What to Sell on Amazon to Make Money: A Must-Read for All Amazon Sellers
Read this article in DE?
If you want to make money selling on Amazon, you'll need to know what to sell.
With over 2 million active sellers on Amazon, it has become impossible to find profitable products just by scratching the surface.
But although there's a lot of competition, Amazon is still the place to sell products online.
If you can find a good product to sell, you'll be able to build a sustainable passive income stream for years to come.
In fact, 74% of Amazon sellers claim that they make more than $1000 per month:
Share this Image On Your Site
However, if you don't find the right product, you'll probably lose a lot of money and your business plans will get back-fired.
So, if you want to know how to find great amazon products, you've come to the right place.
Here's what you will learn in this guide:
- What's really important when looking for a new product to sell on Amazon
- 5 awesome strategies to find the best products to sell on Amazon
- The "truth" about launching a new product on Amazon
Let's dive right in.
What’s Really Important When Looking for a New Product To Sell on Amazon
If you want to run an e-commerce business selling items on Amazon, you need to understand what characterizes a great Amazon FBA product.
Below are important considerations that will help entrepreneurs like you to get great product ideas.
Demand and Competition
In fact, a great amazon product is defined by high demand and low competition. If there are lots of people who want to buy a product and no one sells it, this could be your private goldmine.
Unfortunately, it’s not easy to find such a product.
Several Amazon niches are supersaturated and it's hard to stand a chance against established sellers, especially if your product listing is new on Amazon.
So, let's take a look at how to determine demand and competition for an amazon product. There are several metrics that you can use to do so:
Parameters indicating high demand:
- High monthly revenue
- High number of monthly sales
- High search volume
- Lots of customer reviews
- Low Best Seller Rank
Parameters indicating low competition:
- Fewer product reviews
- Bad average rating
- Bad product page
- Bad product description
- Less competing products
In fact, a top product would have $10k in monthly revenue and 0 competing products.
I think there's no chance to find such a product on Amazon. However, if you use the strategies I will show you in this post, you can find nearly similar products.
However, you shouldn't only consider demand and competition. There are also other things you have to keep in mind:
Profit Margin
After all, you want to make some profits, right?
Thus, you should also consider the profit margin of a product.
There are costs to source products from Alibaba, shipping costs to send your products to an Amazon warehouse, and Amazon seller fees as well.
All of these costs cut your profit.
No matter what you’re going to sell on Amazon, the profit margin is the most important metric you have to keep in mind.
Fortunately, most sellers say they're making profits with their Amazon business:
Share this Image On Your Site
Good news, isn't it? Only 8% of sellers say that their Amazon business isn't profitable yet. A good amount of sellers have profit margins between 6% and 50%, that's great.
Furthermore, 61% of sellers say their Amazon profits increased during 2019.
As a general recommendation, I would say that you've to aim for a profit margin of at least 10%.
To make sure you're on the safe side, here's what you need to do:
1. Sign up for a free Helium 10 account
2. Download Helium 10's Chrome Extension here
3. Head over to Amazon and choose a product
4. Check Profitability
5. Make sure that the profit margin is higher than 10%.
Product Size
If you don't have a high budget, you should also consider the size of a product.
Over-size products cost much more than standard-size products. Plus, you also have to pay more for shipping and storage in Amazon's fulfillment centers.
These costs can dramatically increase your cost per unit and eat up your whole budget to start a business on Amazon.
On the other hand, it could be a great opportunity to sell these types of products since the competition is always much lower in these niches.
When we analyzed the number of products (Amazon US) by price range, we found some interesting results:
Share this Image On Your Site
But only sell oversize products if you have A HIGH budget. Keep in mind that you'll also need money to promote your product.
Selling on Amazon is a long-term investment and if you don't keep this in mind, you're going to fail.
In fact, 85% of sellers agree: selling on Amazon takes effort and intent — it’s not a “get rich quick” tactic:
Share this Image On Your Site
Thus, it's incredibly important that you've enough budget for promotion. The more budget you can spend on advertising, the faster your business will be profitable.
Price
Regarding the price of a product, there's one important thing to consider.
If you're new to Amazon, sell a product priced between $15 and $50.
This has two significant reasons:
- If you sell products below $15, you'll struggle to make enough profit.
- If you sell products with a price higher than $50, a) you will need a lot of money to purchase inventory and b) customers will begin to evaluate products against each other and you'll do harder to close sales.
However, it also depends on whether you're new to Amazon or launch your fourth or fifth product.
As already mentioned, it could be a great opportunity to sell higher-priced products.
What You Also Need to Consider...
We covered the fundamental aspects of product research. Here are a few points more to keep in mind:
- You don’t want to lose a ton of money because your shipping service provider destroys your inventory due to a work failure. Accordingly, don’t sell products that could be easily destroyed.
