Track It On Its Way Up · FBA Canadian Academy

Track It On Its Way Up

You sit down for two hours of sourcing. You open forty tabs. You run the numbers on maybe thirty products and you buy nothing.

That night feels like a waste. It isn't, but only if you did one small thing before you closed those tabs.

Here is the part nobody tells beginners. Most of the leads you kill are not bad products. They are bad today. The buy box is sitting low today. There are eleven sellers on it today. The source is out of stock today. Those are conditions, not verdicts, and conditions change.

The seller who understands that is running a different business than the seller who doesn't. One of them starts from zero every single night. The other one has leads coming back to him while he sleeps.

The rule is simple. Before you close a lead, write down the one thing that would change your answer.

Not "maybe I'll check this later." A specific condition. If the product was worth buying at $29.99 and it's sitting at $24, the condition is the price. If the numbers are fine but there are twelve FBA sellers stacked on the listing, the condition is the offer count. If the product is great and the store is sold out, the condition is on the retailer's side, not Amazon's.

Then you go set that condition in Keepa's Track Product and let the software do the checking. That's it. That's the whole system. Thirty seconds per lead.

The mistake almost everyone makes

The people who do start tracking usually set the alert at the perfect price. The listing sat at $32 historically, they want $32, so they set the alert at $32 and wait.

Don't do that.

You never want to track a product at its potential. You want to track it on its way up.

Think about what actually happens when a listing recovers. It doesn't jump from $24 to $32 in an afternoon. It climbs. And by the time it hits the number everyone can see is a good number, every other seller with a tool is looking at that same listing. You also need time. Time to confirm the source is still live, time to place the order, time to prep it and ship it in. If your alert fires at the perfect price, you're already late.

So set it under. If $32 is where it's clearly good, set the alert around $29 and give yourself the runway. I tracked one recently that was tanking down from about $32.99. I set the buy box at $29.99 or more, and I added a second condition of seven or fewer new FBA offers. I don't want the email when it's perfect. I want the email when it's turning.

That "or more" part is where people get tripped up. Keepa is built for shoppers by default, and shoppers want to know when something gets cheaper. You are not a shopper. You want to know when the buy box comes back up. Leave the default alone and you'll get notified of the exact opposite of what you need. Set the direction yourself, and make sure you're on the buy box field and not some third-party price that has nothing to do with what you'd actually sell at. Keepa moves things around, so look at the fields when you set it instead of trusting a screenshot from a year ago.

Track both sides...

The Amazon side is only half of it. If the reason you walked was that the retailer was sold out, get on that store's back-in-stock email too, and keep the Keepa alert running at the same time. The listing does not sit still while you wait on the source. Sellers pile on, prices move, Amazon shows up. You want to hear from both sides, so that when the source restocks you already know whether the Amazon side is still worth anything.

Same thing with sale cycles. When a retailer runs the same event every year, that's a date, and a date goes in a calendar just as easily as a price goes in Keepa. Write down what went on sale, what the discount was, and which of your leads it made viable. Next year you are not sourcing that store from scratch. You're pulling up your own notes from last year and checking which ones still hold.

The note is the actual asset...

An alert with no note is close to useless, and this is the part everyone skips.

Six weeks from now you're going to get an email about an ASIN you have zero memory of. If all you have is the alert, you're doing the entire investigation over from zero, which is exactly the work you were trying to save.

So when you set the alert, save a few lines with it. Where you'd buy it, with the link. What you need to pay for the math to work. What price you'd honestly underwrite it at, not the spike. Who else is on the listing and why that bothered you. And the reason you said no in the first place.

Thirty seconds of typing turns a notification into a decision you can make in two minutes instead of twenty.

One warning, because this is where the discipline lives. The alert firing is not permission to buy. It's permission to look again. Your analysis went stale the moment you saved it. Product match, source, landed cost, volume, whether Amazon is on it now, how many sellers showed up while you were waiting. All of it gets checked again. The alert bought you the timing. It didn't do the work for you.

And keep the system clean. If a lead keeps firing and you keep passing because the source is gone for good, kill the alert. An inbox full of notifications you never open isn't a system, it's noise, and noise is how you end up ignoring the one email that mattered.

What this looks like a few months out

Nothing, at first. That's the honest answer. You'll set fifteen alerts, hear nothing for weeks, and wonder if it was worth the effort.

Then they start landing. And the difference in your sourcing is that you're no longer opening a blank screen and hunting from nothing. Part of your pipeline is now products you already vetted, from sources you already trust, showing up around the time they became buyable.

This compounds, and that's really the point. Every hour you spend sourcing produces a purchase, an alert, or nothing. Most beginners produce nothing on almost every lead, and then they wonder why hour thirty feels exactly as hard as hour one. It shouldn't. The work you did in week two should be making week ten easier.

This week, do this. Go back through the leads you killed in the last seven days. Pick five where the answer was "the numbers don't work right now" and not "this is a bad product." Set the condition on each one, under the level where it gets good, not at it. Write the note.

Then get back to sourcing and forget about them. That's the whole idea. Let the lead come back to you.

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Track It On Its Way Up