I’m Scott Needham, CEO of BuyBoxer and one of the top 100 Amazon sellers in the nation.
What made the difference for my company over the years was using the right tools to do the right things. On top of this, if you have compelling products at the best prices, you will see success.
However, to increase that success and to decrease the amount of effort it takes, you’re going to need software because software scales.
As a software developer myself, I’ve built many tools. Most of them are internal, but one we successfully built to a few hundred users and sold to sifted. Then I also launched SmartScout, a tool that is for brand and seller research.
It’s really hard to build your own tool, which is why I highly recommend subscribing to other tools. You can really get some amazing things out there for a fraction of what it would cost to build yourself.
Here are the categories that I think most Amazon sellers need to know about.
Inventory Management
Knowing profitability is the most important thing you’ve got. That’s why it was the first tool that I built. It’s made all the difference for us.
You can’t afford to stock out of your most profitable products. Since this is the most important of all the tools, you should really do your research before diving in. Ask yourself these questions.
- Is this tool designed for Amazon FBA vs. omnichannel?
- Does this organize well around my different suppliers and handle POs?
- How well does this show me my profitability, and how configurable is this?
Tools Worth Checking Out: Restock Pro, SoStocked, Skubana, Fetcher, CashCowPro, Connectbooks.
Advertising
When your advertising budget gets over a few thousand dollars, you may be spending too much time in the weeds of PPC. For our brand partners, we know we needed something that helped us kick off campaigns quickly and effectively.
Ask yourself these questions.
- How well does campaign creation work?
- Is this a set it and forget it?
- Is this simply rule-based, or is it actively learning about our spending?
Tools Worth Checking Out: Kenshoo, Teikametrics, Quartile, Pacvue are all leaders of the pack. My tool of choice? Perpetua.
Repricing
Smart repricing made the difference between 14% gross margin and 21% gross margin for BuyBoxer. We did this not by pricing down but by cleverly pricing up whenever we could justify it.
You don’t want to be doing this manually and so invest early in this. Here are some questions.
- How easy and quick is it for me to update price ranges?
- Can I upload a file all at once?
- Anyone can price down, but what are you doing to price up?
Tools I Recommend: Seller Snap, Channelmax, informed.co
FBA Reimbursements
Getting money back from Amazon sometimes is tricky. They often owe you quite a bit. I wrestled with this problem myself and built a company called Valence which I sold in 2019.
The answer isn’t always “What’s the best tool?”, the answer is yes. You should be using one of these tools if you’re in Amazon FBA.
Tools I Recommend: Sifted, Getida, SellerBench
Product Research
Everyone has likely dabbled in product research at some point. Helium 10 and Jungle Scout are perhaps the two biggest brands in this space. So I won’t go into them.
I’ll go into the new opportunity here. It’s a tool I built called SmartScout. In every approach to the same problem, we take a step back. Instead of product research like the other tools, it does brand research.
This is simply the best tool out there for wholesalers and arbitragers that want to see the best brands. It filters out brands that Amazon Retail is selling. It can filter out brands that are selling themselves directly.
It helps you leaf sources from the top Amazon sellers, including from my own company BuyBoxer! I launched it 6 months ago, and it has taken off and has allowed many sellers to grow their catalog size so that they’ll be more likely to really need the previous tools mentioned.
Final Thoughts
To make your Amazon business a better business than it was the previous week, implementing scalable tools like these makes your time more efficient. I hope these have been helpful, and let me know what you think. You can find me @smartestseller or on LinkedIn!
