Tactical Arbitrage or OAXray.  OAXray or Tactical Arbitrage.

What is the difference?
Which is better for a new seller?
Or an experienced seller?

When OAXray came to the market with their market research tool, the Amazon selling community couldn’t contain their excitement. Soon thereafter, Tactical Arbitrage, or TA, as it is commonly referred to, entered the arena, and Amazon sellers now had a choice – OAXray, TA, or both?

Competition is great for the consumer. If nothing else, Tactical Arbitrage has made OAXray better, and vice versa. Both are similar in that they look at online retail store prices on items that are also listed on Amazon, identifying whether there is an arbitrage opportunity for the reseller. But they are different in the way the user interacts with the program.

With OAXray, you open a retail website, navigate to the section you want to “Xray”, and with the click of you mouse, the OAXray program goes to work, searching on Amazon for the UPC, image, product title, and more, trying to find a match. Each item on the page that meets your pre-set criteria gets its own line in a custom spreadsheet where identifying information and relevant data is listed. The corresponding data from the Amazon product page is added to that line on the spreadsheet, allowing the user to compare. The user can filter results by profit margin, ROI, or any number of criteria in the settings, allowing for easy sorting of the results. Multiple page searches can be initiated at the same time, and the data that is shown is in real time.

Tactical Arbitrage is a database of retail store search results, but the searches have already been performed and the data is stored in the TA servers. The user chooses the retail store and category, sets their filters, and the TA research tool goes to work, searching the entire category and providing the results in a file when the search is complete. The user logs in to the TA website and pulls the completed search files into the tool in order to evaluate the results.

I know that is a very basic definition of the workings of two very complex tools, but the purpose is to show that, although similar, each tool is very different in how the results are accessed. With OAXray, you have immediate results, one page at a time. With TA, you get the whole results file at once, but maybe several hours later, or even longer.

We always try to fully utilize the full power of TA at all times. TA allows for 10 active searches, plus 10 more in the queue. But even with all of these results coming in at various times throughout the day and night, there are still times when the VAs are caught up and need more searches to stay busy. During these times, OAXray is the perfect tool. It is also great for quickly checking out a sale that you didn’t know about in time to run a TA search.

In fact, OAXray is a great way to train a new sourcer. It is less intimidating than Tactical Arbitrage, allowing the new user to more quickly gain confidence in their ability to process the results. TA has a much steeper learning curve.