Why Amazon FBA Sourcing Will Be Harder in 2026 (And How Modern Arbitrage Resellers Are Preparing Now)

Brian and Robin Joy Olson are highly-respected Amazon coaches who have helped thousands of online arbitrage sellers find clarity, confidence, and the momentum to keep going when the going gets tough.
They also run the Builder’s Circle, a members-only community built to give OA sellers what they actually need: clear nest steps, better buys, and the confidence to navigate the Amazon ecosystem. Inside, you get full access to their paid training archive plus ongoing series like Keepa Corner and Mastermind Minute that walk you through real Keepa charts, sourcing decisions, and current opportunities so you always know what to look for and what to avoid. You’ll plug into a focused group of OA sellers who are actively working the same model, so you’re never guessing or grinding alone. For a limited time only, membership is 50% off, so if you want Brian and Robin Joy’s systems and community in your corner, now is the time to join Builder’s Circle.

Third-party arbitrage sellers face a challenge that intensified dramatically over the last few years. Amazon fixed some of the operational headaches that used to plague sellers - inbound shipping, financial reports, analytics - but the pain points moved. Sourcing became exponentially harder due to increased competition and stricter compliance enforcement. After helping hundreds of builders adapt to this shift, we've identified exactly what changed and how successful builders are responding.

The Market Shift Nobody Noticed

Five years ago, Amazon sellers complained about different problems. Inbound shipping workflows were a nightmare. You'd spend hours creating shipments, splitting inventory across warehouses, and hoping Amazon didn't lose half your boxes. Financial reports were buried in Seller Central. If you wanted to know your actual profit, you needed advanced spreadsheet skills or third-party tools at a price.

But sourcing? Sourcing was relatively straightforward.

You'd find a product, check Keepa (an Amazon price tracking and data tool), verify potential profitability, buy it, and send it in. Competition existed, but it wasn't cutthroat. Listing hijackers were annoying but manageable. The "easy finds" were still out there.

Today, the situation seems to be inverted.

Amazon fixed many of those operational issues. Inbound shipping workflows are cleaner (though not perfect). Financial reports are easier to access and understand. Seller Central's native analytics actually function now.

But sourcing? Sourcing is harder than it's ever been.

The shift happened gradually, like the "how do you boil a frog?" question. Put it in room temperature water and slowly raise the heat, it'll never jump out. Many sellers kept using the same sourcing methods for the last several years and didn't realize the temperature had fundamentally changed. They found themselves working harder, spending more time, and finding fewer testable products without understanding why.

Ask me how I know.

Why Sourcing Got Exponentially Harder

Two major forces transformed the sourcing landscape:

Competition Increased

More people discovered third-party arbitrage. More Online Arbitrage (OA, sourcing products from online retail stores to resell on Amazon) courses launched. More sellers began chasing the same products. The "easy finds" that used to take a few minutes per product now take an hour or more when looking manually. What used to yield 10 testable products per sourcing session now yields 2-3.

Amazon's Compliance Crackdown Tightened

Between GS1 barcode enforcement, expanding brand gating, and GTIN (product identifier) validation requirements, it's no longer enough to just "find a good deal." You need products with authorized sources, clean listings, and no compliance landmines waiting to block your inventory at check-in.

I see builders who experienced the Trader Joe's GTIN validation issues in October 2025. Half their inventory got flagged or blocked, not because they did anything wrong, but because Amazon's systems couldn't validate the product identifiers.

The Cost of Not Adapting

Here's the uncomfortable mathematical reality:

Old school sourcing (monthly breakdown):

• 10 hours per week times 4 weeks equals 40 hours per month

• 40 hours at $25 per hour equals $1,000 per month in time value

• Result: 80 good leads found per month

Modern automated sourcing (monthly breakdown):

• 1 hour per week times 4 weeks equals 4 hours per month

• 4 hours at $25 per hour plus $69 tool cost equals $169 per month total

• Result: 2,000+ good leads found per month

That's 25X more results for one-sixth the cost.

And that calculation doesn't even account for opportunity cost. While old school sourcers are clicking through products one by one (and don’t even get me started on standing in clearance aisles, scanning for hours so you can load up a U-Haul before going to the next store), modern sourcers are testing more products, finding replens faster, building lead databases they can revisit for years, and spending their extra time on higher-value tasks like optimizing pricing, managing inventory, or scaling operations.

We like to say that the cure to almost every arbitrage problem is to test more ASINs. But you can't test more ASINs if you can't find them fast enough.

What Modern Sourcing Actually Is

A large number of arbitrage resellers think sourcing works like this:

1. Open a retail website

2. Click through products one by one

3. Check each one in Keepa

4. Maybe find something good

5. Repeat 100 times

6. End the day with 3-5 testable products

That's old school sourcing. It worked fine when competition was lower and Amazon's compliance rules were looser.

Modern automated sourcing flips the script entirely:

Instead of checking products one at a time, you scan entire competitor and retail storefronts at once. Instead of manually clicking through 500 listings, you use tools to match thousands of products to Amazon ASINs in minutes. Instead of sifting through gravel looking for gold, you process the entire riverbed at once and let the system show you where the gold is.

