As more people have begun seeking online based jobs, opposed to traditional office jobs, selling on Amazon has become increasingly popular. With simply a computer and internet connection, selling products on Amazon is relatively simple and potentially lucrative. I began selling in 2016 and quickly saw tens of thousands of dollars in sales. Since 2016 I have seen some of my friends start their own fulfillment by Amazon selling journeys and have begun selling thousands of dollars per month. So, I can attest that Amazon selling is a viable way to earn significant income if the correct products are chosen to sell. Product selection is one of the most important aspects of the entire selling process, choose an over saturated or low margin product and you’ll lose money, choose a product with rising demand, little competition and healthy margins, and your profits will soar.
In this article I’m going to share the four tools that I believe were critical to my success with Amazon selling. Three of these tools do have monthly costs associated with them, but the functionally and insights they deliver is well worth the money. Plus the monthly costs are a business expense and are tax deductible! Note, this content is tailored for an Amazon seller that wants to private label FBA products.
As mentioned previously, correct product selection will make or break your success. Since finding unsaturated, low competition, and high demand products is the best way to success, I use Ahrefs to start my product research. While many people use Ahrefs as their go to website SEO tool, I use it to find product niches and new products. Under the “Keyword Explorer” feature, you can choose to search different platforms, one of which being Amazon. By simply entering in a seed keyword such as “rustic”, Ahrefs will show you all keyword phrases that people search on Amazon that include the word rustic.
Once the list populates you can quickly filter the results by search traffic, CPC, among other filters. I look for keywords that have low search volume (around 2,000 or less) as this usually correlates to lower competition. After finding a potentially interesting product, I will search this exact phrase in Amazon see what my search query returns.
When the Amazon search query populates, I am looking at the pricing and the number of reviews. Personally, I look for products in the $25-$50 price range as this typically ensures a decent margin while looking for products with less than 50 or so reviews. If you try to compete against other products with hundreds of reviews it will be hard to get on the first page and get sales.
If the top five or six product results meet the criteria above, I will use the next tool to quickly determine the sales and revenue numbers of these products.
Jungle Scout offers an online web app that helps find profitable products, but their main tool that I use is the Chrome Extension. You can read more about the Jungle Scout tools here. For this article let’s just focus on using the Chrome Extension. Once you have purchased the Chrome Extension and have it installed, assuming you did your Amazon search with Google Chrome, you will be able to sales numbers the Amazon results in seconds.
When on the Amazon search results page click the JS logo in the top right hand corner of the browser and let the window populate with information. Now at a glance you can see the units sold per day, the monthly revenue, the number of reviews, the selling price plus much more of each product on the current Amazon page. Very quickly you can determine if there is demand from buyers for this product niche and determine how much money your future competitors are earning. If there is no demand then I would not consider selling in this product niche. If sellers are earning less than $3000 per month in revenue I would not consider selling either. You will need to create your own baseline criteria based on your particular needs.
Helium 10 and Jungle Scout have some in common, but the suite of Helium 10 tools takes it to another level. Helium 10 has a lot of functionality, so it can be overwhelming to use. I typically use “Cerebro”, “Frankenstein” and “Scribbles” as my main tools. These tools help you find and create keywords that your Amazon listing should be targeting, while helping find variations of keywords that you may not have thought of. I’ve found my product sales to increase by optimizing my listing keywords.
Provided for free by Amazon, this fulfillment by Amazon calculator can help sellers determine profit margins and costs before ordering a specific product. By entering in the ASIN of a similar product, the calculator will determine the Amazon fees and fulfillment costs. You can then enter in your costs and price point to see what your margin would look like if you were to sell a similar product. This calculator is very handy and should be your final step to ensure profitability. Before ordering any product make sure to run the numbers through this calculator!
By using the four aforementioned tools, you are well on your way to having a profitable fulfillment by Amazon business that can create financial freedom, job flexibly and much more. I’m a firm believer in doing research before spending money, so take the time to thoroughly explore any product and product niche before ordering thousands of dollars worth of inventory. Make calculated decisions and you will soon be on your way to success.
I’d love to hear about your success story, feel free to email me [email protected]
