Amazon Product Research Tool
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Imagine this:
You stumble upon a product idea you think will kill it on Amazon. So, you sell it. You make a thousand sales, then two thousand, then three thousand. You’re selling so much you can hardly keep up—a good problem to have.
Next thing you know, you’re an overnight Amazon success.
That’s the dream, right?
Well, we hate to break it to you, but your chances of “stumbling” upon a winning product are pretty slim.
Amazon success requires calculated research, and one of the most important is product research.
What is Amazon Product Research?
Amazon product research is the bread and butter to getting started on Amazon. It’s the process of finding where the opportunity is on Amazon.
You can’t just pick a random product idea (or stumble upon it) and assume you’ll be able to successfully sell it.
Amazon is oozing with products. Many products are completely saturated with dozens of sellers trying to sell the same thing, the same way. While other products might not have enough demand to justify an investment.
It’s a jungle out there.
So how do you find the “sweet spot?”
Here is the short answer: you need to find a profitable product that isn’t saturated, has enough demand, and has competition deficiencies.
What to Look for in an Amazon Product
A product you’re sure isn’t saturated.
A product with enough demand to support your sales goals.
A product where the competition has deficiencies that you can capitalize on.
And that’s it. There’s your recipe for product research success. Check off all these aspects of the Amazon product FBA research process, and you’re good to go.
But doing it on your own…well, that’s where it gets complicated.
You Don’t Have to Do It Alone
That’s where we come in.
Helium 10 is your shortcut to product research. We work to help you find your next product to sell on Amazon—whether it’s your first or your hundredth product.
With over two billion Amazon products in our database, you’ll be able to quickly search through the largest Amazon product database outside of Amazon itself!
Yes, second only to Amazon.
It’s why more than 600,000 Amazon sellers trust Helium 10’s tested-and-tried product research tools.
But, wait, wait, wait.
Before we jump into product research, you should know this: selling on Amazon is not luck or magic. Selling on Amazon is a business.
And just like any business, with the right product and product research strategies, you can do what so many other sellers before you have done—successfully sell on Amazon.
Here are some of our favorite Amazon seller success stories:
A military veteran who, after retiring, thought he would need to work as a Walmart greeter.
Listen NowSo how do so many sellers successfully sell on Amazon?
They have a solid product research strategy (more on that later), and most sell on Amazon using FBA, or Fulfilled by Amazon.
FBA is the preferred Amazon business model that has been adopted worldwide by many successful entrepreneurs of every background.
Why?
Aside from the fact that it’s resulted in an estimated quarter-million people who sell $100,000 a year in e-commerce, it’s also the easiest way to sell on Amazon.
Through Amazon FBA, Amazon sellers send products to Amazon fulfillment centers. When customers buy the product from Amazon.com, Amazon takes care of everything from storage to picking, packing, shipping, and delivering the product to the customer’s door.
In some cases, Amazon sellers don’t even have to touch the product if they send their goods directly from their manufacturer to Amazon FBA!
So, we’ll be focusing on Amazon FBA product research, (although our strategies can be used outside FBA, too).
How Amazon FBA Works
Searching for Amazon Opportunity
First, it’s essential to understand what isn’t an opportunity on Amazon, basically what you need to stay away from (because they’ll waste your precious time and money).
We mentioned above to look out for saturated markets, or markets with too much competition. And we’re not just talking about the number of products for sale, but also about how they perform.
Imagine searching for a main Amazon keyword, and the results are full of dozens of similar products that are selling tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly and/or have thousands of reviews.
This is typically indicative of a bad opportunity—something to avoid.
How to Spot a Saturated Market
Avoid product with these characteristics:
Similar products all selling tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly.
Similar products that all have thousands of reviews.
But why should you avoid saturated markets?
Because the sales velocity you would have to achieve from the start to compete with those products would be very difficult to reach.
Also, think about it from your potential customer’s perspective.
If your brand new product is very similar to the existing products already for sale, but those established products had thousands of reviews versus your measly two or three reviews.
Which product do you think the customer would choose?
How Do I See Competitors’ Sales?
Ok. So, you know how to find out how many reviews a product has—you can see that publicly on Amazon—but how do you find out how many sales a product is making? How can you make that measurement?
This is where the free Helium 10 Chrome Extension Xray tool comes in.
Helium 10’s Amazon seller tool, Xray, runs through any search results page on Amazon and gives you products’ estimated monthly sales numbers.
Here’s how it works:
Take a look below at the Xray search volume results from a search for “collagen peptides.”
Look at the column for estimated revenue.
Many of these collagen peptides products are selling hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, and some even millions. Can you imagine what it would take for a new product to be able to scale up in order to compete with numbers like that?
Notice anything else we’ve mentioned?
Look at the column for review count. Most of these products have thousands of reviews.