The Three-Punch Combo

Modern arbitrage resellers use a three-punch combination:

Punch 1: Keepa Storefront Stalking

Keepa allows you to scan up to 50 competitor Amazon storefronts at once (using storefront IDs - brand stores, top seller shops, competitor listings). For each storefront, Keepa extracts ALL active ASINs, giving you thousands of products in minutes. You're only limited by your Keepa quota when it comes to the number of ASINs that can be extracted, but you can scan up to 50 storefront IDs at once.

The goal isn't to find "proven winners" yet. You're building a database of ASINs to investigate. You know these are live, active listings with resellers on them, but you don't yet know if they're potentially profitable or where to source them. That's where the next punch comes in.

Time investment: 15-30 minutes to scan multiple storefronts and extract thousands of ASINs.

Punch 2: ArbiSource Reverse Scanning (Power Move #1)

You take your ASIN list from Keepa and upload it to ArbiSource, an automated sourcing tool that scans 240+ online retail stores. ArbiSource reverse scans your ASINs and shows you:

• Which stores carry those products

• Current retail prices

• Estimated potential profitability (factoring in Amazon fees, FBA costs)

• Stock availability

You can get back a filtered list showing exactly which products you can buy TODAY from which stores, and whether they have the potential to make you money.

This is the 1-2 punch: Keepa finds what's selling on Amazon, ArbiSource finds where to buy it from retail sources with potential profit margins.

Time investment: 5-10 minutes to run the reverse scan and filter results.

Punch 3: Custom Retail Store Scan (Power Move #2, The Uppercut)

ArbiSource's custom scan feature lets you target ANY online retail store, even ones not in the 240-store database. You can apply custom filters (price ranges, categories, sales rank thresholds) to find exactly what you're looking for.

The notable part? No coding or scripting required. The interface is extremely simple but wildly powerful for finding niche opportunities that other sellers miss.

Time investment: 10-20 minutes per custom scan, depending on store size and filters.

The Hidden Advantage: Lead Databases That Compound Over Time

The obvious benefit of modern sourcing is speed. You find more products in less time. That's the surface-level win.

But the deeper advantage is this: Modern sourcing turns sourcing from a bottleneck into a system.

With old school sourcing, you're always starting from zero. Every sourcing session is a grind. You're hoping to "get lucky" and find something good.

With modern sourcing, you're building a lead database. Every ASIN you identify gets saved.

Because modern sourcing finds so many matches (viable ASINs), you can tolerate the same percentage of testable ASINs thanks to database solutions, filtering options, automation, and AI. This makes finding needles in haystacks highly efficient.

Many products won't be testable today, but they may be in 2-6 months when:

• Pricing changes at the retail level

• Stock availability shifts

• Competitors drop off the listing

• Products that were gated become ungated

• Items that were out of stock come back in

When you save every ASIN you source (even the ones you don't buy immediately), you're creating future opportunities. You can rescan that database in a few months and find products that are NOW testable without doing the sourcing work again. You’re basically shopping from your own database.

One easy way to build a compounding lead engine like this is with a curated feed.
FBA LeadList delivers 10+ vetted OA leads you can save now and save for future rescans — so you’re never starting from zero. Check out our subscription plans here.

This is what a good friend of ours calls "shopping from the back of the list," and it's only possible with modern sourcing because you're generating enough volume that you can afford to save the maybes for later.

Old school sourcing doesn't build databases. It builds burnout.

You find 10 products, buy 3, and move on. You don't have a database. You don't have a system. You just have today's results.

Modern sourcing gives you both immediate results and compounding future opportunities.

How to Get Started

If you've never done modern sourcing before, here's how to start:

Step 1: Pick one workflow
We've identified four core modern sourcing workflows (all detailed with step-by-step video walkthroughs in our free Bulk Sourcing Playbook). Start with the 1-2 punch (Keepa storefront stalking followed by ArbiSource reverse scanning) if you want the full system. Start with direct retail store scans in ArbiSource if you want to jump straight into finding opportunities.

Step 2: Start with a smaller number of storefronts
For Amazon storefronts, start with 3-5 storefront IDs to see how the system works, then scale up to the full 50. The real power of this strategy is the ability to scan multiple storefronts at once, extracting every ASIN across all of those stores. For retail stores, pick one to start.

Step 3: Run the scan
Follow the workflow (detailed in the playbook). You can get back a list of matched ASINs with data.

Step 4: Filter and test
Filter by sales velocity (how quickly a product tends to sell), price points, offer counts, and sales rank. Pick 10-12 products to test. Buy them. Send them in. Track results.

Step 5: Repeat
Once you see results, do it again. Try more storefronts. Try a different workflow. Build your lead database.

That's it. You don't need to be a tech wizard. You don't need a VA team. You just need to try it once and see what happens.

The Takeaway

Amazon didn't make sourcing harder to punish sellers. The marketplace matured. More competition, more rules, more enforcement.

The builders who adapt aren't smarter. They're just using strategie that match the speed of the 2026 game.

Modern, automated sourcing is one of those strategies.

If you're still using old school sourcing methods, the temperature changed gradually, and you didn't feel it happening. Now you know what to do about it.

In the Builders Circle, we see this pattern repeatedly - the ones who switch to modern sourcing early gain momentum while others are still grinding through old school searches. You're closer than you think to making this shift work for you.

Ready to try modern sourcing?  Download our free Bulk Sourcing Playbook with step-by-step video walkthroughs of all four workflows, plus an exclusive ArbiSource discount code (50% off your first month, good through 11/30/25, use PATH50 at checkout). Get instant access at Official Olsons.