Amazon is one of the largest places to buy and sell things online in the world. It’s hard enough to think of a product to sell; it’s even harder to find suppliers. Before you start to sell on Amazon, you need to do a lot of research.
Whether you want to be an affiliate marketer or sell on Amazon, you need to know what the market wants, who your competitors are, and if selling the item you want to sell will make you money.
Today, you’ll learn some important techniques that will help you do this. After this tutorial, you won’t have to feel around in the dark to figure out what products can make you good money.
Is it still profitable to sell on Amazon?
You need to know if you will make money before you start selling. If you want to sell on Amazon, you have to pay fees.
Here is a list of the fees you have to pay Amazon:
Seller Fees
Every time you sell something on Amazon, you have to pay $0.99. At this rate, you can’t sell more than 40 things each month. If you sell more than that, you have to switch to the Professional plan, which has a $39 monthly fee.
The $0.99 seller fee is waived in the professional plan, and you can sell more than 40 items a month. The most basic fee that every seller has to pay is the selling fee.
Referral Fee
The referral fee is different for different types of products. You have to pay Amazon this fee so that the company can pay for its advertising. The fee is paid for each item.
Between 6% and 96% of the price of the item you sold goes to the referral fee. Amazon will charge 96% of the cost of the extended warranty if you sell it.
Closing Costs
If the item you’re selling is a media item, you have to pay a $1.80 Closing Fee per item. Books, DVDs, games, and game consoles are all kinds of media.
Book Rental Fee
If you rent out physical books through Amazon, you have to pay $5 for each rental that goes well.
Shipping, handling, and packaging costs, as well as the money you pay if you use Amazon FBA, are not yet included in these fees.
So, does selling on Amazon still make money?
Yes, that’s the answer. The key is to know what your costs are and then set your prices so that they cover those costs. To find the right product to sell, you have to do a lot of research.
Once you know what your costs are, find a competitor and see how your selling price compares to theirs. Can you lower your prices to make your business more appealing? Or should you come up with more services that add value to your price?
Amazon is a great place for third-party sellers to sell their items. Jeff Bezos once said that third-party sellers like you made up 3% of Amazon’s sales in 1999. Now, 58% of all sales on Amazon come from third-party sellers.
What do you want to sell on Amazon?
You can pretty much sell anything on Amazon, except things that are illegal or against the law. At the end of the day, you have to think about what sells best on the platform and whether or not people want the products.
You should think about these three things:
- Generic brands are better when they cost less.
- Unique products whose price does not matter
- Products that everyone needs and are in high demand
Generic brands are better when they cost less.
There are a lot of things where it doesn’t matter what brand they are. A sponge is an example of a useful thing in the kitchen. When prices go down, they sell more. Exactly the same
applies to rags, tissue paper, and other common items where even the cheapest products can do the job.
Unique products whose price does not matter
People pay a lot for unique items because they can’t find them anywhere else. If you sell print-on-demand shirts and mugs, you are the only one who has these designs, so it is likely that you will be copied.
If this happens, you have to keep coming up with new ideas. The only time this isn’t true is if you have a patent on your designs and products.
Products that everyone needs and are in high demand
People always need things like shoes, shirts, make-up, and a lot more.
There is a market for things that people always want. The problem is that they don’t make much money because if there is a demand, there will be a tough competition.
To sell things like this, you need to be creative. You must find a way to sell a lot of the items. A $5 net profit margin means that you have to sell 1,000 of that product in a month.
If any of these three things are true about the product you want to sell, you should be able to sell it on Amazon.
Then, what are the best things to sell on Amazon?
Here’s what we have:
- Clothes And Accessories: such as shirts, dresses, and jewelry
- Skincare And Cosmetics: are all things that are used to make a person look good.
- Health And Nutrition: these are vitamins that have been approved by the FDA, such as herbal supplements for weight loss that don’t claim to treat anything.
- Home And Garden: Curtains, bedsheets, power tools, and gardening items are in high demand for home and garden.
- Toys And Pets: Anything to do with playing and taking care of pets, as well as pet supplies, is in demand.
