Crunch The Numbers All The Numbers
Your product needs to be profitable. It doesnt matter if you beat out the competition and win all the sales if youre not making enough to cover your expenses.
Crunch the numbers to see if it works. Factor in your manufacturing expenses, storage fees, packaging costs, and shipping fees. Add it all up.
Even if you find a golden opportunity on Amazon, you might not be able to make the numbers work. It happens. to lower your overheadit may be the missing link you needed to make the math fit.
Dont beat yourself up. