This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Can MacBook arbitrage work as a side hustle? Can you make money buying Apple computers in one country and reselling them in another? This is international tech arbitrage. That's the goal anyway. Arbitrage itself is a classic entrepreneurial play. You are buying low,
you are selling high, but what if you tried it internationally using price differences between countries because sometimes products like computers will have different prices in different countries or regions even. Can you buy it somewhere, sell it somewhere else for a higher price therefore profiting? Could this be your next profitable side hustle or at least somebody's? That's what a listener is wondering. He's wondering if it could be his next side hustle.
Let's talk about the details. Let's unpack the fantasy and the friction. I'll do my best to provide a helpful answer, detailed question and that answer coming right up. Hi there. Long time listener, but this is my first time asking a question. I've been doing some reading about
price differences in Apple products between countries and it got me wondering, could you actually make a viable business where you're buying something where it's cheap and selling it where it's more expensive? I think it's called arbitrage. Like buying new Apple laptop sort of vices in one country where they're cheaper and then reselling them in another where they're marked up. Taking a look at it on paper. Sounds clever, but like everything, I'm guessing that it's a little bit more complicated. There's some logistical problems,
I'm sure, that make it harder than it actually looks. Just wondering what you thought could international arbitrage work for premium electronics or is it just a fantasy? So let's look at this big picture. First of all, anything can be bought and resold. Like it's possible, at least theoretically, to buy anything for one price and sell it for something else. It
just depends on your availability of getting that item at one price and then a market demand for someone willing to pay a higher price, presumably. So hypothetically, it's possible. Practically speaking though, what you'll find is that some markets are much better than others. There are some things in which it's much easier for you to acquire at a certain price and for which there are a lot more buyers willing to pay a higher price and so on. So when you start buying and selling, you kind of understand, okay, a big part of this game is trying to figure out what are the markets to go into. And I think our caller is right to see an opportunity, but also right to
suspect that it's not so simple because there are international price gaps. Apple and lots of manufacturers, they price products differently due to local taxes, import duties, currency fluctuations, all those things. So in some cases, you might potentially save hundreds of dollars per device buying in one region versus another. Whenever there is a new iPhone out, for example, there are a lot of Chinese nationals that come to cities like Portland, Oregon, where there's no state tax in Oregon, buying a bunch of iPhones, taking them back to resell them and so on. Nevertheless, there's a lot of complexity here. You've got import-export restrictions. Most
countries have strict limits on bringing in multiple high value devices. So you might have an issue with customs or potentially even having your items confiscated. Then you've got platform restrictions. Marketplaces like Amazon or eBay, they often flag or ban resellers who don't have the right authorization, especially if you're selling phones or laptops or other premium electronics over and over. And maybe the biggest challenge I think is actually thin margins plus travel costs. Even if you're saving a couple hundred dollars on a device, once you factor in
the travel or the shipping and customs duties, transaction fees, all that kind of stuff, the margin tends to go away unless you're moving like a ton of volume, but then that's risky, right? If you're moving a ton of volume, it means you're spending tens of thousands of dollars repeatedly on these items. And then what happens if something in the supply chain doesn't work or the price advantage goes away, maybe it even turns into a disadvantage. So I think there's actually more risk involved in this type of reselling than there would be for lots of other markets and items. So is it possible? Yes. Does it come with some risk? Definitely. I tend to think you might be
better off focusing on more scalable arbitrage models like local product flipping, as opposed to like flying around the world or importing Mac books from some other country far away just because those barriers can be steep. But it's a great question. I don't think we've ever talked about it. So thank you for bringing it up. Listeners, let me know what's on your mind, sidehustleschool.com detailed notes page for every episode, more resources there. And of course,
you can download or stream the entire side hustle school archives all completely free. New episodes drop every day. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is side hustle school. from The Onward Project.
