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Amazon Product Research Tactics for 2022
Finding the right product to sell on Amazon is one of the most difficult aspects of the process. With Amazon's massive catalog, there is a seemingly limitless supply of potential products. Your e-commerce business has the potential to go off if you choose the correct product. If you choose the wrong product, increasing sales and earnings will be far more difficult.
Great product research can help firms figure out which products to sell on Amazon and which trends to pay attention to in the future. It's a method of analyzing market trends and selecting the best-selling items. However, selling on Amazon is more complicated than merely providing good products because there is more competition when there is strong demand.
This post will make the process easier by showing you how to do product research to locate profitable Amazon products. Let's start by defining Amazon product research.
What is Product Research
Product research is the process of determining and confirming a product's profit potential. It's a method of assessing what's selling in order to get a piece of the action. The concept is that you look for things that you can source cheaply and sell for a profit.
Is Product Research Essential
Choosing random things because you like the way they appear and think they'll sell on Amazon will get you nowhere. By running an e-commerce business, there is no space for guesswork or rash decisions, especially if you want to succeed and develop your business.
One of the biggest reasons Amazon sellers struggle with product research is that they don't know where to start. It's not unexpected, given that not all products are created equal.
To help you avoid critical mistakes, let's go over a list of things you need to go over before deciding on what products you'll sell on Amazon.
Manually Scour Amazon's Bestseller List
The first step towards Amazon product research is to manually search for things to sell on Amazon. The Amazon top sellers list is an excellent place to start. Amazon maintains a current list of the top-selling products in each category, which you may use to quickly locate the most popular items.
View the top 100 best selling products in any category using Bestsellers. The key is to delve deeply into the sub-categories. So, instead of looking at the top-selling item in the top-level category, choose something else to source and sell.
Pick a product to investigate more and find a comparable but superior version rather than the exact thing. You should specialize it down, just like the greatest sellers, and base your ongoing study on products that are similar to those that have just been published.
You might even be able to source a product before a popular item's release date and profit right away if you're speedy with your research.
Utilize Research Tools
Admittedly, manually checking each category and sub-category can be inefficient and time-consuming. To maximize your time and effort, learn to use an Amazon product research tool to aid you.
Google Trends is one of the most useful tools for Amazon product research. Setting up alerts to receive fast notifications about trending or hot subjects is the first approach to use this service.
Although you are not immediately alerted of items or products directly, this allows you to research potential products that you can sell on Amazon. You should be able to identify interesting topics or stories that relate to your business and product demands as a vendor.
There are also a number of other options, including Jungle Scout and SellerApp. Each tool has its own set of features and statistics, but nearly all of them let you filter best-selling products. A product tracker tool also displays historical sales volumes, allowing you to examine how sales change from season to season.
Some product research tool chose products that are popular all year, while others rely on a single season to generate the majority of their revenue. These technologies also allow you to compare your products to those of your competitors, allowing you to update your inventory and pricing as needed.
Do Competitor Research
Another excellent Amazon product research strategy is to see which products have already shown to be profitable through Amazon PPC campaigns.
Amazon sellers that spend money on these campaigns are almost certainly benefitting from these products; otherwise, they would not be investing money in them.
If you see the label "sponsored" on Amazon, it signifies the item is a paid advertisement and you should definitely do research on that category.
Get Assistance From Experts
Hiring an agency or corporation to do the research for you is another option for finding things to sell on Amazon. You will save time using this method because you will not have to conduct the Amazon product research yourself.
You also have the guarantee of the product research results to be high quality and based on solid research. Some agencies also offer customized services which can include analyzing shipping costs, keyword research, compilation of historical sales data, and other such services.
However, because you must pay for the service, this approach will be more expensive than the others. Utilize this method only when you have the resources to do so.
Do Keyword Research on Products to Sell
Perform keyword research on Google and Amazon in addition to employing product tracking tools and examining Amazon's best-selling products. Finding a keyword that will boost listing exposure is an essential step not only for product research but also for selling on Amazon.
A product's demand is often proportional to its search volume. When upgrading product descriptions to fit the most popular queries, keyword research is also useful.
Your Suppliers Matter
Simply speaking with your supplier to obtain the unofficial overview on their best-selling products and current product trends is one of the easiest and most cost-effective product research strategies.
Your supplier should have their ears on the ground and be able to provide you with insider information. However, this would require gaining favor and trust; both of which require months or years of repeated business.
Identify Product Categories That Should be Avoided
It's crucial to know which product categories to avoid while conducting Amazon FBA product research. FBA product eligibility, qualifications, and restrictions are all explained by Amazon. Alcoholic beverages, gift cards, and anything with unapproved marketing materials are all prohibited.
Furthermore, Amazon FBA will not accept loose batteries or devices that are damaged or malfunctioning. These are just a few instances of the many goods you should avoid selling.
Establishing a successful Amazon FBA business necessitates continual market demand analysis and ensuring your consumers receive consistently high-quality products.
Amazon FBA product research gives you the information you need to make informed selections and avoid costly mistakes that could make you potentially lose all your capital.
Funneling Data: What you Should and Shouldn't Look out for
Now that you know the methods you can utilize to do Amazon product research, we will now go over how to sort out the data you gathered.
Depending on the extent of your Amazon product research, you may find yourself overwhelmed with the amount of data. Sure, you've been able to perform product research and found out the best selling product categories, essential product criteria, and get a general overview of the Amazon marketplace.
