Inventory Lab In Depth Review [2018]

In the Amazon FBA seller community, Inventory Lab is highly esteemed for helping sellers with their business. Many consider Inventory Lab a trusted partner to make possible and streamline their listing, inventory management, product sourcing and accounting processes.

So why is Inventory Lab popular and how can it be a useful tool for selling on Amazon?

We’ve put together an in-depth product review for you to see what characteristics and handy uses Inventory Lab has, so you can decide if this is the right tool for your business.

First things first: Do you really need to invest your money in a tool?

Many merchants starting out in FBA may question whether they need help at all. Maybe not, if you’re willing to invest time in creating your own solutions when it comes to things like listing, inventory management, product sourcing, accounting, etc. However, sellers on Amazon often find that their time is the most valuable resource, and investments that allow them to focus on their core business are game-changers.

So let’s see what Inventory Lab has to offer.

Inventory Lab has done its homework on its user interface (UI) – in a way Amazon Seller Central, ahem, hasn’t yet – and this really pays off in its listing process. This is what makes the experience much faster and more streamlined than on Seller Central, where you end up clicking back and forth. Spend a couple minutes clicking around, and before you know it, you’ve listed your products, created an FBA shipment, and your barcodes are already printing ready to be stuck on your goods and shipped off.

So how does this work?

1.i. List fast: There are two main ways to add your ASINs into the system and start your creating your listing. If you have a buy list, you can upload this with all sorts of information from buy cost and sales tax to your list price and quantity. Alternatively, type in your ASIN into the software, or if you’ve got your product in front of you just scan the product with a barcode scanner and ping! Your product is locked and loaded in the system. At this point, you’re presented with some vital stats on this ASIN in one quick overview.

1.ii. Nail your price first time: If you’re smart, you’ve already uploaded your Buy List with your with your cost/unit, linked back to the supplier (this will come in handy when we get to our accounting reports!). With your cost/unit already logged, you can quickly decide how you want to price your item using a handy net profit and ROI calculator. To help further here, Inventory Lab shows you all current offers on this item, split into new/ used/ FBA, along with quicklinks to check the price history on Keepa and Camelcamelcamel. So you check the price history, take a look at prices until you land on a net profit/unit and ROI with which you’re satisfied, and away you go! You can also add in a ‘ship to Amazon’ cost/lb to be considered in your net profit/unit and ROI, so you have an accurate idea of what your margins will be and can make a well-informed pricing decision.

1.iii. Don’t think, just prep: As you’re listing, Inventory Lab is giving you the prep information you need. So you’ll see straight away whether your product should be polybagged, bubble-wrapped, etc, and you’re also given the size tier so you know what kind of parcel you’re using. Good for getting prep done right, and fast, and it means never being charged and penalized by Amazon for prepping wrong!

1.iv. No more duplicates: Inventory Lab gives you a warning when uploading your buy list if you’re about to upload offers on the same ASIN. Then it asks what you’d like to do with it, whether you want to merge or remove your duplicates. This can be a life-saver, especially to those new to the game since it can be easy to make slip ups like this when starting out.

1.v. Parent-child ASINs simplified: Anyone works with ASIN variations knows exactly how messy it can be to list them, and how easy it is to make a small mistake and end up in trouble with your customers and Amazon for sending the wrong color or size. Here again, Inventory Lab takes out the awkwardness. Inventory Lab warns you if there is a variation on your ASIN and lets you pick from the options which is the product you’re really selling.

1.vi. Structure to your inventory: What do you see when you look at your inventory in Seller Central? One long list of ASINs, which unless you’re an expert code-cracker is hard to make sense of. Inventory Lab allows you to put them in ‘batches,’ so the ASINs you add together stay together. It’s one of the things that makes your inventory feel neatly arranged and manageable and gives sellers the overview to make strategic decisions about their business rather than getting overwhelmed just trying to understand it.

1.vii. Expiration Dates: With the groceries category growing exponentially, this is a very relevant update. If your goods have an end-by date, you can add it in during the listing process so you have a better overview of the lifetime of your inventory, what needs to be sold fast and what can keep a little longer.

1.viii. The two-click FBA shipment: Once you’ve listed and priced, sending your goods into an Amazon warehouse is literally just another two clicks away.x

1.ix. Know which warehouse: If you like to know which Amazon FC your product should go to straight away as soon as you’re done listing it, you can work with Inventory Lab’s “live” workflow and sort your products into boxes as you’re going along. (The alternative, “private” workflow, means you only find out which warehouses at the end of your session, but with the advantage of being able to go back and make changes as many times as you like to your FBA shipment. The “live” workflow is limited to standard Seller Central changes to shipments: 5% or 6 units. Whichever works for you!)

