So this from my experience over the last 3 months. I started from scratch, first time selling on eBay, first time selling anything really, and mediocre programming skills (although I think I'm mediocre but then again I am an engineering student so my standards of mediocre might not be the same as yours).
1. Yes you will be reinventing the wheel. Like everyone on this post has mentioned, there are plenty of websites which claim they do the exact same thing that you are looking for, and the truth is that they do. None of them are completely free though. I think Priceyak, for example, costs $50 per month or something like that. But the money really isn't the issue here, $50 per month is nothing if you were making $1000 per month using this method. Actually it's well worth the investment, instead of spending countless number of hours developing your own software. However, there are several issues that you will eventually run into:
- The capabilities of these software are limited and you will soon find out there are things that you just can't tweak using these software.
- MORE IMPORTANTLY: You think that you are getting a good deal from these software providers and that you are using their software. Whereas, what is actually happening is that they are using you! Sites like Priceyak and Pricematik are using your account information to see what sells and what doesn't. Instead of figuring it out by listing and delisting items, they just have us do it and then they start listing the items that do sell for themselves. This will obviously ruin your sales. So, yes in the short term, they provide you a service which seems cheap and useful, but in the long-term you won't be getting anywhere because as soon as you tap into a good selling item they'll steal it from you. These companies will obviously deny all of this, of course they would! But the simple fact is that the whole purpose of developing software is to become huge data gathering center's to figure out what items are best to list for sale. It's a really good idea. One which I wish I had come up with.
2. It is possible without Amazon's API. I do automatic repricing without it. It may be that it's much harder my way. But to be honest, I couldn't figure out how you are supposed to access Amazon's API and how it would provide me any benefit over scraping myself in the long-term.
All that being said, I spent a lot of time developing a software like this for myself. A LOT OF TIME. For me it was fun and I improved my computer language skills. However, I haven't put 1% of that time into actually increasing my sales and becoming a better seller. So it really depends on what you want and where you're at. If you are just starting out (i.e., just created an eBay account) then I'd just do everything manually and use the most basic and cheapest software to do your automation. But if you decide on expanding and making real money out of this, you definitely need to stop using these software, develop your own or have someone make one for you. If you have someone else make it, you'll have to keep in contact with them because and be prepared to pay them to update your software every so often because everything changes (on Amazon's end as well as eBay's end).
In the last month, I have been successfully dropshipping items from Amazon to eBay, using the Amazon Prime to sell on eBay method. This has worked for me with pretty good success. I have run into the same issues that everyone always runs into: items go out of stock or the Amazon prices change and I am either forced to cancel the sale or sell at a loss. This has led to a few negative feedback responses.
Now, I have moderate programming experience and figured I could come up with a program that would (at a high level) "track" an individual item on Amazon that will alert me if an item changes in price (out of my range for profit) or it goes out of stock. Through my research, I have some questions that I am having trouble figuring this out:
1. Am I simply re-inventing the wheel here with creating my own program? Is something out there that already does this and more for me (preferably free!)?
2. This is not possible without purchasing one of the Amazon accounts that gives you access to it's MWS API. Is this true or have I missed something?
Any suggestions or comments are welcome. Thanks!
