u/Eonminion

I've been experimenting with different ways to spot products earlier and one thing I keep running into is that most of the "spy" or research tools feel outdated by the time I use them. Either the products are already saturated or the ads I see are no longer even running.

For those of you doing on e-commerce, how do you make sure you're looking at what's actually working right now and not what worked last month? Do you rely more on tools, manual digging, or something else?

A year ago I worked with an ecom client that was struggling to consistently find products that actually sell.

Over time, I built a simple system for them that focused on:

• tracking what’s selling right now (last 24–48h), not just overall bestsellers
• identifying repeat demand vs short-term spikes
• filtering out products that look popular but don’t actually convert

That ended up being one of the biggest levers — and helped them scale to ~$2M in sales within a year.

Since then, I’ve been rebuilding this into a more structured system and expanding it across multiple marketplaces.

Curious how others are doing this right now:

Are you using tools?

Manual research?

Just intuition/experience?

Feels like this part of ecom is still way more manual than it should be.

If anyone’s working on something similar or wants to test early versions, happy to share what I’ve been building. Send me a dm if you interested!

For sellers doing eBay / Amazon / Walmart / Shopify / TikTok Shop, what part of your workflow is still painfully manual?

I’m especially curious about things like:

• Keeping inventory synced across channels
• Knowing real profit / break-even per product without doing full bookkeeping
• Getting discounted shipping rates
• Repricing when competitors change prices
• Filing claims for lost or damaged shipments
• Monitoring cases/returns so account health doesn’t get hit

Do you use software for this, spreadsheets, VAs, or just handle it manually?

I feel like a lot of tools solve one piece, but the day-to-day workflow still feels messy.