But how do you sort all this data? How can you apply your findings into a coherent strategy? To help you with that, below is a list of things to consider:
Sales Figures
The quantity of sales received by a product is a clear indicator of its demand. Obviously, you want to seek categories that have a lot of sales. When the best-selling products in a niche don't show impressive sale figures, it's usually a hint that the product isn't worth pursuing.
Seasonality
Seasonality describes how demand for products fluctuates throughout the year. All potentially profitable products have a natural seasonality, as consumer spending surges dramatically around the holidays.
There are specific products that are particularly seasonal and are only purchased in large quantities at certain seasons of the year. Although these things have the potential to generate high sales, it is best not to establish your business around them.
It is best to avoid selling seasonal products for novices in general. The holiday season is a highly competitive period for sellers; many want a piece of the pie. You risk not selling your inventory and being stuck with undesired things for the rest of the year if you don't sell it. Look for things that have a high volume of sales throughout the year.
Price Range
The average sales price for a product niche tells you how much you can charge for it and how much profit you can make if you obtain a significant market share.
Once you get an overview of the average price history for a specific product category, determine how much potential profit you can get if you decide to enter that market and the product price you plan to implement.
Product dimensions
Your running costs are directly influenced by the size and weight of your merchandise. Shipping and storing your goods will be more expensive if your products are large.
Choose things that aren't too heavy or slow to move. This will allow you to save money on shipping and avoid the hidden expenses associated with the FBA selling process.
Processing larger products costs more on Amazon. There is also a cost for long-term storage of slow-moving items, which you should avoid.
Additionally, you should constantly consider delivery costs. Otherwise, you may find yourself selling a low-priced Amazon product with a shipping cost that is substantially higher than the initial price. People are unlikely to purchase such products via the internet.
Number of Competitors
It's crucial to know how many other sellers are offering similar items while researching products to sell on Amazon. It will be significantly more competitive if you plan to enter a saturated market.
As a starting vendor, you would generally prefer to go for categories with low competition. If you spot a niche with high demand but low competition, you should capitalize on it after doing research on it.
Amazon Restrictions
There are gated and ungated categories in Amazon's marketplace. Ungated categories are accessible to everybody, but gated categories require clearance.
The time it takes to get clearance for a gated category will lengthen the time it takes to start selling. Furthermore, some categories have significant brand restrictions. Some would actually require you to have a physical store before being allowed to sell on Amazon.
Rank in Amazon Best Seller
The Amazon Best Sellers rating compares a product's sales to those of similar products in the same category. When conducting Amazon product research, you should concentrate on things with a high BSR because these are the traits and attributes that buyers appreciate the most.
Check the Product Details in the description for the actual BSR of a product. The first number, which represents the product's rating in the major category, receives the most attention.
Choosing products that are already well-liked by clients is a terrific approach to get a head start. As a novice, avoid chasing products with a BSR of less than 1000 because they will either have low sales volume potential or occupied by highly experienced sellers who will not give an inch of market shares.
Search Volume
Measuring the volume of searches for your product on Amazon or Google is one of the most effective research methods for determining buyer interest.
To begin, compile a list of search results with high-volume keywords connected to your product. You can sketch them out yourself or look at how your biggest competitors promote themselves online.
Finding a product with a monthly high search volume and focused keyword search rates is a good bet for you to invest and go for.
Mistakes to Avoid When You Research Products to Sell
Mistakes are often understandable, especially for beginners. But certain mistakes can make you lose potential customers, incur unnecessary costs, or even lead to the failure of your entire business. As such, here are crucial mistakes you must avoid.
Entering Heavily Competitive/Saturated Market
Check how many merchants on Amazon sell similar things when you have an idea of what you want to sell. Avoid niches that are already overcrowded with competing offers.
It will be difficult to distinguish yourself from the competition, and your new listings may end up drowning on the last pages of search results due to a lack of evaluations.
By entering a highly-competitive environment as a beginner, you surrender yourself to the torrential movement of the market and risk losing everything without gaining anything.
Disregarding Pricing and Margins
Finances can be a huge headache to keep track of. But if you want to succeed in Amazon, you have to keep track not only of trending products, but also the amount of money coming in and out.
You will lose money if you do not maintain track of the ratio between your margins and Amazon's fees. The same is true if you decide to establish a cheaper price to differentiate yourself from your competition.
You're not doing yourself any favors and are only digging yourself into a deeper hole by utilizing strategies without prior research.
Selling Easily Substituted Products
There are products that seem really easy to sell because they are easy to get or seem like items that people would need for daily use. Don't fall for this trap. Do your research before even considering to sell products with multiple alternatives or substitutes.
These are items that a consumer can easily swap out for something similar from another vendor. The products you sell on Amazon should stand out. Otherwise, you risk losing all your market share to substitutes.
Offering Overly-Complicated Products
When you come up with a product idea, it would be a good idea to consider how you'd ship it to your customers. As mentioned earlier, Amazon FBA has their own standards when it comes to packaging and shipping.
New sellers often make the mistake of coming up with a unique product that is difficult to ship or requires complicated packaging. FBA will generally take a lot longer to package and ship complicated products, which will result in greater loss of estimated sales for you.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are numerous factors to consider when researching Amazon products. The recommendations and tips in this post will point you in the right direction in getting started with your Amazon FBA product research.
If you are still apprehensive about doing Amazon FBA product research on your own, there's no harm in getting an experienced Amazon management partner to help you.
As an extra tip, never neglect to optimize your listings. Optimization is your lifeline and will help tremendously in the success of your ecommerce business.
To stay at the top, you must make sure that your listings contain all of the necessary information. If you are lacking in this regard, customers are unlikely to buy from you.
