What can you dream up for your ideal scouting app?
Here are Austin’s “outside the box” ideas of what you could do with Profit Bandit. Austin, our Profit Bandit product owner, was excited to get into this creative mind game.
Do you want to play this game with us?
Help you Sell stuff before you Buy it
I’ve sourced with Profit Bandit and listed items only to watch them sit on my shelf for a week or a month before selling. I made a profit, but I wanted something faster. Then a colleague of mine developed a simple manual repricer that let me see an XY graph showing price history and price movements for all my competition.
It also showed who had the Buy BoxThis refers to the situation where a sel... More price.
It had a simple on screen slider I could move with my thumb to quickly change my price. I moved my price near the Buy Box price for about 10 items in just a few seconds, and then I went to lunch.
When I came back an hour later, I had sold 5 items. I’d never sold items faster, or felt I could make money quicker with Profit Bandit.
What if Profit Bandit could quickly list an item you found to have a decent profit margin, set a minimum price floor, and automatically reprice your item to get you the Buy Box, all while you were still out scouting? Then, as you continued scouting and finding other profitable items, you would eventually end up with a bunch of items you’d have already sold before you were even done scouting! You would also end up with a bunch of items that maybe hadn’t sold yet, but that you would have already won the Buy Box for! You could buy the ones you’d sold or won the Buy Box for and automatically delist the rest!
note: this would only work for MFN not FBA.
Do Online Arbitrage while you waited in line at the grocery store
What if Profit Bandit could let you go to any supported website (target, toys R us, walgreens etc.), search for any page on that site with multiple items for sale, and give you a detailed scouting report for those items? For example, this could be a clearance page for household items or toys. You could press one button, and Profit Bandit would give you an on screen list of which items were profitable on Amazon. Then you could go to another page on the same website, or a different website, and repeat. You would end up with a “Buy List” of items you could source from that website to sell on Amazon.
Help your friends sell their stuff
What if we released a free app for all your friends? They could scan their stuff that they don’t want anymore, then SellerEngine would send them a box and packaging materials so they could send it to us and we would sell it for them. You’d get a cut of all the sales from your friends, and all their friends. All you’d have to do is get them to download the app and “friend” them via Profit Bandit.
Please tell us what your dream scouting app would do, and we’ll try to make it happen. What do you think about the things I’ve dreamt up here?
7 Responses
Integrate Profit Bandit to display on smart watches… For scouting locations that ban scanners, allow only bluetooth scanner in hand and data displayed on watch for covert scanning.
Also, the ability to download Amazon database for offline scouting or locations with bad/no data coverage.
i would definitely want the OA option although all 3 suggestions would be a powerful tool in my business. If I were to prioritise, the OA, the screen slider then the shared App.
Hello Trish, Ken! Thank you for your comments! I’ll forward this to Austin. Your feedback is really important to us and we’ll consider your suggestions when adding new features.
I am simultaneously subscribed to Profit Bandit and a service called Rank Informer. Rank Informer takes an input of simply the item category (Books, DVD, etc) and the current Amazon rank and uses an algorithm to assign a rating opinion such as “Great Buy”, “Good Buy”, “Don’t Buy”, etc based on how quickly you could expect your item to sell based on the category and rank. Rank Informer is a web app, not a true smartphone app. It is quite a pain in the bits having to switch out of Profit Bandit, into a web app, log in, switch back to Profit Bandit to look at the Amazon Rank and category, memorize the rank and category, switch back to the web app… The web app log in credentials expire after an amount of idle time… It would be awesome if Profit Bandit had this functionality built right in. I don’t know about anyone else but if I’m already paying for Rank Informer, I would gladly cancel Rank Informer and pay more for Profit Bandit just to have the functionality of both services in one place, in a true smartphone app.
Hello Patrick!
Thank you for the feedback, this is really cool. I’m really curious about their algorithm.
I’ll forward this to the Profit Bandit Team.
Cheers!
Maria
Hi Maria!
I just stopped by to find out if there was every any feedback from the Profit Bandit team regarding integration of functionality similar to Rank Informer.
Any chance of that ever happening?
Thanks!
Hi,
I’ve actually just been recently looking into their web app in depth. We’d obviously need to figure out a way to reliably correlate the product category / sales rank with speed of sales. I’m suspecting they are doing something very simple, like associating their 3 groupings (great buy, good buy, don’t buy) with the top 5% or 10% of sales rank. I can email to update you on progress and let you know where we’re at and if we can do it. Just write us at profitbandit@SellerEngine.com so we can get your email.