So, this can work, but here's exactly what happens. You find a product on Tactical Arbitrage that sells on Amazon at a pretty good margin, and you buy a lot of it, but by the time you send it in 30 other sellers have done the same thing because they all saw it on TA as well. So now you're in a price war, and you're either forced to sell it at cost (or even a loss), or you have to wait for 2 or 3 months for the other sellers to run out of stock. I'm not saying this can't work. I've found some good products to sell, but it was more from my own research and not directly from TA. It's a pretty good tool though for knowing if you're eligible to sell a product and the history. EDIT: I stopped using it after the free trial because I didn't think it was worth it, but I encourage you to try it and see what you think. More on reddit.com

I tried it out, seemed ok, had lots of false positives though ... I do consulting with several people who use it and they tell me it's getting harder and harder to find items that aren't already bought up ... but I guess that's the case w/ anything.

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I signed up for TA for a free week last May. I had a week off and spent most of the week on TA. There was a quite a learning curve and it was day 5 before I realized to do bulk searches, so I can't say I got the best from it until the last 24 hours of my free trial. Nevertheless, I saw how it worked enough to decide it was not for me. It searches for RA products that have little or no stock on Amazon. I set up searches with multiple stores and then worked through every category of one store where I frequently shop. It was doing automatically what I generally do by hand. By the end of the week I had 81 products to buy. I bought 1 or 2 of each because I was testing the water and really looking for replenishables. I discovered that about half of the products I found were out of stock when I found them, but as soon as I bought them I realized Amazon usually sold them, were temporarily out of stock and re-stocked by Amazon by the time my product reached the warehouse. So TA finds products for which there is a listing, but no stock. I realized that so many people use TA they may potentially be finding similar things. I have a different method of finding things and after a week preferred the method I was previously using which has less competition. I would have liked to have played with it for a second week, but didn't want to pay anything. I had no trouble cancelling my subscription. I did join the Facebook group and found many people on that group asked some very basic questions about how Amazon worked and I wondered if they got full use of TA, which I saw as a product for advanced sellers more than beginners. I just checked and I did find some products and am currently replenishing about 10 of the products I found during that week, although if had I not used TA for a week, I may have found 10 replens in that time period anyway. The best way to get value for money out of it is to keep searches running 24 hours a day and run one after another. I know some people have more than one account so they can run more searches. Even after you find a possible product there is a lot of work to do, and I guess that is why some people have VA's. I can see why some people like it, I just decided it was not for me. More on reddit.com

When I did RA/OA I did the long hold, clearance, discontinued items only just for this reason. As you said, if you're finding the deals with TA or other scraping tools, everyone else using them is too. It took a while for me to build up the capital from Amazon profits, but I spent roughly 5k a month only on clearance, preferably discontinued items, mostly toys, as there is no expiration date, but some consumables with long expiration dates, and just waited until the other sellers exhausted their supply. Otherwise, I found that everyone sent their stuff in at once and the race to the bottom began. With clearance (at least 70% off), if I just sold at the original retail price the profit was enormous. Popular discontinued items? Could get multiples depending. The challenge of course is that clearance and discontinued items are not replenishable. Also having to wait to sell your items. It's the primary reason I moved away from the model, which was right before Amazon's seeming crackdown on it. Unless it's changed, Amazon's TOS does not say RA/OA is forbidden, but when sellers are asked for proof of purchase, receipts aren't being accepted. Of course you will only read about it on the seller forums when people need help. You'll not hear from people who aren't having issues showing proof of purchase with receipts so who knows. More on reddit.com