Beacon: Meet the Buyers Already Asking for Your Items

Every reseller knows the feeling: your item is good, your price is fair, and it still sits there while eBay's algorithm shows it to nobody. Meanwhile, somewhere on Reddit, a real person is typing "where do I find a decent used one of exactly this thing?" — and you'll never see that post.

That's the gap Beacon closes. It's the newest tool in Prelo, and it flips the usual marketing playbook on its head: instead of pushing your listings at people, it finds the people already asking for them.

The idea in one sentence

Beacon reads your live listings, figures out what buyers would ask for, scans Reddit for people asking for exactly that, scores how serious they are, and drafts you a reply that actually helps them — with your listing mentioned honestly, as a reseller, not as spam.

You don't configure anything. No keywords, no saved searches, no dashboards to babysit. If it's published in your Prelo inventory, Beacon is listening for it.

Where the leads come from

People don't just search eBay when they want something specific. They ask communities first — especially for used, vintage, and collectible items where trust matters:

• r/AnalogCommunity, when a parent needs a first film camera for a photography class
• r/vinyl, when someone's talking themselves into their first real turntable
• r/MechanicalKeyboards, r/headphones, r/gamecollecting — every hobby has a "what should I buy and where?" thread running around the clock

These posts are the highest-intent buyer signals on the internet. Someone stating a budget and asking "where do I buy?" is minutes away from purchasing — the only question is from whom.

Intent scoring: not every mention is a buyer

Most of what mentions your item's keywords is noise: people showing off what they already own, selling their own, or asking something unrelated. Beacon runs every candidate post through two filters — a fast one that rejects obvious non-asks (for-sale posts, show-and-tell), and an AI pass that scores buying intent from 0 to 100 and checks whether the ask actually matches your specific item.

That match check matters more than it sounds. Someone hunting a modern Kydex holster for a brand-new pistol is not the buyer for your vintage leather one — same category, different customer. Beacon only surfaces leads where the person's ask and your listing genuinely line up, because the fastest way to torch a Reddit account is replying to threads where you don't belong.

The drafted reply is the real product

Here's the uncomfortable truth about "lead finding" tools: knowing about a thread is worthless if your reply reads like an ad. Communities can smell a sales pitch instantly, and most subreddits will ban you for one.

So every Beacon lead comes with a reply drafted to a strict standard:

1. Answer the question first. Real buying advice — what to check on a used unit, what a fair price looks like — whether or not they buy from you.
2. Disclose. The draft says you're a reseller with one listed. No sock-puppet "oh I just happened to see one somewhere" nonsense.
3. Respect the room. If a community prohibits sale links, Beacon flags it and the draft mentions availability without linking.

And the rule that governs everything: Beacon never posts for you. You read the draft, edit it in place (or hit Redraft), copy it, and post from your own account. You stay a person in the conversation — the tool just made sure you showed up at the right moment with something useful to say.

Zero setup, honestly reported

When you open Beacon, it's already built your searches from your published listings — one query can cover several items, and you can switch off any that pull noise.

It scans automatically every four hours, and it tells you the truth about what it found. No leads doesn't get dressed up as a mystery: you'll see how many posts were scanned and how many looked like real asks. Some weeks, for some inventory, the honest answer is "nobody asked this week" — and that's fine, because the scan that matters is the one where somebody does. High-intent leads (75+) send a push notification the moment they land, because a two-hour-old thread is a conversation and a two-day-old thread is an archive.

Why this works better for resellers than for anyone else

Tools that monitor social mentions for brands match conversations against one product pitch. Beacon matches against your entire live inventory — every item you publish widens the net. A reseller with 60 listings has 60 chances per scan for someone's ask to line up with something already photographed, priced, and ready to ship.

It also completes a loop we've been building all year: Lookout watches the marketplaces for things you should buy. Beacon watches the communities for people who want what you sell. Source it, list it with AI, cross-list it everywhere, and now — meet the buyer who was already asking for it.

Try it

Beacon is live for Pro members, and every new Prelo account gets it free for the first 30 days — enough time to publish some inventory and watch the first leads come in. It's in your dashboard sidebar, right under Lookout.