A proprietary analytical system developed by a single software engineer for a Florida-based Amazon reseller has been commercialized and sold to competing sellers. For the Amazon e-commerce tools market, this is an unusual trajectory: most solutions in this space originate from established SaaS vendors.
Mykhailo Karpenko, a Ukrainian-born .NET developer, joined Artisans Online LLC (Sarasota, Florida) in 2018 as a developer. The company operates in the Amazon reselling space: sourcing products, negotiating with suppliers, managing listings. At the time, the company’s core processes relied on manual competitor analysis, spreadsheet-based procurement decisions, and intuition-driven product selection.
“I joined the company as a developer, but within a few weeks I started asking questions that were not directly related to my assignment,” Karpenko says. “I wanted to understand why an analyst was spending a day and a half just to figure out whether it was worth entering a particular product niche. I looked at the process and saw that 80 percent of that time was going to routine work: opening a competitor’s page, writing down the price, checking supplier availability, calculating the margin. That is not analysis. That is mechanical work a system can do in minutes.»
Over the course of a year, Karpenko designed and built from scratch a proprietary software suite using .NET, C#, JavaScript, TypeScript, Angular, and AWS. The system performs real-time competitor analysis across multiple Amazon product categories, multi-parameter product discovery with profitability scoring, automated supplier availability verification, and order generation based on forecasting algorithms. According to the company, the analytical cycle time was reduced from one to two business days to approximately two to three hours.
What fundamentally distinguishes Karpenko’s system from existing tools on the market is not speed as such, but the fact that it combines within a single pipeline operations that are typically performed separately: competitor monitoring, profitability assessment, supplier verification, and procurement decision-making. In the Amazon tools market, each of these functions is handled by a separate service, often from different vendors, with no integration between them. A seller works across five browser tabs, copies data from one window to another, and makes decisions based on fragmented information. Karpenko’s system replaced this process with a unified analytical pipeline where data flows from initial market scanning to a completed supplier order without manual intervention.
“The hardest part was not writing the code, but correctly identifying what exactly to automate,” Karpenko says. “On Amazon, the market changes every hour. A product that was profitable in the morning can become unprofitable by evening because three new sellers entered the space. The system had to do more than display the current picture. It had to predict where the market would shift and propose a decision before a human could see it themselves. That is a different kind of problem. It is closer to financial analytics than to conventional web development.”
After the system launched, changes occurred within the company that Karpenko had not anticipated. Employees who had previously spent their workdays on routine analysis began focusing on strategic tasks: identifying new niches, negotiating with suppliers, scaling the product catalog.
“We did not simply speed up a process. We freed people to do work that a machine cannot do,” Karpenko notes. “That was probably the moment I realized the system had worked.”
The system’s commercial viability became apparent when other Amazon sellers expressed interest in acquiring it. Artisans Online developed a commercial version and made it available to independent sellers. The transition from an internal tool to a market product purchased by direct competitors represents a significant validation of the system’s originality and commercial value.
“When we first showed the system to other sellers, one of the CEOs asked: did you build this yourselves?” Karpenko recalls. “When he heard the answer, he was quiet for a long moment. Then he said: I have been looking for something like this for five years.»
The system built by Karpenko remains in production at Artisans Online to this day.
