How to travel for free: My 5-part system to pay for travel by sourcing on the road and selling with Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA)
My obsession: funding road trips with FBA
I’m completely obsessed with
1. Taking multi-week road trips at least 4x a year, and-
2. Making those trips pay for themselves by leveraging the power of FBA.
Since before the term “digital nomad” was a thing, I’ve been sourcing books while traveling, utilizing public resources to pack my FBA shipments, shipping them to Amazon, and making all trips pay for themselves.
Here’s the Top 5 things I’ve learned (via a lot of trial and error) from a decade of total obsession with making all my trips pay for themselves:
#1: Compile an airtight source list before you leave
#1: Compile an airtight source list before you leaveYou’ll want to spend the maximum amount of time on your trip actually seeing and doing new things – not sourcing inventory (though it can be fun).
I optimize my Amazon sourcing time by spending about one hour doing research before my trip. I keep a checklist of potential categories to look up in advance. Then I use Google Street View and other internet sources to get clues as to whether they are worth my time. And I omit anything that doesn’t seem likely to offer higher-than-average profits.
Bringing us to the next point…
#2: Focus only on the most profitable inventory sources
At home, you may be willing to take chances and be more loose with your time.
When traveling, your time is finite. I will keep anything off my FBA source list that doesn’t appear to have a high probability of bringing significant profit.
#3: Set an FBA profit target
You want to know when the sourcing should strop and the vacation begin. I.e., you want to know when you’ve hit your target. Your “profit target” could be mitigating the cost of your trip, or covering it in full (personally, I am to cover all travel costs with FBA).
The net-payout feature of your sourcing/scanning app makes it simple to track your profit as you go, so know when you hit your profit target.
#4: Enter all your inventory sources into a Google map
This is crucial to further streamline your inventory acquisition process and keep the “work” portion of your trip as short as possible.
You’ll want everything from church sales to auctions in one ready-to-go, at-a-glance Google map.
#5: Know how to utilize public resources to list & pack FBA shipments
There is nothing you can do at home you can’t do from the road.
Being a “digital nomad” and laptop moneymaking have blown up in recent years. There are no shortages of public resources one can utilize to pack, ship, and list inventory from the road.
From hotel computers to FedEx Office printers, you can find a substitute on the road for anything you do at home.
Hit the road
And that covers the key components of my system for covering all travel expenses with Fulfillment By Amazon.
-Peter Valley
PS: About 10 years ago I wrote an entire book on this subject, titled “Amazon Autopilot II: On The Road – A Complete System For Free Travel Using Fulfillment By Amazon.” The book is now out of print, I’m thinking about revising it and bringing it back… Stay tuned?
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