How AI has Helped my Business

As someone in high school with limited time, efficiency and profitability in my businesses were key.

Using AI, I was not only able to be more efficient, but I was also able to improve profitability, limit dead-inventory, and reduce customer return rates. This has transformed my business. Here is how I used AI to help me:

Over the past three years, I was able to collect data from my over 20,000 individual sales. This data included: sales information, profitability, sell through-rates, and customer return insights. I was able to organize this data using Excel. Initially, I used this data to gain basic insight into the performance of my business. This data also helped me make purchasing decisions for my inventory. While this was helpful, I knew there was potential to extract even more value from the information I had collected.

On a surface level, I have noticed that certain types of products are more likely to be returned. However, when I dug deeper, I noticed that even certain colors of certain products were more likely to be returned. Returns were and continue to be the most costly part of my business. Limiting customer returns has always been a priority. Seeing the trends, I started to use AI models like Chat-GPT and Claude to help me make purchasing decisions.

Every week, I receive lists of products available for me to purchase from brands and distributors. Each list I receive can have thousands of products on it--many of which will not be profitable for me to purchase.

By creating a series of “if-then” statements using historical data, I was able to use AI to help me make purchasing decisions without having to manually go through every product to see if it is profitable.

For example, I created Prompts like:

"If a product in category X has a sell-through rate below Y% within Z days, then..."

'If the return rate for items in size A is more than B% higher than the average, then..."

These insights allowed me to make more informed decisions when purchasing new inventory, considering complex patterns that might not be immediately apparent to the human eye.

While the current model has been incredibly beneficial for my business, I believe there's potential for even greater impact through collaboration. Imagine a scenario where multiple wholesale and arbitrage sellers could pool their anonymized data to create a more comprehensive and diverse AI model.

I think it is also interesting that AI has become so democratized that someone like myself, with little software development exposure, could use it to my advantage.

If you are interested in how you can use AI to help streamline your business, feel free to reach out! Find more information on arbitrage-ceo.com