Inventory Lab Reviews: Listing service Stratify and sourcing app Scoutify helps sellers find profitable products

InventoryLab Reviews

One of the most popular tools out there to help reduce some of the legwork involved with your Amazon business, as well as increase your efficiency and profitability, is Stratify by InventoryLab (sometimes referred to as “Inventory Lab” or IL).

While Amazon FBA has made it significantly easier for online merchants to start listing and selling on Amazon, there are still a lot of aspects to the business that you need to take care of yourself, especially if you plan on pursuing selling that gig full time.

What is InventoryLab?

InventoryLab is a listing service (Stratify) and sourcing app (Scoutify). Stratify helps sellers find profitable products; navigate the complicated FBA listing and shipping requirements; access their complete accounting and financial information; manage inventory; and generate comprehensive reports on all business aspects. Scoutify is a mobile app that gives sellers the information they need to make the best product-buying decisions. One Scoutify account can be used by multiple users so sourcing can be outsourced. InventoryLab has everything sellers need to solve common problems.

InventoryLab Features

• Easy to add expenses as you go – no double entry later into a spreadsheet or accounting program
• You can get the net on any price you choose – merchant fulfilled as well as FBA. Takes into account your out-of-pocket cost for the item as well.
• Automatically pulls P&L for you when an item sells so you can see right away if it was a good product for you
• Works with a wide range of thermal label printers
• All the information you need is all on one page and you can see it in a glance – condition, number of units, cost, pricing, printing…everything

InventoryLab Benefits

Inventory Lab is a feature-rich listing service

We use a desktop barcode scanner to scan an item into the system, and Inventory Lab pulls up the item with all the information we need to price it. It shows the FBA, Merchant Fulfilled, new, and used prices, as well as whether Amazon is selling the item and who owns the buy box. It gives quick links to Keepa for the ASIN of the item, so we can check out sales rank and price history as we’re pricing the item.

Inventory Lab also lets us know the item’s current sales rank, category, size tier, and any prep needed, like poly bagging. We can also enter our buy cost, min/max price, and the supplier for each inventory item, so we can later generate reports to help us keep track of things like return on investment or the profitability of certain sources.

Inventory Lab can limit the number of FBA warehouses we send out inventory to

As we start a batch in Inventory Lab, we can choose “Live” or “Private” for the “Workflow Type.” When the “Private” workflow is chosen, nothing is submitted to Amazon until the batch is completed. The “Private” workflow sometimes changes the final warehouse destination of some of the inventory items (so you’ll have to double check later that the right items are going to the right warehouses). The good news is that using “Private ” workflow almost always sends our inventory to fewer total fulfillment centers than if we had chosen the “Live” workflow or if we had listed our inventory directly in Seller Central. Gone are the days of sending in 45 items to 8 different warehouses. Personally, we prefer to use the “Private” workflow when processing our inventory batches for this very reason.

Inventory Lab comes bundled with the Scoutify sourcing app

We can’t image sourcing for inventory without the using the Scoutify smartphone app when doing retail arbitrage. We can quickly scan the barcode of an item and have all the information we need at our fingertips to tell us if the item would be a good buy for resale.

Scoutify can quickly show you each item’s competitors’ prices, whether Amazon is in stock, potential profit, ROI, sales rank, sales rank percentage, if you’re approved or restricted from selling the item, how many you already have in stock, how many you’ve already sold, plus quick links to request approval for restricted items, and (my favorite) the ASIN’s Keepa graph, just to name a few. With Inventory Lab, we can get both our listing service and our sourcing app at one low price.

Inventory Lab has amazing accounting capabilities

Inventory Lab is capable of organizing all of your finances with their helpful bookkeeping tools. If you want to make your Amazon FBA business profitable, you have to know your numbers. You can’t just assume because you’re getting disbursements from Amazon that your business is actually making money. You have to know where your money is coming from and where it is going.

You can use Inventory Lab to keep track of your buy prices, sales prices, return on investment, inbound shipping costs, money going out for refunds, money coming in from reimbursements, and more. You can even track your mileage, cost of supplies, and anything else financially related with your Amazon business – all within Inventory Lab! These are the types of numbers you need to know in depth for your business so that you can make better decisions for sourcing, for repricing, and for other services you might need to purchase.

Inventory Lab shows us reports on profitability, profit and loss, and sales tax

One of the really cool features of Inventory Lab is that you can generate reports about profitability of your inventory. You can see the profitability of an entire category in your inventory, a particular ASIN, or a SKU.

If you entered in a supplier during the listing process, you can generate reports on supplier profitability. You can use the supplier profitability feature several ways:

• to keep track of inventory purchased by different sourcers you’ve hired
• to see if certain stores or wholesale accounts are more profitable than others
• to analyze how profitable an online arbitrage deal list is for your business over time

You can also generate reports about your profit and loss and your sales tax. Again, the more you know these types of numbers for your business, the more you’re able to make good decisions for your business.

