Using Software To Build Your Catalog

Easily accessing items you've sourced in the past to save time

Welcome back!

It’s been a while, but I finally decided to sit down and write an article that isn’t my monthly profit and loss report. As I’ve been scaling my business and getting very close to the 100k revenue per month mark, I’ve been experimenting with some different software that will allow me to save time when it comes to purchasing inventory. In this post I’ll briefly go over two tools (one I recommend, another I’m still testing) that will assist you in building a catalog of items you’ve previously sourced.

Cheddarsoft

First, let’s talk about Cheddarsoft. Cheddarsoft is a tool that allows you to store items you’ve sourced in the past and organize them based on various attributes such as supplier, ROI, and sales rank:

What makes this tool incredibly useful is the fact that you can upload your sourcing spreadsheets directly into the database, allowing you to aggregate all of your different lead sheets (personal sourcing sheet, VA sourcing sheets, leads lists) into one central location and be able to sort them however you want.

You can also choose what columns you want to add into the database with their mapping tool, allowing you to add extra information. This is very useful in the case that you bought an item during a limited time sale or if you used a discount code to purchase it.

You can also use tags to identify leads of a certain type. For example, my VAs have a tab on their sourcing sheets called “Opportunity” where they can put items that aren’t a good buying opportunity when they were sourced (lower ROI, unusually high amount of sellers, gated items, etc.) but might be a profitable item in the near future. We can tag these leads as opportunity items and look through them every 2-4 weeks to see if any of them have become profitable.

Another reason you may want to use tags is to create a group of items that you’ve sold several times, and can safely repurchase when your current supply is running low.

This tool is also a great reference for when a site you’ve sourced in the past is having a sale - you can check and see if any items you bought from that supplier in the past can be repurchased at a discount.

At $50 per month, Cheddarsoft is a solid option for sellers who are scaling up their business and having a hard time looking back through spreadsheets to find replenishable items. I’ll openly admit that I don’t use this as much as I should, but it’s a great tool to keep track of your team’s sourcing efforts.

Replen Dashboard

I’ve only started using this recently and haven’t determined if I like it yet, but I want to write about it in this post because it’s similar to Cheddarsoft and is an interesting concept.

Replen Dashboard is a simple tool that tracks your inventory and sales to determine your best selling items. Using this data, it will give you a recommended amount of units for you to purchase if you want to maintain a 30 day, 60 day, or 90 day supply based on your recent sales:

While I like the concept, my main issue with the software so far is that it seems like it needs to record data over a longer time period to give you accurate recommendations. It’s only $30 per month, so I’ll be attempting to use it for the next couple of months to see if it’s more effective with a larger sample size.

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While this was a much shorter post, I felt like these tools were pretty straightforward and didn’t need much explanation. I wouldn’t recommend them to newer sellers, but if you’re starting to grow and lose track of all the items you’re finding they may be worth looking into.