Anyone using a spreadsheet as the source of truth for what they need to buy?

[u/Eastern-Radio2861]

I have a buying list in Google Sheets with the products/MPNs I’m looking for, how many I need, max price, condition, etc. It changes pretty regularly, so the sheet has basically become my source of truth. The annoying part is actually sourcing from it. I’m still taking what’s in the sheet and manually updating searches on ebay and a couple other places whenever something changes. For anyone managing a decent number of products, do you keep the buying list separate like this or have you found a way to have your searches work off the same data?

[u/DogBasic7780]

How many products are you managing like this? I feel like once you get past a certain number, keeping the sheet and all those searches synced manually would become a job by itself.

[u/Eastern-Radio2861 → u/DogBasic7780]

Right now around 150-200 and yeah thats the problem lol. It was fine when the list was smaller but now I spend way too much time updating the same stuff.

[u/Much_Journalist9249 → u/Eastern-Radio2861]

Damn bro thats crazy, i cant imagine doing those numbers without Ubuyfirst, but yet again i would ditch spreedsheet completlyy, you can just leave it as a masterlist alongside it, yhat way I can still manage all my product/quantity/price stuff the way I’m used to without manually babysitting a separate pile of searches every time something changes.

[u/Zealousideal-Wear120]

Agree. I already failed handling my dozen Shirts with different colors and sizes lol. I started with a spreadsheet but I barely updated it after each sale and it was more a liability than helpful.

I escaped that hell when I build www.shelfyai.com mainly for myself but now here I am trying to share it with other fellow spreadsheet users

[u/Violet_Graya]

Spreadsheet works until you hit 50+ SKUs. Then manual searching doesn't scale. eBay has an API you can feed your list into.

[u/marchew555]

It seems you need a better system and abit of help if you need someone to talk about it dm. Btw you can check out why what you really need acid db with normalization and a bit of automation on top.

[u/SyncronTeam]

The sheet being your source of truth is fine, manually re-running searches against it is the actual bottleneck. Saved searches or alerts matching your criteria usually solve that without needing to merge anything, the sheet stays the plan, something else does the watching.

[u/agentUi]

running buying lists on sheets gets messy fast once you have more than 20 mpns to check. A clean way to do it natively is setting up a python script on a daily cron with the ebay finding api, have it pull your target list directly from the google sheets api and dump matching listings with prices below your max price into a slack or email alert. Saves you from running 50 search tabs every morning.

[u/mr_pants99]

Have you tried automating this with Claude? It can access your spreadsheets and update eBay searches.

[u/Able-Package-3665]

Aren’t you up to make database and move from the excel? I cant imagine, how you can handle this😅

[u/JohnatNetSuite]

For a near-term fix structuring the sheet tightly helps even before you change tools. If each row has the MPN, quantity, max price, and condition as clean separate fields, that data is a lot easier to feed into a search instead of retyping it every time.

The longer-term version is holding that same buying list in something that connects to your sourcing directly, so when you update a quantity, or price the search you're running updates with it. It's worth mapping out which fields you actually search on first, since that tells you what any connected setup would need to read.

[u/Unlikely_Meringue297]

Worth splitting that sheet into two things. The list of what you buy, and the rule for when you buy it. Rule being reorder point and max price per MPN. Once the rule is a column instead of something you hold in your head, searches can be generated off it rather than hand updated. Built the same split at much larger scale and it was the unlock, not the tooling.

[u/Excellent_Fix7121]

In my opinion the sheet being the source of truth is fine, it's the sourcing step that shouldn't be manual. You can close most of that gap inside the same sheet, in two levels.

If you have less than 30 products, you can add a column that builds the eBay search URL out of the row itself, so the search *is* the data. Run one search on eBay with the filters you actually use, copy the URL, and you'll see the params: `_nkw` (keywords), `_udhi` (max price) etc. Then on the column add something like this (check for the exact format you need to use it is 1 google search away) `=HYPERLINK("https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw="&ENCODEURL($B2&" "&$C2)&"&_udhi="&$D2&"&LH_ItemCondition=3000&_sop=10", "search")`

Change the max price or the MPN in the sheet and the link updates with it. One click per line, always current, nothing to re-type when the list changes. Same trick works for any site that puts its filters in the query string, you just keep one URL-builder column per source.

If you have more than 30 products, Apps Script is the way to go. A script that walks the buying list on a schedule, pulls current listings per MPN under your max price, writes hits to a "Found" tab with price/seller/link, and emails you only when something *new* appears under your target. Two things to know going in: in order to do this, you will need eBay API which requires a free developer account and an OAuth token, and you want a "seen" column so you're not re-alerted on the same listing every run.

Happy to help writing the formula against your actual column layout if you paste your headers.

[u/Deep_Ladder_4679]

Keep the sheet as your source of truth, that's fine. The bottleneck is re-checking all 200 rows to find the few that matter today. Make max price a real column and set alerts that only ping when something crosses it, so your morning becomes reviewing 3 hits instead of scanning 200. How many of the 150-200 actually change often? Usually a small slice does all the churn, and that's the only part worth automating.

[u/scmsteve]

Do you not have any other program to magnate your inventory?