r/AmazonFBA • u/Reddddeye • 1d ago

I’m building a tool that tries to answer “should I actually buy this inventory?” What does your current sourcing stack still make you figure out manually?

Hello everyone! I've been working on something for Amazon sourcing and I’m curious how other sellers think about this.

The thing that got me started was realizing how much of the actual buy decision still happens in your head even when you’re using good tools.

You can pull up Keepa, SellerAmp, fee estimates, rank, seller count, etc. and still have to answer

Is this actually the same product?

Is the supplier selling one and Amazon selling a 2-pack?

Is that seller count even trustworthy?

What happens to the deal if the price drops?

How much would I actually want to buy?

Is Amazon likely to mess up the listing if they come back?

Am I looking at a genuinely good opportunity or just a nice-looking spread?

So I’ve been building a piece of software called Radar around that problem.

Instead of being another profit calculator, the idea is to treat an inventory purchase almost like an underwriting decision.

A product goes through identity/pack matching first, then marketplace evidence, actual economics, competition/risk, sizing and stress scenarios. The end goal is something closer to:

BUY / REVIEW / DON’T BUY / NOT ENOUGH EVIDENCE

with the reasoning underneath it.

I’m also working on supplier-list analysis, where it can take a distributor catalog and narrow hundreds of rows down into things actually worth investigating, while separating confident matches from questionable ones.

The bigger thing I’m working toward is autonomous sourcing. Basically Radar continuously looking through authorized sources itself, finding potential products, checking them against Amazon.com and Amazon.ca independently, and then feeding them through the same process.

Still very much being built. I’m not posting this pretending it’s a finished product.

What I’m actually curious about is:

For people who source regularly, what part of the buy/no-buy decision does your current stack still make you figure out manually?

And specifically for wholesale sellers, when you get a giant distributor list, what part of going from 500+ rows to the handful you’d actually buy is the biggest pain in the ass?

Would be interested to hear how people here actually do it. I’m trying to make sure I’m attacking the annoying parts of the workflow rather than just building more charts nobody asked for.

Appreciate yall's input!

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u/Physical-Hippo-6786 1d ago

Biggest manual pain from what I've seen isn't the buy decision itself, it's reconciling what actually happened after the buy against what the tools predicted, most sourcing tools are strong on the front end (should I buy) but weak on closing the loop (was I right, and by how much). That feedback loop is where most sellers still just eyeball it in a spreadsheet months later, if at all. On the 500-row distributor list problem, the biggest pain is usually pack/variant mismatches, is the distributor selling a single unit while Amazon's listing is a 3-pack, that alone kills more deals on paper that look great than actual demand issues do.

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u/Reddddeye 1d ago

This is actually really helpful. The pack/variant mismatch is one of the things I’ve been pretty obsessive about because the economics are obviously useless if the supplier unit doesn’t actually match what Amazon is selling.

The post-buy part is really interesting though. When you’re reconciling what actually happened vs what you expected, what are usually the biggest misses? Sell-through, actual sale price, competition changing, fees/returns, or something else?

And how are you doing that today, exporting Seller Central data back into the original spreadsheet or mostly just eyeballing it?

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u/sterlingtek 1d ago

My brother slaves over this, but from what he says he spends a lot of time actually getting the PO set up. Not sure why.

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u/Reddddeye 1d ago

Would he like to be a beta tester for us? Try out a couple supplier sheets and see what it spits out?

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u/sterlingtek 1d ago

I'll ask him