Finding the Best Amazon Seller Scanning App
Scanning apps are an Amazon entrepreneur’s best friend.
Not only can they give you deep insights into the competition, your potential profits and the overall demand for products you’re considering, but they can help you price your inventory properly and maximize your returns in real-time, on the fly.
FREE GUIDE: The Amazon Seller’s Guide to Product Launches
Use them when buying inventory online or while browsing aisles in a physical, brick-and-mortar store. All it takes is a snap of your smartphone camera and a few taps on the screen to ensure you’re getting the best deal and setting your store up for success.
The two most common Amazon scanning apps are Scoutify and the Amazon Seller App. Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of each.
Amazon Seller App
The biggest benefit of the Amazon Seller App is that it’s free. As long as you’re a registered seller on Amazon, you can download the tool and start using it ASAP.
Here’s what the app will let you do:
- Scan products using your camera phone or search them manually on Amazon. It will then give you details regarding pricing, FBA fees and potential profits, as well as details like the product’s best seller rank, total number of sellers and its official Amazon category.
- Communicate with customers on the go. This is a huge pro, as your response time factors into your overall Amazon seller health grade.
- Track orders and shipments. Always know where your orders are at in the shipment process.
- Monitor your payouts and disbursements. This makes it easy to make on the fly purchase decisions, as you always have a good idea of your incoming cash flow.
- Update pricing and inventory. This is great if you want to make a quick price change to take advantage of demand or offload old inventory.
And here are its limitations:
- Its profit estimations aren’t the most accurate. They don’t factor in things like taxes or customs fees.
- They only show you the lowest price on new items. This makes it hard to estimate your maximum ROI on a product.
- It doesn’t integrate with Keepa or Camel Camel Camel. These tools help you track price trends and history – both vital factors in sourcing and pricing your inventory.
Click here to learn more about the Amazon Seller App.
Scoutify
Unlike the Amazon Seller App, Scoutify isn’t free. You’ll pay $49 per month (or $480 per year) to use this powerful Amazon scanning app. For many sellers though, the added features and functionalities are worth the extra cost.
With Scoutify, you can do many of the same tasks the Amazon Seller App allows, like scanning products with your camera phone and pulling product rankings, prices, potential profits and more. In addition to these features, Scoutify also lets you:
- Scan products faster, using a Bluetooth scanner.
- Add in sales tax to your fee calculations for an even more accurate estimate profit margin.
- Connect with Keepa and Camel Camel Camel, so you can monitor price and ranking history for each product you consider.
- Keep a shopping list to track your purchases.
- Configure buying guidelines to ensure your inventory purchases meet all your needs.
- The subscription also gets you Inventory Lab, which comes with bookkeeping, reporting and sourcing tools.
Some downsides to the Scoutify Amazon scanning app:
- It comes with a monthly or annual fee.
- You need an Amazon Pro Merchant account, which adds a second monthly cost.
- You can’t access Amazon account details like messages, shipments, orders, etc.
If you’re not completely sold on using Scoutify, take advantage of its free trial offer. Give it a test run for a month before committing to an added fee.
If you do choose to use Scoutify, make sure to also download the Amazon Seller App as well. This will allow you to keep in touch with customers and watch your orders and shipments as they happen.
BLOG POST: How to Become Successful on Amazon Seller Central with FBA
Other Amazon Scanning App Options
The Amazon Seller App and Scoutify are the most popular scanning apps among sellers, but there are other options on the market as well like FBA Scan (a good option if you want to be able to scan products without a Wi-Fi connection, as it allows you to download a product database to your device).
Other choices include:
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