Inventory Lab can be synced with the BQool repricer service

We started using the BQool automatic repricer service in September of 2018. One of the reasons we started using it is because we can, at the click of a button, import all of our buy costs from Inventory Lab directly into BQool’s Repricing Central. This is such a big time saver! Before you could sync your numbers, a Bqool user would have to manually enter their original buy cost. Now, Bqool just imports the buy cost — a huge help when it comes to setting up your minimum and maximum prices within Repricing Central.

Side note: If you’re wondering how well Bqool works, just know that for the first month of using Bqool, our sales literally doubled. This was obviously a game changer for us, and we never would have even tried it before the Inventory Lab / Bqool integration.

Inventory Lab can be accessed by a 3rd party prep service

One of the most important steps to finally make a full-time income selling on Amazon is to find other people to do some of the easier tasks for you. One of the easiest things to outsource is the inventory prepping, packing, and shipping, especially when it comes to online arbitrage or wholesale purchases that you can shave shipped directly to a prep center to help you ship it to Amazon. With Inventory Lab, you can set up multiple employee accounts to create shipments, FNSKU labels, and everything else needed to properly ship your inventory to an Amazon warehouse. Note: the employee sub-accounts do not have access to your financial information.

Pros of Inventory Lab

• All inclusive listing, research & accounting web application
• Easy to use interface
• Ability to print labels
• Ability to create live batches that go right to Amazon shipment plans
• Comes with live only scanning app

Cons of Inventory Lab

• Expensive ($50/mo)
• Accounting reports are very confusing
• Reports of accounting data not formatting correctly
• Unresponsive to feature requests
• No real community
• Founders don’t talk to their customers anymore

Inventory Lab Pricing and Discount with Promo, Coupon code

Free Trial - 30 Days Free

• No Credit Card Required
• 60 Days of Back-Data
• Dedicated Support

Annual Plan - $ 40 / Month

• Discounted Rate
• All Back-Data
• Dedicated Support

Our New Customers enjoy a FREE, no obligation 30-day trial, while they check out everything InventoryLab has to offer. During your trial, you'll enjoy unlimited access to Scoutify (even on multiple mobile devices!). Log into Stratify to view your inventory, list products, and print labels. Plus, you'll have the ability to view FBA & Merchant Fulfilled Sales data for the last 60 days!

Once upgraded to a paid Monthly/Annual subscription plan, you'll continue to enjoy unlimited access to Scoutify and Stratify with the additional benefit of accessing your FBA & MF sales data beyond 60 days, at no additional cost.

Let see reviews from member who used Inventory Lab

• In my opinion, even though the 50 a month plan costs more, it's the better decision. Anyone in this sub should be able to make more than you'd save paying yearly by investing that 450 throughout the year and just paying monthly. You are also about where I am at sales volume wise. This was a great next step for me and I will heavily advocate for it. I have not however used other options, because this one does everything that I want right now. By doing monthly you are also free to rest other apps and shit that do similar things.
• I use inventory lab, and I think it's worth it. Being able to print labels as you list, adding inventory is more streamlined than seller central, and book keeping is automated. I need to start sending in more items, right now it's about 200 a month. Next year I am trying to get it up to 500. Once I get those higher numbers, the $49/mo will seem like an obvious price to pay.
• QB is definitely more flexible, but I love that inventory lab automatically pulls data each each transaction and aggregates it. I currently only use inventory lab and add any external expenses under the 'Other Expenses' category and set it as a recurring expense if applicable.
• Essentially you're paying $50/month to save a few seconds per item during your workflow. If you're selling hundreds of items per month, it might be worth it. If you're not, get a free trial and see if it's actually saving you enough time to account for the high cost.
• Tried both 2 years ago and ended up with inventory lab, which I still use. I looked Fetcher now, and it seems like they've changed a lot, but I remember back then that inventory lab's information seemed more accurate and was presented better. I don't know how they stack up today, but I'm still loving inventory lab. They've also added a ton of features since we began using them. Plus, inventory lab works very well with FBA. Not only can you split metrics between FBA and FBM, but you can make shipments within inventory lab.
• I've used IL for a few years and only have it now because I paid for an entire year. The only feature I use is inbound shipping but that'll end soon. I've used Amazon's inbound shipping system with ease as well though.
• I have used InventoryLab for about two years and they really haven't had any major feature adds in that time; mostly just bug fixes. As I expand into different channels (eBay, Walmart, Jet, etc) tracking COGS on those channels can be really difficult.
• Inventory Lab is a web app and as such is computer agnostic. It will run on anything that can run web browser. It doesn't have any Sales Tax functionality that I am aware of so if you want to use it you would need TaxJar. Note that TaxJar is a commercial business with an apparent monopoly and possibly tight connections to Amazon. No other company that I know of provides this service but I have serious questions about the aggressive definition of "nexus" used by a few states. It's up to you, though, as to wether you use it.

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.