This is an example of a product niche that is NOT indicative of opportunity.
In the early days of selling on Amazon, sellers didn’t have a way to look for opportunity beyond manually searching on Amazon to try to estimate sales and demand.
Those days are gone!
So, in this jungle of tough competition and hundreds of reviews, what’s the shortcut to finding opportunity? How do you start your Amazon FBA Product Research?
Helium 10’s Amazon product research tool, Black Box, is your answer to finding product opportunities.
How to Start Your Product Research and Find Your Product Opportunity
Here’s how to use Black Box, Helium 10’s Amazon product research tool.
First you start by entering the parameters of your search, like we’ve done here. We’ve entered parameters that can indicate both customer demand with low current competition.
In this specific example above, we’re looking for a product in the Patio Lawn & Garden category that has an estimated monthly revenue between 7.5k and 15k dollars.
We specified the retail (unit) price to be between 20 and 35 dollars. We also set a maximum review count of 50, meaning we only want to see listings that have 50 or less total customer reviews.
Most of the products in this category do not have many reviews either, which is why a product with a low number of reviews can still make a lot of sales.
Perhaps the product that comes up meets customers’ needs in a way other products can’t, so that despite other products having more reviews, this product is excelling due to its unique functionality.
It takes Black Box only seconds to show the products that meet your opportunity criteria to find a profitable product.
Notice one of the first search results that came up in our Amazon product research with Black Box.
It’s a hanging planter pot with coco fiber liners.
So, why did this result come up? It meets all of the criteria specified.
This product is priced between 20 and 35 dollars, is in the Patio Lawn & Garden category, is selling an estimated $7,500 dollars a month, and has 50 reviews or less.
We Found a Potential Winner, So What’s Next?
Next, let’s find out what keyword is driving sales to this product.
Using Helium 10’s Keyword Research tools, we discover that one of the main keywords with a high-search volume that drives sales to this product is “hanging baskets for plants.”
Now we’re going to run Helium 10’s Chrome Extension’s Xray tool on the search results of this page. It shows some potential differences between this and the previous collagen peptides example.
The top products are all selling an average of about $13,000 per month instead of $1 million. Which sales volume do you think is easier to compete with?
And, unlike in the collagen peptides example where multiple items had well over 1,000 reviews, none of the results here have 1,000. In fact, many of the listings have well under 100 reviews!
Ding, ding, ding! We may have found our winner!
If you’re curious about what items are trending off of Amazon, consider Helium 10’s Trendster keyword tool. Using the example above, you could use Trendster to compare the popularity of this hanging planter with the popularity of “hanging baskets for plants” off of Amazon; Trendster analyzes this data by reviewing Google trends.
Ready to jump on this product opportunity?
What if you want to move forward with this product opportunity?
You’ve completed the validation process above, narrowed down a product, and now you’re ready to jump in.
The next step in your Amazon FBA product research is to see if there’s a potential financial profit in the product.
There’s more than one profitability metric you need to check for. So how do you do that? Helium 10’s Profitability Calculator.
After receiving a price quote from a supplier/manufacturer, enter that information into the Profitability Calculator. Helium 10’s profit calculator tool gives you an estimate on how much potential profit you could make after factoring in expenses like material/manufacturing costs, freight costs, any marketing investment, Amazon fees, and others.
Helium 10’s Profitability Calculator shows you:
Potential Net Profit
Gross Profit Margin
ROI
And More.
For more details, including a real-life example of putting these methods in action, watch our Project X case study [link], where we conducted our own product research and documented the entire journey all the way to launching and selling on Amazon.
You’ve Already Taken the First Step
You’re on your way to becoming an Amazon seller and entrepreneur. The first step is done!
You’ve learned the basics for starting your product research and discovering your product opportunity.
But hold your horses, you’re not ready to launch just yet. You’re going to need a no-fuss Amazon keyword tool to get to work.
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Amazon Product Research FAQs
What is Amazon product research?
What is the best product research and finder tool for Amazon?
How do you research a product to sell on Amazon?
Why is product research important?
Instead, on Amazon, you need to validate that there is existing or emerging demand for the product. You also need to research the competition to make sure that you can obtain market share while staying profitable.
What information can be obtained from product research?
How does good product research help sellers make better strategic decisions?
Why is trend analysis important when selling online?
What is product validation and why is it important?
What key factors should be considered when calculating profitability?
How does Trendster help you identify the best times to sell a product?
How does Black Box work?
What are the advantages of calculating profitability beforehand?
How can the Profitability Calculator help sellers know how to identify unnecessary costs?
What are the benefits of bundled products?
How to calculate Amazon profit?
What is FBA revenue calculator?
What things are not included in the Amazon FBA calculator?
How do you find good products to sell on Amazon?