Spy On Competitors With The 999 Trick

I'm assuming we've all shopped on Amazon.com before.

We may or may not have noticed that Amazon makes certain information publicly available, such as low inventory alerts when a product's stock is running critically low.

As seen above, they will insert red text underneath the product listing in search results indicating that the product might sell out soon.

This should qualify as common knowledge to both customers & sellers alike, and to my knowledge there's nothing you can do to prevent Amazon from letting the public know that you're about to sell out.

In this article I'm going to teach you how to spy on competitor inventory levels even if they're not low enough to trigger the red text "only [x] left in stock" alert.

Using The 999 Trick To Spy On The Competition

Unbeknownst to many Amazon FBA sellers, their inventory levels are made public by default to those familiar with what we'll call "the 999 trick".

Here's how it works:

1. Open a product listing & add it to cart (quantity doesn't matter)
   
2. Click the "Cart" button
   
3. Click the quantity drop down & select click 10+
   
4. Type in "999" as the quantity & click the "Update" button
   
5. After hitting update, you should see a message "this seller only has [x] available"
   

That's it! easy, right?

But that number won't always be accurate, as Amazon allows sellers to defend against this tactic. It also won't display accurate inventory numbers if they're currently holding more than 999+ at Amazon's fulfillment centers.

Protecting Your Amazon Inventory Levels From Competitors

You can & should protect your inventory levels from the world.

Like I mentioned earlier, if you let your inventory levels fall to critically low levels, it will be displayed to potential customers by default (which isn't bad for your conversion rate as it will create a sense of urgency to buy now).

But if we're holding inventory in the hundreds, we should keep that information private, and here's how to do that in Seller Central:

1. In Seller Central select "Manage Inventory" under the parent Inventory tab
   
2. Click the "Edit" button on the listing you'd like to protect, & make sure that the "Offer" tab is selected
   
3. Scroll down until you see "Max Order Quantity" and enter a number higher than you would reasonably expect any customer to buy from you
   

BOOM - Just like that, you're done! Now your competitors can't keep an eye out on your inventory levels.

Notice I used the number "49" - this is because I suspect that person I was attempting to spy on in the earlier example was using this number as their max order quantity, to illustrate how they did it.

Why This Matters

If your listings aren't protected under brand registry, opportunistic hijackers can jump on your listing if/when they think you might run out of inventory and take advantage of the sales.

Should that happen to you, you'd be out of luck until you restock.

(And then you'd get to deal with the job of fighting over the buy box with them...)

It's better to protect yourself now and do what you can to ward off anyone with malicious intent that might try and hop on your listings, so protect your inventory levels by setting a max order quantity!