Online Arbitrage & Retail Arbitrage Prep Center — Retail-Shipped Inventory Welcome

First, the question everyone asks quietly

An arbitrage seller once ended an otherwise detailed email to us with: "It looks like you are not working with online arbitrage sellers." We were — she just couldn't find a page that said so. So here it is, unambiguous:

We work with online arbitrage, retail arbitrage, and dropship-model sellers every week, and we accept inventory shipped directly from retailers. Orders from Walmart.com, Target.com, Amazon, Sam's Club, or any store can be delivered straight to our warehouse — you never have to touch the boxes yourself. A new FBA seller's first words to us were exactly this worry: "Can you confirm you accept retail store-shipped inventory?" Yes. Small batches too: her first test was under thirty units, split into three orders because the retailer capped units per purchase. Normal. Welcome, even.

What arbitrage sellers actually need from a prep center is different from what a private-label brand needs — it is speed, small-batch tolerance, clean repacking, and intake that doesn't lose parcels arriving from six different stores in the same week. This page covers each, with the published price on every step.

How retail-shipped intake works (and doesn't get lost)

The operational fear behind OA is real: a dozen retailer parcels arriving under different tracking numbers, none labeled with your name in a way a dock would recognize. A cross-dock seller asked us the sharp version: "How does your system handle incoming tracking numbers from our retail suppliers so your dock team knows which retail package matches which outbound order?" The answer is a discipline, not magic:

• Send tracking ahead. Before or right after you place retail orders, send us the tracking numbers — email, WhatsApp, or a shared sheet all work. Your inbound list is what the dock checks arrivals against.
• Name the shipment. Where the retailer checkout allows, put your company name in the address line: Attn: [Your Store], 6117 Long Dr, Houston, TX 77087. Even when it doesn't, the tracking list catches it.
• Same-day receiving. Parcels delivered before 2pm CT, Monday–Saturday, are received and logged the same day — receiving is $5 per carton ($20 per pallet for freight).
• You see it land. Every received parcel appears against your account, so "did my Target order arrive?" is a dashboard glance, not an email thread.

Route one: prep and forward to Amazon FBA

The classic OA/RA flow — retail parcels in, Amazon-compliant units out:

A 25-unit test batch therefore costs about $18.75 in prep plus receiving — there is no minimum batch, no monthly fee waiting to punish a slow test, and the $0.75 covers the whole standard list rather than unbundling labeling and bagging into surprise lines. We ship to whichever fulfillment centers Amazon assigns, including split shipments, and box dimensions and weights are reported back so you can complete your shipping plan in Seller Central. Wholesale FBA sellers: the same machine with receiving reports and documentation is covered on our FBA prep page.

Route two: cross-dock repack and ship to your customer

The dropship-model flow — sometimes called box swap — is the one sellers describe to us in the most detail, because getting it wrong gets accounts suspended. One seller's spec, nearly verbatim: receive a single retail package, remove all retail invoices and packing slips, repackage into a clean unbranded box, apply the shipping label I provide, and hand it to the carrier the same day.

That is exactly the service:

• Strip the retail identity. Retailer invoices, packing slips, and promotional inserts are removed. The parcel that reaches your customer shows you as the seller — nothing else. This is what marketplace dropshipping policies require of you, and clean repacking is how the physical side of that compliance actually happens. The policy responsibility stays yours; the execution here is airtight.
• Plain repack. A clean unbranded box or mailer — boxes from $0.40, mailers from $0.25, billed at cost. Your own branded packaging can be stocked here instead.
• Your label or ours. We apply the shipping label you purchased (Amazon Buy Shipping included) at $0.25 per label, or buy postage through our discounted carrier rates passed through at cost.
• Same-day turnaround. In before 2pm CT, out the same business day, Monday through Saturday. For a seller whose promise to Amazon is a 24-hour handling time, the cutoff is the service.

Priced as standard FBM: $2.00 per order plus materials — an all-in of about $2.25 for a typical plain-mailer swap, plus postage if we buy it. The same flow serves Amazon-to-Etsy sellers (Amazon parcels in, plain-packaged Etsy orders out), eBay prep-and-forward, and Walmart-to-Amazon models. Full multichannel detail on the dropshipping services page.

Built for small batches — because arbitrage is small batches

Arbitrage inventory arrives in dribs: nine units of this, fifteen of that, whatever the clearance rack held. Most 3PLs price that reality out with minimums. Here the economics stay flat at any size:

• No monthly minimum, no account fee, no software fee — a nine-order month bills nine orders. The full month-by-month math is on our all-in cost breakdown.
• Storage matched to small stock: bins at $3.50 a month and shelves at $7.50, so twenty units of test inventory don't rent a pallet position. Pallets are $25 monthly when you grow into them.
• Retailer purchase caps are fine — three separate 10-unit orders arriving across a week all land against the same inbound list.
• Scaling up changes nothing structurally: the seller doing 30 units a month and the one doing 3,000 use the same intake, the same rates, the same cutoff.

What this costs, end to end: two real scenarios

Scenario one — RA test batch to FBA. Three Target orders totaling 25 units arrive across a week. Receiving: 3 cartons × $5 = $15. Prep with FNSKU: 25 × $0.75 = $18.75. Polybag on 10 units: $2.00. Total handling: $35.75, forwarded to Amazon the day the last parcel clears — outbound to FBA at carrier cost.

Scenario two — dropship month, 60 orders. Sixty retail parcels in, sixty plain-mailer swaps out with seller-provided labels: 60 × ($2.00 + $0.25 mailer + $0.25 label application) = $150, plus $5-per-carton receiving on the inbound parcels. Every order that beat the 2pm cutoff shipped the day it arrived.

Both scenarios run without a contract: month-to-month, cancel anytime, and the test batch is allowed to stay a test.

OA / RA prep FAQ