give insight into your searches, your profile and the products found.

The first window is your membership overview. It outlines when you joined Tactical Arbitrage, your membership level and latest invoice. This isn’t too important, you can add a picture to your profile if that’s of interest. The only important part here is the link to your latest invoice. You’ll want to save these for tax purposes.

The next window on the dashboard will be your search manager. The search manager will indicate how many active searches Tactical Arbitrage is doing for you. One search indicates that Tactical Arbitrage is searching one website for product recommendations. You can do 3 concurrent searches on the free trial and check on the status of each one from your dashboard. If you upgrade to the full program, you can run up to 7 searches at once.

The last important window in the dashboard is your product search overview. This window gives a preview of all of the products that fit your search criteria. This will be the cumulative product recommendations from all of the search queues. You can see how the searches are going, view the products that TA found and save any products that you want to seriously pursue for online arbitrage.

On the dashboard you can also change any settings for Tactical Arbitrage. When you first sign up for Tactical Arbitrage, you’ll need to put a MWS key in your Amazon Seller Central to make sure you have the latest data.

Product Search

The first and likely most important page is product search. Product search is the page where you can scan online sites for product to sell on Amazon. On product search, you can set the criteria you’d like for a product and Tactical Arbitrage will do the rest.

When you go to product search, the picture above is the first thing you will see. This helps sellers narrow down a wide list of online sites that Tactical Arbitrage can scan for products. The first thing you will want to do is make sure the country is correct. If you overlook this, all of your data will be skewed and you’ll waste precious time that you could’ve been scanning with.

The alphabetical and numerical numbers are a way to help sellers pick sites to start scanning on. For example, if you click on the letter W, you will be able to scan Walmart.com or Walgreens.com or any other major retailer that starts with the letter W. Here you can choose which retailer you’d like to scan on move on the following search settings.

The second part of the product search page is setting your basic filters. The filters will decide whether you will see a scanned product or not. If you don’t put any filters in, Tactical Arbitrage will scan the sites for any profitable item to sell on Amazon. It’s important to put in important filters and your costs to get a real estimate of whether products will be profitable or not.

The first step in selecting your filters is selecting your category. The categories are important because you should select only categories that you are eligible to sell in. There’s no point of getting product recommendations if you are unable to sell it. You can select up to 500 subcategories, so be sure to maximize that before submitting the search.

Once you’ve maximized your subcategories, add any discounts and costs associated with your business. Some sellers have store credit cards they can use, so it’s important to factor it in for profitability. Also, put estimates in for your costs, so you can have a true estimate of profitability.

Reverse Search

Reverse search is a great tool for sellers on Tactical Arbitrage. Reverse search tools help you find different ways to source a product. Instead of doing product search where you search sites for profitable products, reverse search searches for suppliers of products.

Reverse search allows you to search up to 100 ASINS. ASIN stands for Amazon Standard Identification Number, it’s basically a mixture of letters and numbers that Amazon uses to identify products. To upload ASINS, you can copy and paste it into the reverse search window or upload a file with ASINS on it.

Reverse search has two basic methods on Tactical Arbitrage: searching via ASINS and searching best selling products. Searching with ASINS is a good strategy when you see a product that sells well and there’s no FBA listing. You can do a quick reverse search on Tactical Arbitrage to see if you can find the product on another retailer’s site and send it in to Amazon.

Scanning best selling products is the other form of reverse search. This allows sellers to pick categories within Amazon and source backwards. Since you already know the product is selling well, all you need to do is find a way to source the product. Reverse search will provide you with all of the profitable ways to source best selling products. This can be a gold mine if you end up finding a product with low competition and good margins.

Reverse search also allows you to set the same filters as product search. You need to put in all of the right data for your business to get the most accurate results. This is important to do or you might get faulty data.

View Data

View data is the page where you will likely spend most of your time in Tactical Arbitrage. When you click view data, you can view data, download data, view saved lists and see your matches. View data allows sellers to have a bird’s eye view of all the products scanned on Tactical Arbitrage.

As you can see from the screenshot above, Tactical Arbitrage scanned 4,270 items. The 276 items are the items that met my criteria and can be potential products to source for online arbitrage on Amazon. It will take a little bit of time for sellers to get used to the view data page. This is because it provides a ton of data and can be overwhelming. Each time a new product fits your criteria, it will be added to this page. You can also remove all your filters and see all the products Tactical Arbitrage has found.

