The Expert manual
Every setting, its shipped default, and the effect of changing it.
Settings
Every input on the Settings tab autosaves with a short delay, and there is a Save settings button if you want to force it. The shipped defaults are the Balanced preset: an $8 Buy Box floor, 10 sales per month minimum, top 3% BSR, sellers with up to 25 reviews, and the Amazon-on-listing and private label exclusions off. That combination finds product without choking the crawl. Tighten from there once findings start flowing.
Crawl parameters (Run tab)
Rounds (depth) 5
How many storefront hops the crawl follows from each seed. A seed seller leads to products, those products lead to more sellers, and each hop is one round. Higher goes deeper and returns more products; the range is 1 to 20.
Concurrent tabs 3
How many scan tabs run at once, from 1 to 10. More tabs is faster but heavier on your machine and on SellerAmp. If you get rate-limited often, drop this before touching anything else.
Tab timeout 60s
Seconds before a scan tab is abandoned. Lower fails faster on pages that never finish loading; the floor is 20 seconds. Leave it alone unless slow pages are stalling your runs.
Max per store 100
Cap on products pulled from any one seller storefront. A 4000-item store would otherwise eat the whole run. Raise it for deep coverage of a few stores, lower it to sample more stores per hour.
Scanning behavior
Run scans in a separate window on
Scan tabs open in their own worker window instead of mixing with your tabs. Turn it off only if you want to watch the scans happen in your main window.
Minimize the scan window on
Keeps the worker window out of the way. If scanning seems throttled, turn this off: some systems slow background windows down.
Eligibility
Require ungated on
Only products you are approved to sell get saved. Gated products fail, and an unknown verdict pauses the run for Seller Central sign-in. Turning it off removes gating from the pass criteria entirely.
Expand crawl via any ungated product on
The crawl recurses into the sellers of any ungated product, even one that failed your price or rank filters. That widens the seller network and surfaces more findings. Off means strict mode: only full passes get expanded.
Best-first ordering on
The queue chases the most promising leads first, ranked by convergence (how many low-review sellers carry a product) and seller newness. Off reverts to plain first-in first-out. Best-first finds more winners per rate-limited lookup, so leave it on.
Adaptive pruning on
Seller neighborhoods that keep returning zero winners sink in priority, and newer sellers get scanned deeper. Nothing is dropped, cold leads just wait longer. Off gives every lead equal priority.
Expansion focus Balanced
Controls which ungated products the crawl expands through. Discovery expands via any ungated product. Balanced requires the product to clear your enabled structural exclusions, category allow-list, and brand rules. Quality adds a sales floor: SPM must be known and at least half your Min SPM. Blacklisted brands are never expanded through in any mode.
Abandon a cold store after 12
Gives up on a seller once this many of their products in a row score zero winners, dropping their queued items and logging it. Set 0 to never abandon. This is what stops a giant junk storefront from burning an hour of lookups.
Exclusions
Exclude multipacks & bundles on
Rejects titles that read as multi-unit listings: pack of N, N-pack, N-pk, set/case/box/lot/carton/sleeve/bundle of N, Qty: 2 and up, word packs like two/twin/double/three/triple/four/six pack, and standalone "dozen". These are almost always unsourceable as listed.
Treat counts as packs too off
Also flags "N count", "N ct", "N pcs", pieces, and pairs at quantity 2 or more. Off by default because a 100 count vitamin bottle is one sellable unit. Turn it on if count-style bundles keep slipping through in your categories.
Exclude without Buy Box on
Rejects products with no active Buy Box winner. A suppressed Buy Box usually means pricing trouble or a dead listing.
Exclude without BSR on
Rejects products with neither a BSR rank nor a BSR percentage. No rank data means no read on velocity.
Exclude oversized on
Rejects anything that is not Standard Size. Oversize fees and prep change the math enough that most sellers filter these out at the sourcing stage.
Exclude when Amazon is a seller off
Rejects a product when the Amazon-shares-Buy-Box alert fires or an AMZ row shows in the offers table, two independent signals. Off in the Balanced defaults; turn it on if you refuse to compete with Amazon on a listing. Note that "Amazon Share Buy Box" is not the same as "Never on Listing".
