Hi All, My name is Andy Bruce and I have spent an inordinate amount of time (and my own money) developing www.tooyen.com. This site is devoted to allowing smaller sellers (50 to 5000 items) to reprice and analyze their online listings for free. My wife is an Amazon seller and was shelling out $40 a month to a certain other seller management tool. As an Open Source developer (freedom for all software!) that offended my sense of amour propre and so I built a repricing engine for her. THE MANIFESTO a. Turn this industry on its head. The goal for all repricing engines appears to be "charge irritating amounts of money per month to let people do simple tasks". No, that's fundamentally unsound--it's all about love. You reprice your listings, view the interesting statistical reports (which I'm building frantically in this last month), and update your listings all for free. Sound crazy? Talk to RedHat, Linus Torvald, Google, Postgres, Gentoo, etc.--all these other "crazy" people and organizations that figured out that the key to success is getting people interested and not in worrying about license fees. b. Nothing to download--no silly proprietary program to run on your desktop. No worries about whether you are up-to-date or not. The system is all online, it's always running, and it's always at the best version level. The sad fact is: Your own computer is a prime target for those evil monster hackers. Why on earth would you want to download Yet More Stupid Software to your system? As any security expert will tell you, downloading unknown software from an unknown source is a great way to infect your computer with all sorts of unpleasant things. c. No private data--I don't want *anything* personally identifiable about you. Programs and computers get hacked all the time (my FirstUSA visa provider just sent me yet another email about "possible security breach..."). The best way to defeat that is: don't have anything valuable for these hackers to steal. Therefore, I concentrate on using only publicly available data to do Tooyen's work. If some master hacker broke into my system all I want them to find is my social calendar (sadly bereft of engagements, I'm sorry to say). And, I want you to feel as safe when you run Tooyen.com as when you submit an anonymous search query to Yahoo or Google or MSN or Ask Jeeves or...well, you get the picture. d. Success--the two most important priorities for Tooyen are that you move your items quickly and that the consumer gets a Great Price on the item. Eventually tooyen.com becomes the single place you go for your seller processing (ebay, Half.com--I want to build for everyone). HOW IT WORKS Unlike other tools, Tooyen.com loves both standard and pro merchants. You sign up using the super-simple registration screen (http://www.tooyen.com, just give her a Hotmail account and select a user name and password) and you start repricing. Tooyen.com has an automated process to allow you to determine your "Amazon Seller Id" (which is *not* your email address), and then she loads your listings to her database. She can load them directly from Amazon's public Web Services API (which is available to anyone on the planet) or she can load them from an Amazon Open Listings Report that you upload directly to her. They both have the same information, but the public Web Services API is just a few hours out-of-date compared to a freshly-downloaded Open Listings Report. Neither report contains any personally identifiable information about you. PRIVACY I can't emphasize this enough. You don't have to upload anything to Tooyen in order to perform repricing. Furthermore, Tooyen doesn't need or want your Amazon email or password. It just wants you to reprice your listings easily, and to move your merchandise quickly. In fact, Tooyen doesn't even update your listings on Amazon automatically. It simply generates a spreadsheet that you can use to review and update your listings yourself. YOUR LISTINGS PRIVACY This is a good one. Numerous seller software vendors prattle on and on about keeping your listings information private. Total untruth. Here's the real deal: *ALL YOUR LISTINGS* are already publicly available via oh-so-simple techniques (see http://www.amazon.com/gp/aws/sdk/102-5840387-0587334?v=2005%2d10%2d05&s=AWSEcommerceService). Let's say you have a book ISBN or title (such as "The Diabetic Athlete"). You first do an "item search" for that title, which returns a set of "offers". Each offer has a magical "Seller Id" token associated with it. You then issue another Amazon.com query to look up details on that Seller (nickname, rating, geographic location, lots'o'stuff). Ergo, everyone has full access to everyone else's listings and price offerings. It's just that kind of world, so we have to deal with it. REPRICING YOUR LISTINGS Tooyen.com uses a repricing algorithm that looks at around four dozen variables (degenerative time functions, condition, out-of-print, special offers, standard deviation of all prices with weighted analysis, and many more). This initial cut does not allow you to customize how the repricing analysis works, but that's planned to come soon. Tooyen.com does not update your Amazon listings on Amazon.com. To do so would require your Amazon user name and password, and frankly that's something we just don't want to touch with fire tongs. VIEWING YOUR LISTINGS You can view your repriced listings on Tooyen.com. She shows which direction that she thinks your prices should go (up or down). Additionally, you can view details about the competitive offers (or, at least, you will--I'm building that today or tomorow). UPDATING YOUR LISTINGS Super simple here: You tell Tooyen.com to create a listings report spreadsheet for you (either in Microsoft Excel or Amazon.com format) and you download it to your local computer. Then use the spreadsheet program of your choice (www.openoffice.org has a free suite of M$ [Microsoft, or MicroSloth, or evil empire, or whatever you want to call that company] compatible Office tools which work wonderfully) to review the suggestions that Tooyen made. (Don't like the suggestions? Change them however you like, Tooyen doesn't mind.) Then Pro Sellers can update the listings report spreadsheet to Amazon.com and voila! your listings are repriced. Standard sellers, unfortunately, must enter their listing updates by hand. (But, I have plans for that, oh yes---just wait for the next version. Tooyen.com loves standard sellers with 25 items as much as pro sellers with 5000 items.) FINAL THOUGHTS (WHY WOULD I BUILD THIS?) First and foremost, Tooyen.com is a labor of love from a husband to his wife. (Also, from an contrarian programmer sick to death of business-as-usual software, to the rest of the world.) Amazon.com sellers are astute folk who are justly suspicious of why anyone would give something away for free. Apart from simply wanting to do this (I build software systems, it's what I love to do), the business model is: Interest Equals Opportunity. If enough people are interested in Tooyen.com, then other people are interested in the (anonymous!) audience that is there. Targeted banner ads, perhaps premium services (although basic functionality will always remain free), interest from vendors such as Amazon.com or eBay, or Half.com, integration with the huge number of auction houses around the country--these are all interesting and lucrative opportunities for the man with vision and chutzpah. Regardless, this is a program that I have worked hard upon (and continue to work upon, all the time, day and night). And if it really doesn't pan out--then I give it all away for free to the world. That's right--you will simply download the project from any one of the numerous free software foundations (GNU/OSF, SourceForge--there are many others). And then you can run your own repricing engine on your own computer, all for free. And free is how it should be. This states it best: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html#SEC1 Good Luck with your selling, and Tooyen is waiting for you. She hopes to see you soon. Remember: Let The Monkey Do It! Andy Bruce
www.tooyen.com
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