1.x. Print barcodes as soon as you list: What’s that we hear? Is it the satisfying hush of your barcodes being printed as soon as you’ve added them to the system? It’s a very nice touch, as it means you don’t have to batch print barcodes at the end of your session, cut them out and then try to figure out which barcode belongs to which product. You can just stick on as you go along.

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Sourcing new Amazon products

Aside from helping you list, ship and manage your inventory, what else does Inventory Lab do well? One way is when you’re looking for new products to source:

2.i. What makes the Scoutify 2 mobile app strong: If we’re going to talk about sourcing new products with Inventory Lab, we have to talk about the Scoutify 2 mobile app. Why? Because, trust us, mobile is a game-changer.

2.i.a. Scan and go: With this app, you can scan a barcode – for example, if you’re walking through a supermarket looking for a products to resell – and up pops vital buying information. Right there and then you see existing offers on this ASIN, sales rank, and a breakdown of your net profit of both FBA or MFN offers. As with the Inventory Lab web service, you can preset your average shipping fee/lb to be included in your net profit and ROI breakdown.

2.i.b. Scout for new products while on the go: You don’t have to have a product right in front of you. If you want to do some research, you can just type in a keyword and you’re shown the top products with their offer count and sales rank within their category. When you dig down into an ASIN, you’re back on the detailed ASIN breakdown page with your net profit and ROI.

2.i.c. Upload your buy list from Scoutify 2: Let’s say you’ve taken Scoutify 2 shopping and it has all the info on what you’ve bought. Now you can just send yourself your buy list and open it in Inventory Lab . The two work together so the fields are auto-matched, and you can keep going with any other work you need to do on your inventory through your laptop. Neat.

2.ii. Scout new products on Stratify: If you also like to do your product research on a computer, Inventory Lab’s got you covered with its web app Stratify. We’re talking the same valuable pricing info as when you first list a product: price history, prep type, FBA fulfillment fee and of course your net profit and ROI breakdown.

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Know your business in 2 seconds with Inventory Lab’s reports

This is where Inventory Lab empowers you to make strategic decisions about your Amazon seller account. Here are some of the business decisions Inventory Lab helps you answer:

3.i. Which supplier should I call back? Which supplier is most profitable? Which category is letting you down? Which ASINs should you drop? With a profitability report on each of these levels, you can see in a couple of seconds what’s working and what needs to be chopped and changed. That can lead to big time savings and optimization of your processes, just like that.

3.ii. When should I replenish? This is Inventory Lab’s Velocity Report, and we like this feature a lot. In one tidy report, you’re given everything you need in order to know what needs replenishing and when: on an ASIN/ SKU level, what’s in your inventory right now, what’s being inbounded, what’s your lead time (you input this in your inventory), supplier, average daily sales and replenish by date. You can even toggle between calculating for safety stock or not. This is a process that otherwise has a lot of margin for error and requires a lot of time and energy to set up, which is why we’re on board with this comprehensive but simple overview.

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Pricing

Pricing in Amazon seller tools varies wildly and can reach the lofty heights of $1,500+ monthly fee. Inventory Lab sits on the less expensive end of this spectrum when looking at tools that offer the same features.

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Which sellers will get the most out of Inventory Lab?

If you haven’t solved these problems, or you’re paying more to do so, then Inventory Lab is probably a good choice for you. One thing worthy of mention is that Inventory Lab is for Amazon sellers, not eBay. Also, it’s made for the US marketplace, so if you’re keen to use it, you can either be a US seller or an international seller that has also launched into the US marketplace.

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Conclusion

In terms of pricing, we’re impressed by the quality of Inventory Lab’s service for the money. What’s also been working well for Inventory Lab is that they’ve clearly been paying attention to their end-users. The features of adding in Shipping Rate to the ROI calculator and expiration dates are recent updates based on customer feedback and rising trends. This is a good sign, since selling on Amazon is a fast-paced business, and we need our tools to keep up with us.

Could Inventory Lab help you? Try a 30-day trial and see how much extra time you have for your core business.

Comments

Have you tried Inventory Lab? What were your thoughts? Have any questions about it still? Then shoot! We’d love to hear what you have to say! 🙂