The products found in view data will look like this:

This overview provided by Tactical Arbitrage allows sellers to make quick judgements whether they’d like to pursue this product or not. As you can see Tactical Arbitrage provides sellers with information like estimated monthly sales, Amazon price, estimated ROI and more.

Although it can be exciting to see the profit you can potentially make from this product, you need to click on both links (Amazon and the store you searched) to ensure the data is accurate. If you feel like this is a a good product, you can move on to the next step: checking sales history.

This can be seen by scrolling to the right of the product:

This is basically like a Keepa graph. It shows the sales rank, you can hover over any point in the data and it will show you the sales rank of a product at that time. It also shows a 90-day history of the product in addition to who is holding the Buy Box. If Amazon is holding the Buy Box, you should avoid the product altogether.

Once you’ve checked you can sell the product and it’s profitable. You can go directly to the retail website and order the products to your house or office. All you have to do then is list the product and ship it to an Amazon FBA warehouse.

Search manager

Search manager is where you can go to see all of your searches on Tactical Arbitrage. There’s 4 sections to search manager: Queued, completed, saved and scheduled. Queued basically is searches that currently going on. As you can see in the picture above, that search is in queue. You can check how long Tactical Arbitrage has been searching that site, how many categories it has search and the filters associated with it.

Completed is where you can go to check completed searches. You can inspect each completed search and note any changes you’d like to make to your future searches. Saved searches are searches that you save in Tactical Arbitrage. This can be good if you have found a ton of good products in one search; saving it will allow you to do similar searches in other websites.

Scheduled searches are searches that you have scheduled for Tactical Arbitrage to do. This is one of the best features of Tactical Arbitrage because you can automate the entire product research work for selling on Amazon. You can set Tactical Arbitrage to search a certain site at a certain time each week and you will get product recommendations for you to sell around the clock. This is huge and can help you scale your online arbitrage business significantly.

View Inventory

View inventory is a nice feature on Tactical Arbitrage that allows you to get further data on your current Amazon FBA inventory. With view inventory, Tactical Arbitrage can help you keep track of your online arbitrage shipments and track sales and profitability. When doing online arbitrage, it’s hard to keep track of all of your metrics. View inventory allows sellers to do this in an organized fashion and sellers can really see how much money they are making on their online arbitrage products.

Since this is very private information, Tactical Arbitrage allows sellers to put a password/code on this. This is because anyone that gets access to this will see what items you have in inventory. This is not something that’s required, but it’s good to keep track of your online arbitrage metrics.

I personally wouldn’t mind using this because I’m only getting a few products per ASIN with online arbitrage. If I was doing wholesale or private label products, I definitely would not use this. That’s because one ASIN can be a good fraction of your business with wholesale or private label business models.

Videos

In the videos section of Tactical Arbitrage, there are step by step video guides on how to use all aspects of the site. This can be a great place to start with if you’re completely new to Tactical Arbitrage. There are over 100 video tutorials on the videos page and it covers basically every imaginable scenario. In this page of Tactical Arbitrage, there’s also a frequently asked questions portion that covers most questions that new users have.

Support

Tactical Arbitrage is a great product, but it also has great service. Tactical Arbitrage has a chat where you can talk directly with a support representative and you can also email them. The chat support works mostly during business hours Monday-Friday. If chat support isn’t available, you can still send a question or message through the chat and you will receive a follow-up email once support gets back online.

You can always email Tactical Arbitrage support at support@tacticalarbitrage.com. You should receive a reply within a few hours for most emails. I’d recommend just using the chat in the Tactical Arbitrage site and that can directly go to their support email if they are not available.

From my personal experience, I’m satisfied with Tactical Arbitrage’s support. Whenever I’ve had a question or a complaint, they’ve dealt with it in a time-efficient manner. Other services may have slow responses or bad customer service, but I haven’t seen this with Tactical Arbitrage.

Analysis

Analysis is another great tool within Tactical Arbitrage. Within analysis, there are two primary functions: product variations and Tactical Edge. Product variations allows sellers to figure out which ASIN in a parent ASIN will sell the best.

There are tons of products on Amazon that have variations and sellers often have a difficult time choosing which one will sell well. By using product variations, sellers can have a good idea of which variations they should pursue. 

