The service is completely web based and automatic. It requires no human intervention except in the case that technical maintenance is required. i.e. no shipping

The service is completely web based and automatic. It requires no human intervention except in the case that technical maintenance is required. i.e. no shipping any products. The service DOES depend on web scraping, and this is what causes the technical maintenance from time to time. (And no, it is not scraping Craigslist, haha.) Building copycat sites would be... hard. The market is niche and the integration is not easy. I provide SaaS to the academic market.