How to pack arbitrage-sourced items for Amazon FBA

If you’re new to retail arbitrage, sourcing products is the fun part. It’s the packing and shipping side that tends to trip people up. How do you set up an FBA shipment? What boxes should you use? How do you handle price tags, labels, and poly bags without making a mess of it?

The good news is that once you’ve done it a few times, the process becomes second nature. This guide walks through everything you need to know about packing and prepping arbitrage-sourced items for Amazon FBA, from gathering your supplies to dropping boxes off at the carrier.

Overview of the FBA packing process

Amazon’s “Send to Amazon” workflow in Seller Central is the backbone of every FBA shipment. It walks you through the following steps:

• Step 1: Choose inventory to send
• Step 1b: Pack individual units (if not using case packs)
• Step 2: Confirm shipping details
• Step 3: Print box labels
• Step 4: Confirm carrier and pallet information (pallet shipments only)
• Step 5: Print pallet labels (partnered carrier pallet shipments only)
• Final step: Enter tracking details (non-partnered carriers only)

Amazon’s built-in guide covers the mechanics of creating a shipment, but it’s written for the general seller population. It doesn’t specifically address the prep work that goes into shipping arbitrage inventory: sourcing boxes, dealing with store stickers, or building a packing checklist when you’re shipping 300 items across eight boxes. That’s what this guide fills in.

Prep work for retail arbitrage sellers

Most of the work happens before anything goes into a box. Here’s what to take care of first.

Sourcing your products

Before you can pack a shipment, you need to go out and find what to put in it. Thrift stores are a solid starting point for retail arbitrage. You’ll often find items with less competition from other sellers and lower acquisition costs than big-box stores. Don’t overlook used books and older media items, since those can move well on Amazon FBA.

If you’re just getting started, it’s worth reading up on where to buy products to sell on Amazon to understand which sourcing channels tend to yield the best margins for different seller types.

When you’re out sourcing, a good scanning app is non-negotiable. Scoutify is built for exactly this: it instantly shows you profit margins, restriction flags, and sales history right from your phone when you scan a barcode in the store aisle. For book flippers specifically, ScoutIQ gives you fast, offline access to a database of book profitability data with the proprietary eScore metric that shows how consistently a book has actually sold.

Both are part of Seller 365, which bundles 10 sourcing and selling tools into one subscription at $69/month.

Getting boxes

For your first few shipments, hardware stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s are a reliable source for clean, sturdy boxes. Two sizes tend to cover most arbitrage shipments: medium (roughly 18″ x 18″ x 16″) and large (roughly 18″ x 18″ x 24″).

One thing to note: Home Depot has updated box dimensions at some locations, and some “large” moving boxes now exceed Amazon’s 25-inch-per-side limit for standard-item boxes. Always check the dimensions before buying. Per Amazon’s policies, boxes containing standard-size products cannot exceed 25 inches on any side.

Free boxes are also worth tracking down. Retail stores that receive large quantities of inventory often discard usable boxes. Check with local vendors or managers, and reuse boxes from your own online purchases when the size is right. Reusing boxes can meaningfully reduce your packaging costs over time, which matters once you’re running a tighter-margin operation.

Removing price tags and stickers

Every retail price tag, clearance sticker, and markdown label needs to come off before you ship to Amazon. Some stores make this easy: Goodwill tags and Target clearance stickers generally peel off cleanly. Others, especially Ross and Marshalls, use stickers with perforated holes designed to make removal harder, and the adhesive tends to be strong.

A few techniques that work:

• Use a hair dryer on low heat applied to the underside of the sticker while peeling. The heat softens the adhesive and makes removal much cleaner.
• For Ross-style circle-hole stickers, place a piece of Scotch tape over the holes first so the sticker lifts in one piece rather than tearing.
• For leftover adhesive residue, a cotton swab with rubbing alcohol or Goo Gone will clean it without damaging the packaging.

Be careful throughout this process. If the packaging gets torn or visibly damaged, you may not be able to sell the item as new on Amazon FBA.

Adding products to Seller Central with a barcode scanner

Once you’re back from a sourcing trip, you’ll need to add your finds to your Amazon inventory. Searching by product name is slow and unreliable. Too many listings can come up for the same product, and it’s hard to identify the right match at a glance. Manually typing UPC codes for dozens of items is tedious and error-prone.

