Reselling as a business has a pretty low cost of entry. Perhaps that is why it can be so enticing for folks looking for an alternative means for Manufacturing Spend. That’s also the reason that it makes for a great side gig. But how can you kick things up a notch? Normally, the answer would be to just spend more time, right? But think, every deal you find, takes time to analyze, to determine whether you should buy it. There’s additional time required to analyze the market once you’ve already entered in on a product, to determine how you should move your pricing. While an auto-pricer can automate the price changes–which I don’t recommend, by the way–you still need a tool for the analysis.

Enter ASINSpector – Standard and Pro versions

I’ve been using ASINSpector Pro for a few months now, and have played around with many of it’s features, and really feel them to be truly value added. Briefly described:

ASINSpector Standard (Note, affiliate link) – Provides a Chrome Extension that allows you to who the best seller is of a particular product. Provides multiple tools for researching an ASIN, shares what other marketplaces have a particular product for sale and prices (for sourcing or competitive intelligence), and provides a revenue estimator (incorporating Amazon fees).

ASINSpector Pro (Note, Affiliate link) – In addition to the benefits of ASINSpector Standard, the Pro version allows you to mobile scan capabilities (I haven’t used these myself), as well as additional filtering, importing and keyword functions. There’s an import function too. Ultimately, the Pro option gives you more functionality for sourcing/finding the product, vs. just the standard version.

ASINSpector for Quick Product Analysis – 3 Key Tools

I find that the best features for ASINSpector are the saving of “clicks”–I’m big on limiting how many unique “clicks” of the mouse I need to do. For example, once you have the Chrome plug-in enabled, and you load up a product on Amazon, you’ll get this handy little summary:

Of course, if I want more information, I can click the plug-in icon on my browser bar, and I get a display that looks like this:

As you can see, this little dashboard gives you much of the information from the little overlay on the Amazon page, including Estimate Sales per Month, Estimated Fees, and Estimated Revenue. But the “Actions” on the right side of the page, are, in my opinion where ASINSpector really flourishes.

I’ll just highlight a few of the “Actions” in this post, and go into more depth in a future post, if interest warrants it (e.g. questions in the comments, etc). But, I do want to highlight a few that I find myself consistently going back to. First off with a single click, you can open up CamelCamelCamel (Read more about CamelCamelCamel in Useful Reselling Tools) to get an idea of price volatility:

The next action, is net payout, yes, you could go the FBA Calculator–but that would be more clicks–or you could just click on the little dollar sign action and put in your cost, and anticipated sell price:

The last key action, is perhaps the strongest – checking the inventory of competing sellers:

This is particularly key when you either have very little inventory and others have a lot, or the opposite. Why? Because if you have a bunch of a product, which is tying up your capital, you may want to get more aggressive, but wouldn’t it be nice to know that there’s only 4 total units for sale via Amazon prime sellers, below $545? If you had 20 units, and priced at the buy box around $499, rather than $545 (which you could probably get, just waiting a day or so), that is a pretty decent chunk of change. Alternatively, if you only have one or two, and want to get rid of them, you could price slightly less expensive than the heavy hitters, like the sellers with 23 and 48 units, and you probably could get a fair shot at the buy box.

Conclusion

As I get further into reselling, I’m noticing more and more that there are areas where spending some money helps me to be more efficient in my sourcing efforts. Don’t take lightly the consideration of it though, while the adage of “you have to spend money, to make money” can be true, you also need to ensure that your reselling efforts justify the investment. All that said, I find ASINSpector to be quite useful in making quick product analysis, and knowing competitor inventory. In short, to leverage a G. I. Joe closing phrase: “Knowing is half the battle.”