These categories are, in a sense, the big ones. If you really want to be successful, you need to find your niche first. For instance, you can’t sell all kinds of clothes and accessories at once or you’ll get lost and confused.
Instead, you should start by selling leggings or jeans. You decide what kind of product it is, but choose no more than one or two. Find a place that sells that particular item, and then sell it on Amazon.
Spend some time learning how the market works and how you can improve your marketing. You should also use this time to learn about other parts of the business, like customer service, shipping times, handling refunds, and so much more.
How to Quickly Find Products That Sell on Amazon
Now, let’s talk about the different ways you can use to find products that sell on Amazon.
Only two kinds of people are successful in business: those who bring something new to their field (like the iPhone) and those who use business statistics to decide what to sell.
These nine approaches are more like the second type. If you know what products are in demand, where to find them, and how to sell them, you are well on your way to being a successful Amazon seller.
Use an Amazon keyword research tool to your advantage.
A keyword tool tells you how many times a certain keyword has been searched for. If you want to sell Baby Yoda on Amazon, the first thing you should find out is if people are looking for it.
You can only find out that number if you use a keyword research tool that scrapes information from Amazon and not the whole internet. KeywordTool.IO is one such site.
It is a free tool for researching keywords that shows what people are interested in, not just on Amazon but also on other platforms.
In the picture below, you can see that we tried to find Baby Yoda. What we can see here is that the term “Baby Yoda” has been looked up 23,800 times. This number is the average number of times that keyword is searched for each month.
We can also see that the trend is going up by 124%. This trend shows how much the number of searches has gone up or down in the last year.
The cost per click (CPC) shows how much you’re likely to pay Google Ads if you want to advertise. The last column, called “Competition,” has a number between 0 and 100. A number of 100 means that a lot of people are selling this product.
Here are some good reasons to use this tool:
- Find out if there are enough people interested in a product you want to sell.
- Find keywords that describe what people in that niche are looking for.
- Figure out the direction of the trend, which can be up or down.
- Check how much it would cost to run an ad for that keyword.
- Find out if you will be in a niche with a lot of competition.
If you know these things, you can decide if selling a product is a good business move or not. If you decide to sell that product even though there is a lot of competition, at least you know what you are up against and can get ready for it.
Check out Google AdWords or Keyword Ads.
If you want people to go to your Amazon page, you need to put ads on Google. But before you do that, you need to know what words or phrases would make Google show you an ad.
You need to use the Google Keyword Planner tool to be able to do this. Even though there are a lot of tools available, Google is the best one to use because the data set comes from Google.
Once you’re signed in to your Google Ads account, go to Tools & Settings > Keyword Planner. See the picture below.
Then, choose Get Search Volume and Predictions. Enter the keyword you want to search for or analyze, and then click on Get Started.
Click on Historical Metrics once the results are in. Here, you can see how often this keyword is searched for on Google on average every month.
If you look closely, you will see that there isn’t much competition. On the right side of this page, you can also see how much the current highest bid is for the low range and the high range. The prices for both of these are shown in your local currency.
These bid ranges show you how much you have to bid for your products to show up on the bottom of Google Ads and how much you have to pay to be at the top.
You don’t have to offer lower prices than these. You need to make an ad campaign and bid for this keyword at a price that is about the same as the average price of both.
Let’s say the highest bid in the low price range is $0.03 and the highest bid in the high price range is $3.1. The sum of both prices is $1.65. In this case, you need to make a campaign and pay $1.65 for your CPC cost.
How will this help you decide what to sell? This method works because it lets you see if your ideas are good.
Here are some reasons why you should use Google Keyword Planner:
- You would know how much advertising could cost.
- You can tell if your keyword is getting enough searches.
- You already know how much competition there is in the Google Universe.
We already knew that people search for “Baby Yoda shirt” more than 23,000 times on Amazon, but only about 10,000 times on Google.
What makes them different?
What you need to know is that when people look up “Baby Yoda” on Google, they aren’t looking for shirts, they are looking for information about the character. This tells you that some people might be interested in a Baby Yoda t-shirt even if they aren’t looking for one.
