A 20-year-old college student brought in $125,000 in 7 months doing retail arbitrage on Amazon. He explains how he got started with $3,000 upfront.

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Ever since starting a landscaping business in high school, Sahaj Dhingra has been curious about making money from "non-conventional sources," he told Business Insider.

Naturally, the Gen Z-er turned to YouTube to learn more.

It introduced him to the vast business of e-commerce and its various strategies, from arbitrage to wholesale to private label. A mentor suggested Dhingra start with Amazon retail arbitrage — buying products from retailers like Costco and Walmart, thrift stores, or dollar stores, and reselling them on Amazon for a profit — because it's low-cost and low-risk.

Other strategies, including wholesaling or building a private label, require much more experience and upfront capital, said Dhingra. "Meanwhile, in retail arbitrage, the only money you need upfront is $300 to $400 for your LLC and your licenses, and then after that, it's really however much you put into inventory."

In a worst-case scenario where he couldn't resell anything, he wouldn't necessarily lose the money spent on products he bought. "Costco has a very lenient return policy, so I can always liquidate that inventory. Then, my only loss would be a couple hundred dollars for the basic licenses," he said.

Low-risk retail arbitrage is time-intensive, however. It requires going out and purchasing the products for resale. Plus, Dhingra was doing fulfillment by merchant (FBM) rather than fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), meaning he was packaging, labeling, and shipping the products himself.

When he launched in May 2023, he was 19 years old and wrapping up his sophomore year at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU). He had a few summer vacation months ahead: the perfect opportunity to scale a retail arbitrage operation.

Dhingra wasn't ready to jump into the deep end just because a mentor suggested he try retail arbitrage.

He spent about a month and a half familiarizing himself with the business model and developing a strategy before he felt confident. At that point, in February 2023, he formed an LLC.

February through May consisted of more general business and product research plus important backend tasks, like setting up an Amazon seller account and filing for resale permits.

Getting approved to sell on Amazon was more tedious than he'd anticipated.

"I had to provide a lot of information about my business and what we do," said Dhingra, who was also required to do a video interview with an Amazon representative, in which he held up his ID to the camera to verify his identity. "There's so much legal compliance around just making an account. It's a whole one- to two-week process."

Understanding what he could legally resell on the platform was even more time-consuming than the verification process.

"There was a lot to learn about the actual compliance part because there were a lot of questions, like: Do you own the trademarks of the products you sell? How do you have permission to sell this stuff?" he said.

You can't sell anything that is someone else's property without their written permission. While some brands allow anyone with proper account compliance and a strong selling history to resell their products, others restrict resale to direct distributors or partners.

Amazon has a built-in approval process that makes it easy to determine if you have permission to resell, he explained: "Let's say I'm selling Perrier, which Nestlé owns. As soon as I try listing it, it'll basically say, you need approval to sell Nestlé-related products. Then there's an orange button that says 'request approval' that I can hit, and it'll automatically grant it if my account is in good standing. But this is only if the brand has it set so that anyone can sell it."

Dhingra spent hours walking through Costco to find eligible, profitable products. He used the Amazon Seller app, which allows you to scan the barcode of a product and calculate your estimated profit. If something were estimated to be profitable, he'd try listing it to see if he was approved to sell.

More often than not, he wouldn't be approved, he said: "Imagine going through thousands of products and then all the good ones, like 70% of the good ones, I can't even sell. So it was frustrating, but you just have to keep going and put in the time."

Dhingra had about $3,000 in savings to play with.

His initial startup costs didn't exceed $500, he said: "I spent $100 on the LLC, I spent $100 on a used thermal printer — I could order thermal labels from UPS for free — and I put some money into packaging supplies. I had to buy a tape gun, packaging tape, and shipping boxes. Amazon's monthly fee to sell is $40 a month and the Costco membership is $120. It was about $400 upfront, and then everything after that was just inventory."

Thanks to such low startup costs, it didn't take long to break even and start profiting. The inventory would pay for itself, and then some, as long as it sold for more than he originally bought it for, he said: "It took two weeks max for me to make that $300 to $400 back."

A small budget played in his favor, he noted: "I was very strategic in where I was deploying my capital because I didn't really have much, so I couldn't just throw like $1,000 or $2,000 into a random product."

