Chapter 4.3: Settings that make the numbers right
What you'll learn: what to check in your settings on day one, and how to allow for sales tax, so every profit and ROI figure ArbiSource shows reflects your business. Set aside about 15 minutes; it pays for itself many times over.
Most of these are on the Account page (at the bottom of the sidebar), which is split into tabs: Settings (including Additional Costs and Preferences), Deal Score Settings and Global Filters. Custom buttons are added from the Results page.
1. Allowing for sales tax on your purchases
US accounts don't have the UK's VAT options, because Amazon.com doesn't add VAT to its fees and Amazon collects the sales tax on your sales (see Chapter 2.2). What's left for you to think about is the sales tax you pay when you buy stock.
ArbiSource works out profit and ROI from the retailer's listed price, which doesn't include sales tax, and there's no sales-tax setting to configure. Many sellers don't factor purchase tax into each lead, and that's your call, but it's good practice to know what it does to your numbers:
- Buying tax-exempt with a resale certificate or a retailer's tax-exempt program? The listed price is your real cost, so there's nothing to adjust.
- Paying sales tax? If you'd like to allow for it, there are two optional approaches: add your local rate to the buy price when you do the Money check, or set your minimum ROI filter a few points higher so thin deals drop out automatically.
It makes the most difference on thin-margin products. Chapter 6 shows a worked example.
2. Additional costs (optional: come back to these later)
On the Settings tab, under Additional Costs, you can add costs that Amazon's fees don't cover: a Fixed Cost per unit (such as prep supplies or a prep center's charge), an average Inbound Shipping cost per pound, and a Storage Time (how many months you expect to hold stock).
You don't need to fill these in on day one. They're entirely optional, and a wrong guess can make good products look unprofitable or hide them from your results altogether. Leave them blank while you're learning, and add them once you've sent a few shipments and know your real costs. Until then, keep your prep and shipping costs in mind when you check a lead.
once you add a Fixed Cost, it's taken off before your minimum-profit filter is applied. A $1 Fixed Cost plus a $3 minimum profit means a product needs to make about $4 before that cost to appear.
3. Deal scores
Every result gets a deal score out of 10, so you can spot the strongest leads at a glance. You decide how it's calculated on the Deal Score Settings tab:
- Under Points Allocation, you share 100 points across five factors: profit, ROI, BSR (sales rank), match confidence and number of sellers. Give more points to whatever matters most to you.
- Under Score Thresholds, you set what counts as bad, okay, good and great for each factor. Profit thresholds are in dollars (for example $3–$5).
You need to assign all 100 points before you can save. New settings apply to future scans; results from scans you've already run keep their old scores.
On day one, leave the defaults alone. Once you've checked a few dozen leads and know what you like, come back and adjust. For example, give BSR more points if you want faster-selling items.
4. Your starter filters
Filters decide which results you see. Each result must pass every filter at once, so a handful of individually sensible filters can add up to almost nothing. The most common day-one complaint is "I'm getting no results", and it's nearly always filters that are too tight.
Set your everyday filters on the Global Filters tab (Account → Global Filters). These are your account-wide defaults.
Start with broad filters, then narrow them. Set each filter to the lowest value you'd accept if everything else about the product were perfect.
A sensible starter set:
| Filter | Starter setting | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum profit and ROI | Low: the least you'd accept on an otherwise perfect product (allowing for sales tax if you pay it) | Don't hide good leads before you've learned what "good" looks like |
| Average profit (tick to enable; choose 30/90/180/365 days) | Slightly below your normal minimum profit | Screens out products that only look profitable because of a temporary price spike |
| Minimum number of sellers (Total Sellers, under Amazon Statistics) | 2 | Screens out most single-seller (often private label) listings you couldn't buy anyway |
| Match confidence | 70–100% | A good balance between catching matches and avoiding mismatches. 90%+ is usually too strict |
| BSR | Leave fully open to start | Avoids accidentally hiding fast sellers |
| Exclusions | Leave Exclude Results with Missing Fees checked (it's on by default) | If Amazon hasn't calculated an FBA fee for a product, it may never have been sold through FBA. Excluding these keeps you focused on FBA-friendly products |
A few exclusions are switched on for you by default: Exclude Results with Missing Fees, Exclude Results Without BSR, Exclude Out of Stock and Exclude Mismatches. Leave them on while you're learning.
Combinations to avoid:
- A minimum BSR together with a minimum sales figure: a minimum BSR removes the best-selling items (low BSR numbers mean high sales), while the sales filter keeps only items that sell well. Together they can remove everything.
- High minimums everywhere at once, such as high minimum profit, high ROI and 90% confidence together.
How filters are applied:
- Your account filters (your Global Filters) apply automatically in the Vault and to new scans. You can adjust them on the fly on any results page from the Filters drawer.
- When you start a scan, the Filters menu lets you choose Account Filters (or one of your saved filter sets), Customise Filters for that scan only, or No Filters.
- Scan filters are fixed when the scan is created. You can narrow the results afterwards, but loosening the filters won't bring back products the scan didn't keep. If a scan's filters were too tight, run it again.
Filter Sets. You can save a set of filters under a name and switch between sets later. After changing your filters on Account → Global Filters or in the Filters drawer on the Results page, click Save Filter Set (it appears once you've changed a filter), give the set a name (up to 20 characters, and each name must be different) and save. You can keep up to 25 filter sets, for example "Starter", "Fast sellers" and "Higher ticket". Choose a set from the Filter Set dropdown at the top, or delete one with the bin icon. To update a saved set, select it, change the filters and click Overwrite Filter Set. Your everyday defaults stay under Account → Global Filters.
Chapter 13 goes much deeper into filters, with a full "why am I seeing no results?" troubleshooter.
5. Custom buttons (add Keepa)
Custom buttons put one-click shortcuts on every result, such as opening the product in Keepa, checking eBay sold listings or visiting a cashback site. Click the + icon at the top of the column of icons on the right of any result panel to add one. You can have up to seven.
The clever part is dynamic values. Put a placeholder in the link and ArbiSource fills in the right details for each product. For example, a Keepa button for Amazon.com:
https://keepa.com/#!product/1-{ASIN}
Here {ASIN} is replaced with each product's ASIN (Amazon's product code), and 1 tells Keepa to open the Amazon.com listing. Type the dynamic values exactly as shown, with single curly braces: {ASIN}, {EAN}, {UPC}, {store_name}, {store_product_name} and {amazon_product_name}. Click What can I include in the URL? in the custom buttons window to see the list, along with common examples: a Keepa link, an Amazon.com search by the store's product name and an eBay sold-listings search. The Amazon product name is handy for an eBay sold-listings search, for example, and the UPC for searching by barcode.
Checklist
- I know whether I'm buying tax-exempt, and whether I'll allow for sales tax on leads (optional)
- Additional costs left blank for now (I'll add them once I know my real costs)
- Deal scores left on defaults for now
- Broad starter filters set under Account → Global Filters and saved as a Filter Set
- Keepa custom button added (Amazon.com, domain 1)