The practical solution is a USB barcode scanner. You can find wired ones on Amazon for well under $30. Plug it in, open the Add Products screen in Seller Central, and scan each item directly into the search field. It’s significantly faster than typing, and a misread scan is easy to catch immediately.

For items without UPC barcodes, you’ll still need to search manually. In some cases you may need to request an Amazon GTIN exemption to list the product at all.

Printing and placing labels

Standard 8.5″ x 11″ label sheets with 30 labels per sheet (1″ x 2-5/8″ each) work fine for individual product labels. For box labels, half-sheet peel-and-stick labels (8.5″ x 11″, two per page) make it easier to print and apply them to boxes without trimming.

Off-brand labels from Amazon are generally just as reliable as name-brand options like Avery and cost considerably less. Either an inkjet or laser printer works, but make sure the labels you buy are compatible with your printer type. If you’re buying a printer specifically for FBA labeling, a laser printer offers better long-term value.

When to use poly bags

Amazon requires poly bags used on FBA products to be at least 1.5 mil thick, transparent, and printed with a suffocation warning. The product label must be visible and scannable through the bag.

Common use cases for poly bags include:

• Stuffed animals and soft goods that could collect dust
• Hats and items that could be crushed or deformed
• Products bundled as a set (these also need a “SOLD AS SET / DO NOT SEPARATE” label)
• Any item where the packaging alone isn’t sufficient protection for warehouse handling

Buying variety packs of poly bags keeps a range of sizes available without committing to a single size you might run out of.

Packing and shipping your FBA shipment

Once your products are prepped, labeled, and ready, here’s how to pack and ship efficiently.

Building a packing checklist

Amazon’s Seller Central requires you to declare exactly which items are in which boxes. This box contents declaration is used by the warehouse to process your shipment. For one or two boxes, you can manage this without too much effort. For larger shipments, you need a system.

Here’s a spreadsheet-based approach that works well:

Step 1: List all products and quantities

Create a spreadsheet with two columns: product name and unit count. This becomes your master checklist.

Step 2: Add tracking squares for each unit

To the left of the units column, add a series of small bordered squares, one per unit for each product. These are your tracking grid. You can resize columns to make square cells and use borders to define them clearly.

Step 3: Print and use during packing

Print the checklist. As you pack, write the box number into each square for the item you’re placing. If you put three units of an item into Box 1 and four into Box 2, your squares fill in as 1-1-1-2-2-2-2.

When you fill out the box contents form in Seller Central, this checklist gives you an accurate record without having to keep everything in your head. It also lets you pack boxes by weight and size rather than by product, which makes better use of your box space.

Weighing boxes

Amazon’s weight limit for standard FBA boxes is 50 pounds, with an exception for boxes containing a single heavy item. For most arbitrage shipments with lighter consumer goods, this isn’t usually an issue. When you’re packing heavier items like books, though, it’s easy to go over, especially in larger boxes.

A bathroom scale works fine for checking weight. Step on it, note your weight, then repeat holding the box and subtract. Dedicated box scales with a wired readout are available for under $40 if you want something more convenient, but it’s not a required investment. Check box weights before sealing them so you can redistribute items if needed.

Dropping off your shipment

UPS stores are the most convenient drop-off point for most FBA sellers using Amazon’s partnered carrier rates. Your shipping labels are already paid for and printed, so you just hand the boxes over and they scan them in.

A foldable hand truck is worth having if you’re regularly shipping more than a few boxes at a time. It makes loading your car and unloading at the UPS store much less physical effort.

For very large shipments, particularly around Q4 when volume peaks, you can schedule a carrier pickup instead. Check pricing and availability in your area, since pickup fees vary by location and shipment size.

Streamline your sourcing and shipping with Seller 365

The packing and shipping process is one of the more mechanical parts of running an arbitrage business, but it connects to everything else. The products you find during sourcing, the way you add them to your inventory, and the speed of your prep workflow all feed into how efficiently your operation runs. It’s worth tracking your inventory turnover ratio as you scale, since slow-moving stock directly affects your FBA storage costs and your ability to keep cash flowing into new inventory.

Seller 365 bundles the tools retail arbitrage sellers rely on most: Scoutify for in-store scanning, ScoutIQ for book sourcing, ScoutX for Amazon product research, Tactical Arbitrage for online arbitrage, and InventoryLab for FBA prep and shipping. All in one subscription starting at $69/month.

Start your free trial of Seller 365 and run more of your arbitrage business from one place →