5 Essential Steps for Finding a Winning Product on Amazon
Every product has a story to tell. Once the brand, your authentic backstory, has been established, you are ready to sell. These are the concepts we explored in Chapter 2 of Amazon Jungle, as well as in my last blog Start With Your Story.
In Chapter 3 of Amazon Jungle, I walk you through my method for identifying winning products and selling them to their full potential. One concept that has stood the test of time is that if you know what you are doing, it doesn’t matter how big Amazon gets, there will always be an opportunity. Let’s explore where to look for this opportunity.
The key to long-term success selling on Amazon is finding a great product to sell. But how?
Not only do you need a great product, but there must be a market for it! Research must be done, and you must learn to recognize consistent, repeatable patterns. As I mentioned in my last blog, an enduring brand is what separates you from your competition and will build your loyal customer base. Let’s take a closer look at my tested method for finding great products and measuring their sales potential on Amazon.
5 Essential Steps For Finding a Winning Product
Step 1: Have Passion
Have a passion for what you’re selling. What moves you? It helps to feel connected to the product, and that what you are selling is special. Turn your passion into a new brand. Once you have found that passion, the next step is to size up the market for new and existing products.
Step 2: What’s Hot?
Figure out what’s hot. In this step we use some analytic tools as well as creative intuition to find a product that people care about, but for which there is an existing market. In other words, make sure there is a need for this product you care so deeply about before trying to sell it. There are steps you can take to measure the potential for the product, you just have to know where to look.
- Search the current brand’s product on Amazon
- Conduct a web-based search, such as Jungle Scout or X-ray from Helium10, to determine the estimated monthly sales quantity of each item on an Amazon search results page.
- Scroll to the Product Detail Page (PDP) on Amazon. This is where a customer learns about the specific product details, such as features, benefits, images, and price.
- Look at product reviews for competing products.
These steps work to determine the sales potential for a product whether you are in the
exploration process, a first-time Seller, or looking to grow your Amazon business.
Step 3: Size Matters!
The size of the market matters! It is crucial that you make sure that the product you want to sell is well-liked and is being purchased by Amazon customers. This just makes smart business sense – figure out the sales potential for your product. This can be done with web-based research software such as Jungle Scout and Helium10. Here is a trick my brothers and I used long before this time-saving software was around. It is called the 999 Cart Trick. Here is how it works:
- Find a competitive product to research
- Add the item to the Amazon cart
- Increase the quantity to 999
If 999 products are not available, a message will appear showing you how many are. By tracking the available quantity each day for seven days, you will be able to determine the number of units that are being sold daily.
Step 4: Finding Flaws
Find flaws, it’s where the opportunity is. This is one of my favorite parts of selling on Amazon. In this step, we are going to look for loser products. What I mean is we are going to look for the opportunity to create a winner. A good place to start is to seek out great selling products with lots of poor reviews. This means 4 stars or fewer. Your mission in this step is to search for top-selling items with potentially fixable issues.
Step 5: Make it Yours!
The final step is what I like to call “Hit the sweet spot” and make the product yours. This happens when you have solved the problems that customers are experiencing with a competitor’s product, then add your own personal style to the product. Remember different is sometimes better than better. These two steps could make a Seller on Amazon among the elite group of Top Sellers on Amazon!
What’s Next?
In Chapter 3 of Amazon Jungle, I present these essential steps along with authentic examples from my own selling experiences with Amazon. My own battle-tested lessons learned will help you take the guesswork out of selling on Amazon. Learning to navigate the platform and utilize the tools available to you may just catapult your product ahead of the competition!
The next chapter, and blog entry, will take a closer look at how to fix that flawed product and build a one-of-a-kind, untouchable brand. To learn more and get a copy of The Amazon Jungle, go to https://avenue7media.com/founders-book/.