Top 8 Ways to do Amazon Product Research Like A Pro in 2021!
If you want to make huge money as an Amazon seller, it becomes absolutely crucial to do proper Amazon product research before diving into it full time.
Trust us, every successful Amazon seller has gone through this phase. Deciding on the best bankable product is not as overwhelming as it seems.
There are numerous things to look at when it comes to product research — niche selection, brand restrictions, competition, selling fees, and so on.
Researching for products on Amazon has evolved over the last few years. What used to work before may or may not work now.
This detailed guide has 8 definitive tips to assist you in Amazon product research.
This article will cover the following topics:
What is Amazon product research?
Why is it important to do product research?
How to do product research on Amazon?
A quick way to perform product research
Checklist of Amazon product research
What not to do while doing product research?
Unconventional ways to do Amazon product research
Product categories to avoid
So let’s start!
What is Amazon product research?
The process of researching products to sell on Amazon is exactly that. A process of analyzing what’s selling so that you can grab a slice of the action. The idea is that you research products that you are able to source inexpensively and sell for a profit. Sounds super simple, doesn’t it? Yet, it’s a process that includes numerous important factors that must be considered.
For example, your niche selection, any brand restrictions, your competition, costs, and fees will all impact whether the products you research are viable.
Why is it important to do product research?
If you don’t spend adequate time honing your research skills, you’ll be unable to spot potentially profitable products. Choosing random products just because you like the look of them and ‘think’ they will sell on Amazon will not cut it, because what you ‘think’ and what your research will uncover are likely to be total opposites!
So, don’t sell what you want to sell, sell what actually sells!
There is no room in the world of running an eCommerce business for you to make guesses or uninformed decisions, particularly if you want your business to be successful and to grow.
One of the main reasons Amazon sellers find product research so challenging is because they simply don’t know what to focus on. And it’s not surprising as not all products are equal. Before you even start your research you should have a handle on what a good product looks like to introduce to your inventory.
How to do product research on Amazon?
Step 1: Check The Best-Sellers List
Amazon offers you substantial help for researching about a product and this is through Amazon’s Best Sellers page. In fact, this is the foremost step you should be doing, as Amazon displays all the top-selling products.
You can search for products based on their categories & sub-categories. Perform a quick check at the listings in order to determine what items are sold the most. This, in turn, will also assist you in deciding a niche (perhaps, if you are not sure which one to go with).
From a product’s selling info, you can predict what products can appeal your target audience. In addition, you can even check the related items to help you have an idea about the ways you can expand your business into.
Try to choose products that are neither priced too high nor too low. Besides this, a limited competition also gives more prospects to sell the product.
Generating a product idea can also be done through the following ways:
Amazon’s best-seller list
Amazon storefronts
Exploring the retail stores
Amazon’s Movers & Shakers
Amazon Basics
Browsing about a few products on Pinterest
Exploring the Shopify stores
Looking at eBay’s trending list
Checking the section — “Customers Also Bought”
Amazon’s product sub-tiers
Seeing through the AliExpress’s Weekly best-sellers list
Once you have an idea about the niche and the respective product, see if the product is in-demand or not through the following ways:
Google keyword planner
Sellerapp’s Product Intelligence tool
Google trends
Step 2: See What The Competitors Are Doing
The second step is to analyze what your competitors are doing to sell the product that you have picked. Amazon’s Best Sellers page enables you to see through your primary competitors.
You can check for their product listing pages and their official website if available. The insights give an idea of what items are selling the most, the ones that are getting good ratings and customer reviews.
Apart from this, you can spy on your competitors outside Amazon by typing the appropriate keyword on Google or other search engines, and see if their results are showing up.
Also, you can purchase the product from your competitor (if it is affordable for you) and check the kind of service they offer. You can always learn those best practices from them and find out ways to improve them while selling yours.
Few tips to keep in mind when researching the product’s page:
When you check a product page in detail, you will tend to get multiple new ideas. With thousands and thousands of products listed, it is very easy to be carried away, it is important to be clear to understand what you are exactly looking for.
When in doubt, ensure to follow the tips mentioned below:
Look for any type of product from Amazon’s Best Seller page, as that’s adequate to help you come with ideas.
Focus more on the Sponsored Products, Frequently Bought Together, and Customers Also Bought sections, as they provide better data intelligence, which you further might want for increasing or up selling your inventory.
A quick way to perform product research
This is indeed one of the quickest ways to perform product research. They save your time and come in handy.
Just Imagine Scouring through the bestseller lists, checking the hot-selling items, analyzing the product criteria, images, description, bullets, listings, and competition can be time-consuming and maddening.
Moreover, you will have to check if there is enough demand for the product and see if it can sell easily. Also, is the product seasonal or is it only good if is sold during holidays?
What will be the return or refund rate and how expensive it can be to ship? Do customers want it to work impeccably for years? Would this necessitate proper customer support?
You can either do all of the above, visit all the websites, click on all the potential products, put in all the price, weight and other criteria that are mentioned above, go to all the competitors, go up and down on scrolling through all the products, go back and forth switching tabs and spend hours and hours of energy and you still may not come up with any product idea.
So, here is the ultimate tip to unveil some interesting products for your online business.