- Don’t enter niches that are dominated by big brands. If you want to sell private label products, no matter what, don’t do this.
- Don’t sell products with a high variation count, if you can't offer as many variants of your own product as your competitors do.
The 5 Best Strategies to Find Money-Making Products to Sell on Amazon
By now, you should know what you've to pay attention to and what you definitely need to avoid.
But you don't know yet how to find products to sell, don't you? You may have heard of some tactics, but do they really work?
Yet, if you want to learn the exact strategies to find money-making products to sell on Amazon, read on. In this section, I'll guide you through 5 awesome tactics step-by-step.
Let’s start.
1. Use Helium 10 Black Box
It’s important to mention that this strategy is about searching for Products with Helium 10’s Black Box.
Sounds illogical?
Perhaps, but there's another way (search for products through keywords) you can use the tool for product research we'll discuss later.
Yet, here’s the step-by-step process of this strategy:
Get Helium 10
Take this 50% discount on Helium 10 to try it for one month. You can also sign up for free if you want, but you'll then have limited uses.
If you don’t need it anymore after the first month, make sure to cancel the subscription. Keep in mind that it will take time to find the “perfect” product. You won't find it in one day, but one month is more than enough.
Head over to Black Box
Then, head over to Black Box and open the advanced filters. Now you can see that you have a bunch of options to filter the entire Amazon marketplace:
Set your filters
Type in the values you’re looking for. We already covered what parameters a great product should meet. In the end, it depends on your budget what kind of product you can sell.
If you're new to Amazon, you can use the values I'm going to use in this post. Keep in mind that these are only recommended values. You can easily change them by +/- 10%.
- Monthly Revenue: $5000
- Price: $15 to $50
- Review Count: 100
- Number of Images: 7
- Variation Count: 1
- Fulfillment: FBA
The reason why I'm going to search for products with less than 7 images is pretty simple.
On Amazon, you can upload up to 9 images.
If a seller uses all 9 images, chances are high that he/she optimized his/her whole Amazon listing and is extremely active.
And this is exactly what you should avoid. Look for uncompetitive niches and inactive sellers that you can easily outperform.
PRESS SEARCH
Now, you should see a bunch of great products that meet all these criteria. If you want, you can sort the list by monthly revenue.
Sort the results
Next, go through the list and sort out products from big brands. Put products that you think were sold by a private label seller on your watchlist.
Run all ASINs through Cerebro
So far, you should have a ton of products on your watchlist.
However, you don't know yet if they meet the most important criteria: the number of competing products.
You can also not be 100% sure that all of these products were sold by a private label seller.
So what you’ve to do is to run all these products through Helium 10 Cerebro (A Helium 10 tool that checks for which keywords a product is ranking).
If you run them through Cerebro, you'll know from which keywords a product generates its sales.
You can look at these keywords and see how many other products are also ranking for them.
Low amount of ranking products = Low competition
High amount of ranking products = High competition
For example, there’s a vacuum stealer on my list with decent parameters:
Now let’s check for what keywords it's ranking for. If you put the ASIN in Cerebro, here's what you'll see:
You can see that people are not searching for a particular brand.
They're simply searching for “stealer, vacuum stealer wet, useful vacuum stealer” and so on.
That’s great because you won't stand a good chance if they were searching for a stealer of a particular brand.
Now, let's check if these keywords are competitive. Use COMPETING PRODUCTS and CPR 8-DAY GIVEAWAYS to determine this.
CPR 8-DAY GIVEAWAYS shows you how many products you need to give away in a day for 8 days to rank on Amazon's first SERP for a given keyword.
If you go through all these keywords, you can see that there are some keywords with decent search volume that are highly competitive:
When you go deeper, you can see that there're lots of keywords with less competition and still decent search volume:
Finally, I think this strategy is clear now.
If you are new to Amazon, try to find products that haven't more than a CPR-8-Day Giveaway Score of 10.
They also shouldn't have more than 500 competitors for the main keywords.
Surely there can be keywords with more competition, but there should also exist some keywords with only 100-200 competitors.
CPR-8-Day Giveaway is a great metric to determine your advertising costs. Try to consider this metric to decide if you have enough budget to launch a product on Amazon or not.
2. Find Products Through Keywords
You can also use Helium 10's Black Box to search for products through keywords. The advantage is that you know directly whether a keyword is competitive or not.
In my opinion, this is a more efficient strategy to find profitable products to sell on Amazon.
Here’s what you have to do:
Get Helium 10
Take this 50% discount on Helium 10 to try it for one month. You can also sign up for free if you want, but you'll then have limited uses.
Head over to Black Box
Head over to Black Box and open “Keywords”:
Now, open advanced filters:
You now have a bunch of options to filter the entire Amazon marketplace for keywords with exactly those parameters you're looking for.
