How Do I Protect My Discounted Products from Arbitrage Using Inventory Protector?

Temporarily selling your products on deep discount can help you win the Buy Box or boost your product to the top of a search results page, but it can also put your inventory at risk for arbitrage. So how do you protect your inventory while running a promotion? Helium 10 created its tool Inventory Protector to keep competitors from cleaning out your inventory during a promotional event.

One of the easiest Helium 10 tools to use, Inventory Protector is indispensable to the private label seller on Amazon. This short tutorial covers the basic steps to defend your stock inventory.

1. Sign into your Helium 10 account and click on the Blue 'P' icon located near the bottom of the left menu, or on the Inventory Protector button in the bottom left corner of the main menu. The Inventory Protector dashboard will open. The dashboard consists of a few filters, columns and a list of all your products. 

2. To find the product you want to protect, first select the market where the product is being sold, using the drop-down menu located in the top center of the dashboard.

3. You can also search out specific products using the search field. To activate protection for a product, click on the empty check box next to the product so that it turns green. You can check off as many products in your inventory as you want, as long as they are going to have the same quantity limit. When you're ready to turn on protection for all of them, click on the black Protect button located in the top, right corner of the dashboard.

4. The Product Inventory window will open. You can set the Max Order Quantity by typing the number into the open field box. Click the green Protect button to start the process. Of course, if you have products to protect with different quantity limits, you'll need to set their protections separately.

5. A confirmation window will appear letting you know that the process is activated. Click on the blue OK button to close the window.

6. While Helium 10 is processing your request, an orange Processing notification appears under the Status column. The date and time stamp represent the UTC time of the activation. UTC is short for Coordinated Universal Time. It is the same time zone as GMT (London) except during the summer, when the U.K. springs forward for Daylight Savings. 

7. When Helium 10 is done activating Protection for the product, the orange Processing notification changes to a green Success notification.

8. A couple other filters allow you to limit the products displayed on-screen at one time. For example, if you only want to check that all your In Stock products are protected, use the drop-down menu to select that option.

9. You can sort the list of products using the column headings. You can sort by ASIN, SKU, Stock Levels or by Status.

It's important to protect your inventory and business against competitor arbitrage, and Helium 10's Inventory Protector is the ideal tool with which to do it.