He mainly sold products in the grocery category, which he admits to "falling into" rather than strategically selecting. He'd already decided to source his products from Costco; it was a 10-minute drive from his home and offered a good return policy. The global retailer mainly sells grocery-related products. Additionally, when researching products in the spring, temperatures were climbing in Virginia, and he noticed a high demand for beverages like sparkling water, soda, and energy drinks.

The very first product he bought and resold was a Fairlife protein shake. He also sold sparkling water and Logan Paul's energy drink, Prime.

It's important to consider demand when selecting products, said Dhingra: "Just profit doesn't mean anything if you can't sell it. If there's no demand on a listing — if the sales rank is really low — then there's no point because you could list it at whatever you want, but if no one else is willing to pay for it, then you don't have a market."

In mid-August, after a summer of reselling products on Amazon, Dhingra hit $100,000 in sales. Between May and December, he totaled about $125,418 in sales, much of which he earned during the summer. Business Insider verified his revenue by viewing his Amazon seller dashboard.

A couple of strategies helped him scale quickly. One, he started listing products before buying the inventory. That way, he bought only as much as he needed to meet the demand.

Still, he kept extra inventory for his best-selling products in his garage. At any given time, Dhingra was listing 10 to 20 different products, "but only one to three of those would account for at least 80% of the sales," he said. Those were the products he'd keep on hand to reduce his trips to Costco.

He always had some capital set aside in case he discovered a new, profitable product. The name of the game becomes investing your capital in high-demanding products that will get you the best returns.

Dhingra also saved time by streamlining the shipping process.

He started with USPS because it offered the cheapest rates for his scale. "I was doing anywhere between 10 to 30 outbound shipments a day, which can very easily fit in my super old minivan. So I would bring the inventory from Costco, unload it, package it, put the shipping labels on it, and then I would load it back into my car and take it to USPS."

He would wait in line and drop his packages off in the front bins. However, as he scaled, USPS let him load his increasingly large number of packages out back. Eventually, he started shipping through UPS, which offered a higher discount for his larger volume, and did at-home pickups, he said.

Another key to his success was doing FBM, which required more time and effort but saved a lot in fees and gave him more control. With FBA, he wouldn't have been able to list products until Amazon received them, which would have killed his strategy of listing products before purchasing inventory. He would have also paid storage fees for unsold inventory. Ultimately, he doesn't think he'd have been able to profit if he went the FBA route.

Dhingra, now 20, is in his junior year at VCU and focused on other entrepreneurial projects since retail arbitrage requires so much time.

He has reinvested 100% of his profits back into the arbitrage business, he said: "I haven't taken a single disbursement from my business checking. All of the money just went straight back into the company. That's the only way I was able to scale to where I did without adding a ton more capital because you can't double the amount of revenue the next month with the same amount of capital. You're going to need that profit reinvested to continue to grow it."

Alexa, what are the most frequently asked questions? Amazon reveals what was on our minds this year

Alexa, what do people want to know?

Amazon is giving us a peek at the answers to that question for at least one country — the United Kingdom.

The virtual assistant was released in 2014 and reportedly named after the Library of Alexandria — one of the largest and most significant libraries of the ancient world — to help users access information or complete simple tasks.

The tech giant categorized the most frequently asked questions to pull some top hits. shared with outlets like Sky News and the Daily Mail.

And while many Englishmen were curious about King Charles’ Coronation last spring, they also demonstrated shared interests with the rest fo the world.

Among moviegoers, for example, many wanted to know “What’s the Barbie movie about?” and “How long is the Oppenheimer movie?” as they presumably booked their tickets for a Barbenheimer double feature last summer.

Among British music lovers, Ed Sheeran was named as Alexa’s most-requested artist, ahead of Taylor Swift. Flowers by Miley Cyrus was the most-played song of the year.

And sports fans across the pond were very curious to know “What’s the score?” and “How tall is Lionel Messi?” as they cheered on their favorite teams from the comfort of their courches.

A lot of people also wondered “How old is Elton John?”, “What is Elon Musk’s net worth?” and “Who is Jennifer Lopez married to?”

Besides basic information, it turns out British Alexa users — presumably like those in other countries — enjoy a more personal relationship with the tool.

Read on for a list of the top ten most surprising interactions in 2024, according to Amazon.

Amazon and Hyundai will have to sort out the finer points of car selling