Exclude potential IP issues on
Rejects products SellerAmp flags for trademark or brand risk. Cheap insurance against IP complaints.
Exclude Hazmat / Dangerous Goods on
Rejects products flagged hazmat or dangerous goods. These carry special shipping rules and slower check-in.
Exclude private label off
Rejects products SellerAmp marks as likely private label, which carry high IP risk if you source them elsewhere. Off in the Balanced defaults so borderline calls reach your eyes; flip it on if you want the engine to make that call for you.
Exclude products with variations off
Rejects listings with size or color variants. Variations make matching the exact sourceable item harder, but excluding them cuts a lot of legitimate product, which is why it ships off.
Exclude from results (avoid list)
Paste ASINs to exclude empty
Comma or newline separated, validated as 10-character ASINs, managed as removable chips. ASINs on this list are still crawled for seller discovery but never saved to findings or the sheet. Use it for products you already evaluated so the crawl keeps expanding through their sellers without re-surfacing them.
Skip products found in earlier runs on
Auto-skips any ASIN already scanned in a previous crawl using the seen history. Turn it off when you deliberately want a fresh pass over old ground, for example after loosening your filters.
Seller filter
Max seller reviews 25
Only follows sellers with this many reviews or fewer. The logic: a seller with 12 reviews who moves product is new like you and likely holds the same ungates you can get. Sellers with an unknown review count or no storefront URL are skipped. Raising it follows more established sellers, whose catalogs are more picked over.
Product filter
Min Buy Box price $8
Rejects products selling below this. Under about $8 the fees leave nothing; raise it to $15 or $20 if you only want higher-ticket flips.
Min max cost $0
A floor on SellerAmp's Max Cost figure. Set $5 and any product you could only profitably buy under $5 gets rejected. 0 disables it, and an unknown Max Cost never fails a product.
Max spread $4
Rejects a product when the gap between the storefront price and the Buy Box price exceeds this. A $22 storefront price against an $18 Buy Box is a $4 spread and passes; $28 against $18 fails. Big spreads usually mean a stale storefront price or a tanked listing.
BSR limit by percent
rank applies the absolute BSR limit, falling back to the percentage when rank is unknown. percent applies the top-% limit, falling back to rank. both requires both to pass. Percent is the default because a 150,000 rank means very different things in Toys versus Grocery, while top 3% means the same everywhere.
Max BSR rank 150000
Rejects products ranked worse than this when rank mode applies. Lower means only faster movers pass.
Max BSR % 3%
Rejects products outside the top X% of their category when percent mode applies. 3% is a reasonable velocity bar across categories; drop to 1% when you only want proven movers.
Min SPM 10
Rejects products with estimated sales per month below this. It also sets the Quality expansion floor at half this value, so at the default the crawl only expands through products doing 5+ SPM in Quality focus. Raise it when you want depth-of-stock buys instead of onesie-twosie flips.
Max weight blank
Rejects products heavier than this many kilograms, but only when weight is known. Heavy items eat shipping margin. Blank means no limit.
Offer-cap slack 30%
Tolerance above the built-in SPM-to-max-sellers table (50 SPM allows 12 sellers, 100 allows 18, 200 allows 25, up to 60 at 3000). The cap is the table value plus slack: at 100 SPM with 30% slack, up to 24 real Buy Box competitors are tolerated. Competitors counted are FBA plus Amazon offers, falling back to total offer count.
Exclude products with unknown sales on
SellerAmp shows "Unknown" SPM when it cannot estimate sales, which usually means very low velocity. On rejects them; off keeps them and skips the SPM filter for those products.
Allowed categories blank
Comma-separated whitelist matched case-insensitively against the product's top category, exact or substring. Blank allows all. It is only enforced when the category is known, and in Balanced or Quality focus it also gates crawl expansion.
