Lesson 2 of 6
Analyzing Products With the Amazon Seller App
Scanning a barcode with the free Amazon Seller app and reading what comes back: fees, rank, and whether you are allowed to sell the item.
The Amazon Seller app is free with your seller account and it is enough to run retail arbitrage on its own. This lesson covers scanning, checking the numbers, and listing an item, all from a phone.
Scanning a product
Open the app and tap the camera icon in the top right. The camera opens and you point it at the product.
Scan the barcode. That is the reliable method, because a barcode identifies exactly one product. The app matches it to the Amazon listing and shows you the sales rank and the Buy Box price immediately, which is usually enough to decide whether the item is worth a closer look.
When the barcode does not scan
Some barcodes are not in Amazon's catalogue, or are printed too small or too glossy to read. Two fallbacks:
- Scan the packaging itself. The app recognises product images. This works, but it is much less precise: it returns several candidate matches and often none of them has a sales rank, which means you cannot judge demand. Treat a packaging match as a hint rather than an identification.
- Search by name. Type the product name into the search field, on the scan screen or under Add Product on the home screen. Slower, and usually exact.
Checking the numbers
Once you have the right product, open its details page and work through it in this order:
- Select Amazon Fulfilled. This matters. It tells the calculator to use FBA fees rather than merchant-fulfilled ones, and the two give very different answers. Getting this wrong is a common reason a product looks profitable and is not.
- Enter your cost. The price you are paying at the till, including any discount.
- Read the profit. The app calculates the Amazon referral fee, the FBA fulfilment fee and your margin, and shows the profit per unit.
You now have the two numbers that decide the purchase: what you keep per unit, and how well the product sells. Sales rank is on the same screen.
Listing it
If the numbers work, you can list from the shop floor. From the product details page, tap List in the bottom right, and then:
- Enter the price you want to sell at.
- Set the condition to New, assuming it is.
- Choose Amazon will dispatch and provide customer service. This is the FBA option, and it is the one that matches the fee calculation you just did.
Tap Continue, review the details, and submit. The item is in your inventory and ready to be sent to Amazon in a shipment.
Two more features worth knowing
- History. The scan screen has a History link showing everything you have scanned. Useful when you want to reconsider something you passed on an hour ago, and useful for reviewing a whole trip afterwards.
- It scans screens. Point the camera at a barcode on a monitor and it reads it. So the same app works for online arbitrage on a desktop, which is a quick way to check a product without any other software.
Advice for the first shipment
Two practical points from the lesson:
- Buy around ten items or more before shipping. Not because ten is a magic number, but because a box costs the same to send whether it holds two items or twenty, so a nearly empty box wastes the shipping cost.
- Avoid large and heavy items at first. Amazon routes oversized goods to different fulfilment centres, so they cannot be packed in with your small items and you end up sending two shipments. They also carry higher fulfilment fees. Start small and light.
What the app does not tell you
One important limit. The Seller app gives you sales rank right now, and as the sales rank lesson explained, a single reading can be badly misleading. It also does not show you how many other sellers are on the listing, or whether Amazon itself is selling it.
That is what the next two lessons add: SellerAmp SAS for competition and analysis in one screen, and the Keepa app for the price and rank history behind the current number.
Your task
Go to a shop and scan. Buy enough to justify a shipment, keep the items small, and check the FBA setting on every calculation. The lesson after next covers getting the box to Amazon.