If you show them your ads, they might click on them and then buy.
On Amazon, the 23,000+ search results come from a direct search on the Amazon website, which Google can’t access. People looking for shirts did more than 23,000 of these searches.
Now, if you do both of these things, you know that Baby Yoda t-shirts are popular on Amazon and that there is a lot of competition. But you also know that Google doesn’t have a lot of competition.
Put your Baby Yoda t-shirt on Amazon and then advertise it on Google. People who look for that keyword on Google are the people you want to sell to outside of Amazon.
Aliexpress or Alibaba.com.
Alibaba and Aliexpress are similar to Amazon in the United States. The main difference is that these two websites, which are both owned by Alibaba, are a hub for Chinese manufacturers and suppliers.
A lot of the world’s products are made in China. This includes well-known brands like Nike and iPhones. If you go to either of these two websites, you can find dropshippers who will ship the items directly to your customers.
You can also buy the items in bulk and have them shipped to your house. When you do, you can start selling on Amazon.
If you decide to sell wholesale, you can also send your products to Amazon. After you get the items, you can put them in a catalog, add barcodes, and send them to the Amazon warehouse.
This is called Amazon FBA, and here is a blog post with more information:
Which Should You Choose: Dropshipping or Amazon FBA?
If you don’t want to put a lot of money into your capital, dropshipping on Amazon is the best thing to do.
In the dropshipping business model, you basically put other people’s products in your Amazon store and let them ship them for you. When an order comes in, you have to go to AliExpress and order it from the supplier. The supplier would then ship the item to your customer.
Both Alibaba and AliExpress have a lot of things for sale. All of them are also really cheap. Be ready to face a lot of competition because of this.
You can do this by making your own brand. You can do this by looking on both sites for white label suppliers. White label means that your brand label will be put on the products by the supplier.
Even though you didn’t make the product yourself, it would look like you did. There is no easy way to do this, but the product pages on AliExpress will tell you if a seller uses white-label.
Use Data from Google Trends
Google Ads is not the same as Google Trends. Google’s ad network is geared toward searches for products, not for general search terms.
In Google Trends, you can see what people have been searching for over the last 10 years and then compare that to other search terms.
Go to Google Trends and type in a keyword to start your analysis. We will use Baby Yoda in this case.
As you can see in the picture below, the number of Google searches for “Baby Yoda” has been going down over the past few months. When you think about it, the movie Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker came out in December 2022.
People learned that Baby Yoda is in the movie from the trailers and reviews. This made people curious, so in the first week of December, the search term got to a score of 100.
In Google Trends, the popularity or performance of each search term is shown as a number between 0 and 100. A score of means that no one wants it. If a search term has a score of 100, that means it is at its best.
With Google Trends, we can broaden our searches to meet our needs. We can also compare different search terms.
Check out the picture below. We showed you where you can change things to broaden or narrow your search.
You can choose specific countries or the whole world, set the time range to the last few hours, months, or even as far back as 2008, limit the results to certain categories, and choose where you want the search to take place.
Check out this example:
From this, we can see that there isn’t much interest in Lion King toys around the world in Google Shopping from 2008 to the present.
We know that more people are interested in Baby Yoda now that the movie has come out. If you play around with this tool, you will find a lot of useful information that will help you decide if people want your product or not.
Find out what Amazon’s best-selling items are.
If you want to sell on Amazon, you shouldn’t miss the chance to find the best-selling items on Amazon.
Go to Google and search for “Amazon best sellers” to find this information. Once the result is in, click on the link below to go to Amazon’s best-seller.
You have to scroll down and look for the category based on what you want to sell. The one on top is for toys, and the one below it is for electronics.
If you click on the Toys category, you’ll see a lot of the best-selling items on Amazon, like the one below.
The biggest problem with this method is that you can’t tell how many of these items are sold. You can only see the products themselves and how much they cost.
To find out more, you can click on one product, check the quality and description of each, as well as the price of the product and the shipping rate.