Set parameters
Enter the parameters. As already mentioned, I use some recommended values to demonstrate the whole process. If you're new to Amazon, you can also use them.
However, you can easily change them by +/- 10%.
Here's what I typed in:
- Search Volume: 200 - Max
- Monthly Revenue: $5000 - Max
- Price: $15 to $50
- Review Count: 0 - 100
- Variation Count: 0 - 1
- Fulfillment: FBA
- Age: 1 Month
- Competing Products: 0 - 200
You may wonder how to filter keywords by revenue and reviews. In fact, you don't filter keywords, but rather the top-ranking products for a keyword.
PRESS SEARCH
Sort the results
Go through all results and check if any keywords refer to a big brand. Sort them out and only look for general keywords.
The first keyword I saw when I went through the list was this one:
Seems like top-ranking products for this keyword only have an average of 41 reviews and an average rating of 4.1.
Let's take a closer look at it on Amazon:
There're only 36 competing products and the keyword has a decent search volume of 621. Let's go one step further and check this niche with XRay.
XRay is an Amazon Chrome Extension with which you can check relevant sales data of any product on Amazon. If you've never heard of it, I highly recommend checking it out here.
You can see that nearly all products have a low review count and a decent revenue:
So seems like a great opportunity.
You now need to go one step further and run all the products in this niche through Helium 10 Cerebro.
Here's what you will see:
As you can see, there are lots of not so competitive keywords with decent search volume.
For example, lock picks kit has a total search volume of 354 and 353 competing products.
Furthermore, according to CPR 8-Day Giveaways you only have to give away 8 products a day for 8 days to rank on the first page of Amazon search results.
Finally, I hope this strategy is clear now. Write down all your ideas and then decide which one you want to sell depending on your budget and possibilities.
3. A Simple Hack
Another great strategy is to search for products directly on Amazon.
If you go for this strategy, you'll need Jungle Scout's Extension. You can get it here for $19.
You can also get the annual subscription with a 30% discount here, but if you are new to Amazon, you should choose the monthly plan, as you can cancel the subscription at any time.
As soon as you've got Jungle Scout, here's what you need to do:
Head over to Amazon and search for a product by going through the bestseller list. For example, you can look through the category Kitchen & Dining:
When I went through the list, the first product I found interesting was this rack set here:
So what you have to do now is to identify the most important keyword for this product:
Then, put it into the search bar:
By now, you can see all the search results for this keyword. So what you need to do now is to open Jungle Scout's Chrome Extension and search for all keywords that people are also searching for.
To do so, open Jungle Scout's Keyword Cloud:
I found the keyword "wood" interesting:
So I put it into the search bar:
You can see that Amazon suggests me keyword wooden dish rack and drainboard set. I decided to perform a search for this keyword.
What I saw is that there were only 398 search results which is not so bad:
But although there were only 398 search results, however, Jungle Scout tells me not to go for this product because it's highly competitive:
Finally, you shouldn't sell this product, but I hope you understand the process of this strategy.
I think this strategy is not as efficient as the other ones, but if you do hard finding great products, it's worth a try.
4. "The Absolute Best Way to Find Products" - Dan Vas
I recently saw this great Strategy from Dan Vas, so I decided to include it in this post.
Here's the video in which Dan explains his strategy:
I also highly recommend checking out his YouTube Channel here.
5. Out-of-the-Box Strategy
These times, it has become hard to find profitable products to sell on Amazon, especially for new sellers.
In most niches with low-cost products, there are already hundreds of sellers.
When we analyzed the number of products by price range, we found some interesting results:
Share this Image On Your Site
As a beginner, it's hard to compete with all these established sellers.
So, it might be a good choice if you think outside the box and sell rather uncommon or high-priced products.
Therefore, you have to search for exactly those product categories where there are high barriers for your competition to enter.
For example, these could be:
High-priced Products
Most new Amazon sellers usually have a small budget, which is why they're going to sell cheap products in the beginning.
So if you're going for high-priced products, you may face less competition.
Oversize Products
It's the same if you're going for over-size products. These products cost much more than standard-size products, e.g. shipping costs, selling fees, storage fees...
Eye-catching shapes/colors
Fewer sellers provide eye-catching colors and shapes.
If you stand out with an eye-catching design, you can reach a target audience that will be highly interested in your products.
In Conclusion
To summarize what you've learned, here're the most important things:
- It depends on your budget which products you're going to sell on Amazon.
- If you have a low budget, you might have to go for cheaper products and don't have as many opportunities as someone with a high budget.
- If you have a high budget, it'll be easier for you to find a product that you can launch.
- Demand and competition are two main indicators that you should keep in mind.
- 5 strategies to find great products to sell on Amazon.
- It could be a great opportunity to sell over-size and high-priced products.
