Your software, in two piles

One of our customers pays about $2,100 a month for an Amazon reporting dashboard. They are deciding whether to keep it.

They came to us skeptical. Not politely skeptical, actually skeptical. Then they did something I wish more sellers would do: they put every piece of software they pay for into a spreadsheet, with a column for what actually earns its keep.

That is where the $2,100 line item started looking strange to them.

What that kind of tool actually does

Think about what a tool like that does. It connects to Seller Central, pulls your orders and your ad spend and your fees, cleans it up, and turns it into charts and answers. Buy Box share by ASIN. Which SKUs quietly lost margin last month. Which keywords convert.

That was worth real money when two things were true at once. Getting the data out of Amazon was hard, and reading it required someone who knew what they were looking at.

Only one of those is still true.

The analysis got cheap. The data did not.

The analysis is not the scarce part anymore. If you can hand an AI your actual Amazon data, it will do that work, in plain English, at a level that was a specialist job three years ago. What is still genuinely hard is the data. Amazon’s APIs are a real project. Reports arrive in different shapes and different timezones, fees reconcile late, and the raw feeds do not agree with each other until someone makes them agree.

So that is where we spent our effort. My company, Seller Labs (www.sellerlabs.com), is the connection between your Seller Central and Advertising data and whatever AI you already use. Official Amazon APIs on one end, Claude or ChatGPT on the other, and you ask questions the way you would ask a person.

The honest part

Now the honest part, because I would rather be useful than look right.

That dashboard does things we do not do. It covers Walmart and other marketplaces. We are Amazon only, on purpose, because I would rather go a mile deep on one channel than an inch deep on six. If you sell across three marketplaces, that tool solves a problem for you that we are not solving. That is a real reason to keep paying for it, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

They have not cancelled anything yet. It is an open evaluation, and it might land somewhere I do not love. I am telling you about it anyway, because the question they asked is the useful part, not the outcome.

The sorting question

Here is that question, and it is worth an hour of your time.

Go through your software line items and separate them into two piles. Tools that do something, meaning they move inventory, run your ads, talk to your customers, file your reports. And tools that mostly exist to turn Amazon data into an answer.

The first pile is safe. The second pile is worth a hard look, because the economics underneath it changed and most sellers have not repriced it yet.

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