Building Swift Lister - drop shipping automation for Amazon to eBay

[Y Combinator]

So I've been having some success with the method described here: http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/making-money/731479-method-amazon-ebay-drop-shipping-done-right-spoon-fed-long-detailed.html and I'm already making sales.

The problem is: to make any real money doing this you need to cycle over thousands of items to build a list of regular sellers which literally amounts to hundreds of hours of manual data entry. Not to mention that most of the items you try to sell already have horrible competition on eBay. And how do you manage your inventory? I've found that prices and stock quantities change regularly which makes scaling a store with hundreds of items a nightmare to manage.

I've decided I'm going to try revamp this method for the 21st century and fix these problems. Here's what features I'm planning:

• Automated niche item lister so you actually have a chance of achieving best listing status
• Automated SEO for listings descriptions + auto posting
• Manage inventory and shipping status automatically
• Detect price and stock changes from suppliers and adjust automatically
• Sexy templates with rich media content to maximize your sales and murder your competition
• [Your idea here]

Sound interesting? Then maybe you want to sign up to be an alpha tester and help test it. Alpha testers will get the chance to try the software out early (before it's officially available in the Marketplace), plus have the chance to have the features they want built for the first version. You can sign up to be an alpha tester at http://www.swiftlister.[most popular domain extension].

Also, let me know what features you want here in the thread

 

[lewwy789]

It's an excellent idea please count me in for testing.
I think the most important aspect would be being able to track prices and stock because if you have a product finder then we would all end up selling the same items.

 

[Y Combinator]

It's an excellent idea please count me in for testing.
I think the most important aspect would be being able to track prices and stock because if you have a product finder then we would all end up selling the same items.

Amazon are so sneaky about it too. You can check a product out one day and then another they've marked it up like $2 which might not seem like much but when your margin is only like 7 - n$ you really need to know about every change (especially stock changes which are absolutely essential to maintaining good feedback which is probably the biggest reason why eBay worry about drop shipping: bad buyer experiences.)

if you have a product finder then we would all end up selling the same items.

I'm still braining storming how the product finder will work but at the moment Amazon has over 250 million products in total so theoretically even if there were say: 10k people doing this I think there would still be a huge, huge, number of good items to sell. But don't worry: I don't plan to sign up a huge number of people outside of BHW so this probably won't ever be a hugely popular service.

 

[lewwy789]

Maybe you could give each member so many products a day/week and try to keep them separate.

Not a simple task for you to work out but it would have massive potential and you would make your money from us going through your site or at least going through your site once a day to Amazon so you get the affiliate money for your en-devours.

Then you are happy and we are happy it's a win win.

 

[Y Combinator]

^ That idea is actually amazing and it's much better than what I was thinking.

(By the way: I don't currently have enough posts to send private messages (and don't intend to spam to get there) but I'll respond to any PMs when I can so don't think I'm ignoring people.)

 

[lewwy789]

Just out of interest why the hxxp:// because i'm having trouble finding the site and what does come up is about malware/spyware so that will put people off.

 

[Y Combinator]

Just out of interest why the hxxp:// because i'm having trouble finding the site and what does come up is about malware/spyware so that will put people off.

You're apparently not allowed to post links to your own websites without obfuscating them. The URL is just a normal http:// .... .com site. I guess I'll remove the hxxp thing so people don't get confused.

 

[Tove]

Just subscribed, it would be good if it can work for other dropshipping sites such as alibaba or aliexpres

 

[lewwy789]

Subscribed and looking forward to this.

 

[TheVigilante]

Should belong in the beta testing section.

 

[nnahlee]

very interested in this would like to test.

 

[AlphaWulf]

I am very interested in seeing how this turns out. Signing up now!

 

[siffy1]

Count me in as an alpha tester, started getting a few sales recently but its a pain in the ass trying to keep an eye on price changes

 

[Kieranight]

Sounds great! Count me in! How much are you planning to charge for this after it is out of testing?

 

[Y Combinator]

Thanks for signing up guys. I've been working hard on the software and it's starting to take shape now but there's still a long way to go before this will be ready for users.

I'll be sure to keep you all up to date on when it's ready though

Sounds great! Count me in! How much are you planning to charge for this after it is out of testing?

I'm building a web-based version for people who don't want to have to mess around with running their own bots which will have a few plans starting out at a low entry price (let's say ~$15 / month.) The entry package will be designed for people just getting into drop shipping who want to be able to scale up to a profitable store fast without having to invest a huge amount of time and money. This package will include automated inventory management, a fixed amount of reserved (and exclusive) arbitrage opportunities to auto-list each month, hand-optimized SEO for your items, plus other features (keeping my cards close to my chest at this point so you'll have to wait and see.) The other plans will be for power sellers who need to manage a much larger inventory and who need access to more things to list.

I understand though, that some people just want to get a bot that they can run themselves so there will also be a version that you can download with no monthly price. The disadvantage of this version is it will be far less efficient compared to being run across a fleet of servers (so it will take much longer to find arbitrage opportunities) and it won't include all of the bells and whistles built into the web-based version (which won't be possible to provide in a portable bot.) Needless to say you won't be able to manage your inventory or make money with the bot when your computer is off (and the bot will need to use your own API keys.)

The choice in the end, will depend on what people need. Probably for most people the web-based software will work fine for them.

 

[michaeljarvan]

id love to try something like this. very nice idea.

 

[naizarak]

funny, i started dropshipping on ebay a few weeks ago and im making my own automated tools, too. good luck to both of us lol

 

[Y Combinator]

funny, i started dropshipping on ebay a few weeks ago and im making my own automated tools, too. good luck to both of us lol

Out of curiosity, I checked Google earlier and there does seem to be some software out there for eBay drop shipping but the reviews for them are terrible and they seem to be designed mostly to exploit people trying to start a drop shipping business rather than giving them simple and cost effective business tools. I might be wrong about this - maybe there are good products out there, but from what I can see it's the same bottom feeding scamming you see in anything business related.

What language are you coding your bot in? It's always interesting to see how two people go about solving a problem completely differently.

 

[muffslayer]

 

[Y Combinator]