Parabellum Scout: ask the market a question

Some questions don't fit in a search box. "What came back in stock yesterday?" "Is this price high right now or is that normal?" "Where am I overpaying?" You could answer them by clicking through a dozen screens, or you could just ask.

Parabellum Scout is the assistant built into the site. It's included with Pro+.

It looks things up instead of guessing

Scout doesn't answer from memory. When you ask about a product, a price or a restock, it runs a lookup against the same data behind your search results and then tells you what it found. Behind the scenes it has tools for:

• Looking up a product by UPC, part number or description at your distributors
• Current stock and price per distributor
• Price history for a product, up to a year back
• Restock estimates from Restock Intelligence
• In-stock alternatives, the same ones you'd see on a results page
• The biggest price moves and stock changes over the last day, week or month
• Today's deals
• Your own search history, savings and pricing compared to the market
• Your BullsEye Watches and connected distributors

If a question needs one of those, Scout uses it. If it needs something we don't have, like what your competitor down the road charges, it can't answer that and shouldn't pretend to.

Questions worth asking

Here are prompts that map straight onto real lookups. Paste in a UPC from your own search where one is needed.

• "What's the price history on UPC [paste UPC] over the last 180 days?"
• "This UPC is out everywhere. When is it likely back, and at which distributor?"
• "Nobody has this one. What's the closest in-stock alternative?"
• "What are today's deals?"
• "What came back in stock in the last 24 hours?"
• "Show me the biggest price drops across distributors in the last 7 days."
• "How much have I saved using Parabellum, and what did I search for last week?"
• "Where am I paying more than the market over the last 30 days?"

The last one is a good place to start. It compares your pricing on the products you deal in against the rest of the market, over the last 7, 30 or 90 days, or all time, and shows where you're saving and where you're paying a premium.

Prices it doesn't have

Some distributors don't publish a price in their feed. When Scout looks up a product and a distributor has stock but no price, it tells you "Price not available" instead of making one up or treating it as free.

That's also a reason to check the product page before you place an order. Scout is quick for getting your bearings. The results page is still where you confirm the price and stock you're about to buy at.

Your distributors, not everyone's

When Scout searches for a product, it searches the distributors you're connected to, the same as your own search. Market-wide questions, like the biggest price drops this week, cover everything we track.

Where to find it

Click the assistant button in the bottom-right corner of any page. Scout opens in a panel on the right, so you can keep working with it open. The starter buttons, like Deals of the day, Recent restocks and Am I overpaying?, fill in a good first question.

Your past conversations are saved under Conversations in the panel.

Pro+ includes 100 messages a day, up to 2,000 a month. The count resets at midnight UTC, and the panel shows how many you have left.

Try it

Parabellum Scout is included with Pro+. Open it from any page and ask it what came back in stock yesterday.

Not on Pro+ yet? Try the full Pro+ plan free for 7 days. No credit card needed until your trial ends.