All you need is to buy amazon product research services from Onebox Hub at a single click and get everything done in a single place.
Checklist of Amazon product research
Here is a quick checklist of what is required to come up with the right product. With these criteria, your job gets easier.
Average product price between $10-$50
Selling at least 10 products a day
Similar products have a best seller rank of 5,000 or lesser in the main category
Top 3 related keywords have over 50,000 monthly searches on Amazon
Current top sellers with room for improvement and optimization of current listings
Lightweight (preferably under 2–3 pounds)
Product is easily outsourced from China
Year-round seller (not seasonal)
Simple item that is not easily broken or can be faulty
Product can be made for 25% or less of sale price (quick check)
No famous brand names within product category/niche
2–3 products with less than 50 reviews on the first page
Ability to expand your brand with related products
Can make a superior product over similar products in the market
Product encourages recurring purchases
Multiple product related keywords where you can rank better in Amazon search
What not to do while doing product research?
Outlined are the five key mistakes that sellers often tend to do while researching a product on Amazon. So, make sure not to do them.
Choosing a very small niche
It is important to choose an active market — where your products get noticed and sold. Never do the mistake of narrowing down too much, especially in some obscure product categories.
Setting up products for an extremely low price
As a seller, the moment you start racing by offering the lowest price than the competitors, understand that you are sabotaging your income in a great way.
Your pricing decision should never be based on what your competitors have put up, as you aren’t aware of their profit margins, sourcing costs, or the logic behind their scheme.
Selling undifferentiated products
You need to realize that Amazon is no longer like the one it used to be a few years ago. Those god olden days are gone. It has become more saturated and competitive today. You cannot private label BBQ gloves, silicone wedding rings, or yoga mats and collect that hefty check. If you are choosing undifferentiated items, it becomes even harder to sell.
Not calculating the profit margins
This is another big mistake new sellers tend to do. They underestimate the kind of impact Amazon’s fee can have on the products they prefer to sell. Hence, it is very important to use a good FBA calculator to know proper estimates for a product ASIN.
Failing to improve the product
If you see that your competitors have a bunch of poor reviews and bad ratings for the same product that you selling, and you still do not do anything to improve from your end, you are doing the biggest hard in terms of sales.
Unconventional ways to do Amazon product research
999 Method: Among the many methods available, the 999 method remains the most popular Amazon Product Finder tactics. Here are the steps to find out how many items a seller currently has in his FBA inventory and how many units he sells on a daily basis.
· Go to the Amazon page of the product of your interest
· Add the product to your cart
· In the shopping cart, click on the quantity and edit it to 10+
· Type 999 (the highest number allowed) and click update
· If that seller has lesser than 999 items left in his inventory stocks, it will state, “This seller only has XX of these available.”
· Do this for the next 7 days and keep tracking the inventory remaining on a daily basis
· The difference in inventory shows you how many products are getting sold for this product & seller on a daily basis
Note: One important point to note is that if there are multiple sellers, you may want to do this for all the sellers to arrive at the right number. This method fails if the seller has put in a restriction on the maximum products that a user can buy.
BSR Movers: This includes products whose BSR has significantly jumped in the past 24 hours. Now, why is this important and why should you track interesting products in this list for your Amazon product research?
As mentioned earlier in this blog, the product’s BSR is calculated by the number of recent sales for that specific product. It also takes into account historical sales data relative to any other products in that same category.
So, if the BSR is increasing suddenly and on multiple days, something about that listing or product is working really well and needs to be evaluated or understood more. This can also give us more ideas on whether we can find products that can be privately labeled or sold through Amazon retail arbitrage or wholesale.
Fidget Spinners took over the summer sales of 2020 in the US and the worldwide, quickly and unexpectedly. However, using our data, we saw Fidget spinners suddenly gaining BSR back in early January itself.
Even in July when the market was flooded with fidget spinners, some of them were performing better than the competitors. What made them unique? Can we check how they have made their listings?
What is the type of images that they are using? What specific discounts or promotions are they giving? Further analysis of the data can reveal a lot about what you can do for your listing and even for your next Amazon FBA private label product idea!
Product categories to avoid
If you are going to be a “private label seller,” then understand that not all items are created equally. You need to avoid choosing some complex products such as Cameras, Photos, Paintings, Home Appliances, etc. for some reasons.
Do not pick products that have complications with shipping and manufacturing, as they turn out to be the biggest headaches later on. This is mainly because such massive products involve liabilities, quality assurance, returns, and customer reviews.
In addition, anything that foes “in” or “on” your body — like foods, lotions, creams, nutritional supplements tend to have potential liabilities. So, it is good to ignore such products.
On the other hand, categories like shoes and clothing are worth noting too. Since most individuals have their brand preferences, creating your brand might not be successful.
Final Thoughts
Your Amazon product research will never feel daunting if you always follow the set criteria and remember to ‘niche-down’ your research whilst using competitor information and trends to help you. There’s no need to waste time trying to sniff out products that are non-starters when you can narrow down your research and recognize a bestselling product using the easily accessible Amazon research tactics detailed above.
Interested in optimizing your Amazon account? At Onebox Hub we have optimized many Amazon accounts of sellers from countries like the USA, UK and Canada and helped them to achieve the highest sales.