For example, if there’s a shoe that is selling well, sellers may have difficulty trying to figure out which size is best for them to sell. Using the product variation tool on Tactical Arbitrage will allow the seller to see which percentage of sales does each shoe size account for, how many sellers are on each size, gross ROI and more. The product variation tool is great especially for sellers that focus on clothing and shoes. 

The second tool in the analysis feature is Tactical Edge. Tactical Edge allows sellers to get a deeper dive into a product and see any relevant information. There are several features within Tactical Edge that allows sellers to do competitive analysis on sellers who sell the product as well. Some of the features within Tactical Edge include:

Product information

Tactical Edge can pull up any data on a given ASIN. This can include total ratings, reviews, ROI, the seller selling the product and more. Sellers can use this information to make calculated sourcing decisions and maximize profits.

Seller information:

This is the more exciting part of Tactical Edge. Tactical Edge allows you to see exactly how much inventory the seller has in stock. This can be a good idea prior to purchasing inventory because you don’t want to be buying a product that has hundreds of inventory in FBA. You can also see which seller has the Buy Box directly from Tactical Edge. 

Storefront stalking:

If you click on any seller in Tactical Edge, you can start doing what is called storefront stalking. This is basically where you click on the seller’s store name and see what products they are selling. Tactical Arbitrage goes a further step and allows you to reverse search any product that the seller has in store and you can see where they may be sourcing the product from. You can download the entire ASIN list of any seller and run a bulk reverse search and see where a seller can be getting any of their products from. 

Pricing

Tactical Arbitrage has 5 offerings for their services. The product offerings are library, wholesale, online arbitrage, online arbitrage+ wholesale and full suite. Each offering provides different services, so choose your desired plan based on what features you’d like to use in Tactical Arbitrage.  Below is a brief breakdown of the plans and associated costs:

Library: 

The library plan on Tactical Arbitrage allows you to do library searches and view your inventory. I would not recommend getting this plan because you can’t even do product research on it. That basically means you can’t scan online stores. Cost: $59/monthly or $600/annually.

Wholesale: 

The wholesale plan on Tactical Arbitrage is geared for sellers that do primarily wholesale products on Amazon. You can do a wholesale search, view inventory and many more functions. This can definitely be worth it if you find a few good wholesale products for you to sell. One wholesale search can lead to a product making thousands of dollars per month, so it’s a great investment. Cost: $69/monthly or $660 annually. 

Online Arbitrage (most popular): 

The online arbitrage plan allows you to do all of the functions covered in this review. This is the plan I currently use. It includes product search, reverse search, always be scanning, view inventory and more. This is the best option for sellers looking to do online arbitrage. Cost: $89/monthly or $840 annually.

Online Arbitrage + Wholesale: 

The online arbitrage + wholesale plan is a marriage between the wholesale and online arbitrage plans of Tactical Arbitrage. You can do a wholesale search, online arbitrage search and many other functions. The only thing you cannot do on this program is library search. Cost: $109/month or $1020 annually.

Full Suite: 

The full suite plan of Tactical Arbitrage gives you access to all of the features of Tactical Arbitrage. Every single feature is at your fingertips and it’s only a few dollars more per month than the online arbitrage + wholesale search plan. I’d recommend this once you’ve fully established your Amazon business and are looking to just scale. Cost: $129/month or $1140 annually. 

Final thoughts

Tactical Arbitrage is a great online sourcing software tool and it’s probably the best on the market. I’ve personally used it and its performance is very strong. There are other great online arbitrage tools out there, but I’m personally a fan of Tactical Arbitrage because it scans products for me 24/7. Doing this type of work manually will eat up your time and you cannot be able to scale. This online arbitrage tool can connect easily to your seller account and start scanning for profitable products.

From my experience, the majority of products scanned can contain mismatches or I’m not eligible to sell in it because I’m a relatively new seller. The products I did find are easy to source (both from local retail stores and online) and they helped me make my first sales on Amazon.

Finding one good product on Tactical Arbitrage can result in hundreds of dollars in profit each month. If you do decide to use it, run multiple scans of products and come back to it later. Once Tactical Arbitrage has scanned the products, you can browse through them and see which ones work for you.

There’s not much you can lose by simply just trying the 7 day trial. Run a few scans and see how it goes. If you like it, you can continue using it. If you don’t, just cancel your membership for free. There’s a 7-day free trial for the Tactical Arbitrage, you can check it out here.