Blacklist brands empty
Case-insensitive brand match, exact or substring. Blacklisted brands are never saved and never expanded through, in any focus mode. Put IP-landmine brands like Nike or Disney here.
Only these brands blank
Brand focus: only these brands are saved and expanded through, and up to 3 brands get scoped storefront scans so lookups are not wasted off-brand. If the brand did not parse, the title is matched instead. The blacklist is checked first, so a brand on both lists stays excluded.
Max sellers at Buy Box price 0
Rejects listings where more than this many sellers sit within 2% of the Buy Box, the signature of an active price war. 0 turns it off. Set 4 or 5 to dodge crowded listings before you buy in.
Pacing & rate-limit protection
Delay between requests 6s
Pause between requests so Amazon and SellerAmp do not rate-limit you. 6 to 15 seconds is the working range; go 10 to 15 if you get limited often.
Random jitter 35%
Adds random variance to the delay so request timing does not look robotic. Higher is more human-looking.
Cooldown when limited 5 min
How long the crawl waits when SellerAmp bounces it. Raise it if you keep getting re-limited immediately after resuming.
Max cooldown retries 3
The run gives up after this many consecutive cooldowns. Higher is more persistent through a rough patch.
Sign-outs before cooldown 2
Consecutive "Seller Central logged out" detections required before the run pauses for sign-in. This absorbs spurious logout detections; a cooldown only happens on a real sign-out.
Extra wait after page load 0s
Fixed pause after the SellerAmp page loads, on top of normal load detection. Use 2 to 5 seconds on slow connections where SAS data arrives late.
Notifications
Notify when a crawl finishes on
Desktop notification with the winner count when a crawl completes. Useful because runs finish long after you stop watching.
Notify on rate-limit / block on
Fires when the crawl is rate-limited or blocked so you know to check your Seller Central sign-in instead of losing an hour to a paused run.
Notify on every eligible find off
One notification per eligible product. Gets noisy on big crawls, which is why it ships off.
Sound alerts on
Audible beep on important events, with an urgent triple-beep when action is needed. Works even when macOS blocks Chrome banners, so keep it on if you rely on the sign-in pause alerts.
License
License key empty
Paste the key shown after checkout (format XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX) and hit Activate; the pill flips from Polar to Active. Deactivate this device frees a device slot and locks the app. If you bought the bundle, activate the key in both SourceHawk apps; they are separate installs. Your key lives in your Polar customer portal.
Google Sheets
Tab name Prospector
The spreadsheet tab findings sync into. Editing the field only stores the setting; the New tab and Rename tab buttons apply it to the connected spreadsheet. An empty value falls back to Prospector on save.
Never append the same ASIN twice on
De-duplicates the sheet across resyncs and runs. Off means the same ASIN can be appended repeatedly, which you almost never want.
Connect Google / spreadsheet picker not connected
Sign in with Google and choose the spreadsheet and tab; SourceHawk uses the drive.file scope, so it can only see sheets you pick or it creates, nothing else in your Drive. New creates a spreadsheet named SourceHawk Expert Export with your configured tab as the first sheet. Findings sync live during a crawl; without Google connected, CSV export still works.
Save and reset
Save settings / Reset to recommended defaults autosave
Everything autosaves as you type, so Save is a belt-and-suspenders button. Reset restores the shipped defaults after a confirm, preserving your Sheet tab name and your avoid list.
Run tab stats
The Run tab shows a live tile grid while a crawl works. What each tile counts:
- Eligible found: products that passed every criterion. These are your winners.
- Win rate: winners divided by products checked, one decimal. 12 winners from 500 checked reads 2.4%.
- Products checked: running total of products evaluated this run.
- Gated: products rejected because you are not approved to sell them.
- Multipacks: products rejected as multipacks or bundles.
- Sellers checked: distinct sellers evaluated against the seller filter.
- Stores scanned: storefronts crawled for products.
- Issues: errors hit during the run.
- Searches run: keyword or category search pages scanned. Hidden unless searches ran or are queued.
- In queue strip (running only): pending searches, products, and storefronts, plus an ETA to clear the queue at the current pace.
