u/mguozhen

A lot of Amazon product research starts with demand, price, competition, keywords, margin, all that stuff.

Obviously useful. But ngl, I feel like sellers sometimes skip the most obvious part:

What are customers already annoyed by?

Bad packaging, wrong sizing, cheap material, confusing setup, missing accessory, unclear instructions, weird smell, battery dies too fast, product looks different from the photos, etc.

That stuff is basically free product research. If the same issue keeps showing up across competitor products, it’s either a red flag or an opportunity before you even source.

The annoying part is doing this manually. You open a bunch of competitor ASINs, read through customer language, take notes, copy/paste into a doc, then try to turn that into product specs or listing ideas. It works, but it’s slow and super easy to bias toward what you already wanted to believe.

So I made a small open-source CLI for this.

You put in an Amazon ASIN, and it gives you a quick first-pass report around customer pain points, selling points, buyer language, and listing improvement ideas. Not meant to replace seller judgment. More like a starting point before you spend hours digging manually.

Also made it CLI-based because I wanted something that could plug into agent workflows later, instead of another dashboard I have to babysit.

Curious how other sellers/agencies are doing this today. Are you actually looking at customer pain points before sourcing, or mostly relying on sales estimates + keyword tools?

Repo is on GitHub: https://github.com/mguozhen/voc-amazon-reviews

Looking into phone answering options for a small local business and ngl, a lot of the AI phone stuff I’ve heard sounds kind of robotic or annoying.

The use case is pretty basic: small retail/showroom type business, usually 1-2 people working, and calls get missed during busy hours, lunch breaks, after hours, weekends, etc.

Most of the calls aren’t super complicated either. It’s usually stuff like hours, availability, delivery area/fees, basic pricing, booking a time to come in, or just asking someone to call/text them back.

I don’t really mean “AI replaces the receptionist.” More like: can it pick up when no one else can, get the customer’s name/number, answer basic questions, maybe book a simple appointment, and hand off anything messy to a real person?

Has anyone here tried an AI receptionist or phone answering service that actually felt decent and not like a bad phone tree?

Mainly curious if customers were okay with it, if it actually captured useful leads, and whether it was better than just letting calls go to voicemail.

Amazon Seller 101: I made a small CLI to find customer pain points before sourcing

Any non-robotic phone answering services for small businesses?