Once you have the information yourself, you can set a better price for your own goods.
If you are setting up a dropshipping store, you can compare the prices on Amazon to the prices from your supplier. So, you can carefully check to see if your products are good enough to compete.
Use a spreadsheet like MS Excel to write down important information about your competitors while doing this exercise.
Find out what eBay users are interested in.
Amazon and eBay go up against each other very hard. It’s likely that people who buy things on Amazon also look for them on eBay.
eBay is a place where people can buy and sell things. People can put items for sale on eBay’s “watch list” and buy them later.
Go to Watchcount.com to find out if people are watching something like yours. On that site, you will see a box where you can type the keyword of the product you are looking for.
In this case, we will type “Baby Yoda” into the yellow box and then click the “Show Me” button. After this is done, the website would show a result, as shown below.
As you can see, an embroidered Baby Yoda with 126 watchers is the most-watched item. Since 126 people are keeping an eye on the same product, you know that 126 people will definitely want to buy it.
They are watching because this is a product that they can bid on. They are only looking to see if the current bid price is within their budget.
But if you can sell this for less on your Amazon store, you’ll have no trouble finding people who want to buy it.
Use SaleHoo to find best-selling products
SaleHoo is a tool for suppliers that do dropshipping. Before you can use it, you have to sign up as a member.
SaleHoo has a list of suppliers from all over the world because it is a directory. These suppliers have been carefully chosen, and they will ship the items directly to your customer.
SaleHoo has something called the Market Labs because it is one of the biggest supplier directories in the world. The Market Labs is a tool that can help you find the best and most popular things to sell, not just on Amazon but all over the world.
SaleHoo costs $67 per year, or you can pay $127 to become a member for life.
Take a look at the screenshot below to see how this tool lets you find the best-selling items.
Use the sliders at the top of Salehoo to only see products that have a 100% Sell Rate.
This means that people buy that item. You can also narrow your search by price or by type of item.
If you click on a product you like, the tool will tell you how many suppliers make it, where they ship to, and if there is a minimum order.
With the SaleHoo Market Labs tool, you can get real data that shows if the product is going to be hard to sell or not. All you have to do is take some time to look at the different items.
Use Oberlo to find out more.
With Oberlo, you can find dropship suppliers who ship worldwide for free. Aside from that, Oberlo knows what sells because many dropshippers on both Amazon and Shopify use the tool.
Oberlo is free, so all you have to do to use the search tool is sign up for an account. Dropshippers on Shopify should use the paid plans the most. If you are already making money from Amazon sales, you can also get the paid version.
Use the free tool for now. Go to your dashboard once you’ve signed up. Click on Search Products on the left.
We will look at Baby Yoda as an example. Type “Baby Yoda” into the box, and then click “Search.”
From the results, you can see how many reviews a product has, how much it costs, how many page views it has gotten from dropshippers, and how many orders are still being processed.
With this tool, you can find out if there is a market for the product you want to sell or if there are suppliers who can sell it to you for less.
Check out product reviews in the niche you want to be in.
Check reviews of the same products you want to sell. This is the last step we can show you. Once you know there is a market for your products, go to Amazon and look at how the other sellers did.
Let’s try out Baby Yoda for this demo. If we search for that word on Amazon, the results are shown below.
As you can see, the cup on the left has ten reviews and has been sold several times. The problem is that it only has a rating of 3.5 stars.
If we click on that and then look at what customers have said, most of the problems aren’t too hard to fix.
As you can see, one person said the item was broken and another said the print had black marks on it. You can easily use this to your advantage if you can find a supplier who can guarantee high quality.
Summary
To sell on Amazon, you have to be patient and work hard. You have to know that getting traffic on Amazon is easy, just like everyone else. Buyers know, though, that you are not the only one selling that item.
You need to know who your competitors are and what the trends are. You should then change your marketing strategy and how your business does from time to time. To be successful in sales, you need to be at the top of your game and run your own business.
Start using the ideas we’ve talked about here to find the things that sell. Choose one or a few tools, and then start working your way up to a successful online business on Amazon.