Findings
The header reads "N ungated products matched your criteria" plus sync status: "X synced, Y pending", or a note that Google Sheets is not connected and CSV export is available. The search box filters on ASIN, title, brand, category, and source seller. Sort options are Convergence (the default, most shared-seller products first), Newest, Best BSR, Highest SPM, and Profit potential (Buy Box price times SPM). Toolbar buttons: Resync rewrites the sheet in the current sort order, CSV exports using your configured Columns, and Clear wipes all findings after a confirm, keeping the activity log.
Each row shows the product image (hover or keyboard-focus the thumbnail and a larger, sharper preview floats beside it, upgraded to a 500px image where Amazon serves one; it stays inside the window and never blocks a click), ASIN, title, a brand, category, and UPC line, and a meta strip: BSR rank with top-% in parentheses, SPM, offer count, Buy Box price, storefront price when it differs, and weight in kg. Tags flag what matters at a glance: "N sellers carry this" (starred at 3+ shared sellers), Ungated, No Buy Box, Amazon sells, FBM Buy Box, "N at Buy Box" when 4+ sellers crowd the price, Pack of N, and Sheet or Sheet pending for sync state. The footer shows provenance: source seller, crawl depth, and the root seed it traces back to.
Per-row actions:
- Sources: opens a panel of retailer launch links built from the product, plus the search query used.
- Google: Google search for the title, or brand plus ASIN, in a new tab.
- Amazon: opens the Amazon listing.
- Copy ASIN: copies the ASIN.
- Avoid (ban icon): confirm, then adds the ASIN to the avoid list and removes it from findings. It will not come back next run.
- Delete (trash icon): confirm, then removes it from findings and the sheet without touching the avoid list, so a future crawl can find it again.
Exclude all adds every finding currently listed (it respects the search box) to the avoid list in one step, shows the count it added, and offers Undo. The findings stay visible; future runs just will not save those ASINs again.
Seen history and the avoid list
The seen history is the cross-run memory of every ASIN the engine has ever scanned. Its size shows in the "N seen" pill, and with Skip products found in earlier runs on, those ASINs are skipped in future crawls so lookups go to new ground. Controls: Copy ASINs copies the whole set, Export CSV downloads a single-column asin file, Clear history makes everything scannable again, and Remove re-enables specific ASINs you paste in. Clear the history after a big filter change; with Balanced defaults loosened or tightened, products that failed before may pass now.
The avoid list is the opposite: ASINs you never want saved. They still get crawled for seller discovery, so the network keeps expanding through them, but they never land in findings or the sheet. Feed it from the paste box in Settings or from the Avoid row action in Findings.
Exports
Three ways out. CSV from the Findings toolbar downloads your findings using the Columns tab configuration. Google Sheets sync appends findings live during a crawl to your chosen spreadsheet and tab, with Resync available to rewrite the sheet in your current sort order. The seen history has its own CSV export of bare ASINs.
The Columns tab drives both CSV and sheet output from one config: toggle fields on or off, drag rows or use the arrows to reorder, and Reset to restore defaults. Around 40 fields are available, from identity (ASIN, title, brand, UPC, EAN) through velocity (BSR rank, BSR top %, SPM), pricing (Buy Box $, Max Cost $, Storefront $, Spread $), risk flags (Amazon Sells?, IP Issues?, Hazmat?, Private Label?, Variations?, Multipack?), and provenance (Source Seller, Depth, Root Seed, Convergence). Most ship enabled; EAN, Convergence Sellers, Source Search, and Notes ship off. Boolean fields render Yes, No, or blank, and app upgrades append new fields disabled so your sheet layout never shifts under you.
Profile transfer
Moving machines? Export profile downloads one small JSON file holding your seen history, avoid list, and settings. On the other computer, Import profile reads the file and offers Merge or Replace. Merge unions the histories and keeps the destination device's settings unless you flip on Also apply the file's settings (off by default). Replace applies everything from the file after a confirm. Your license covers 2 devices, so activate on the new machine and free the old slot in the Polar portal if you are retiring it.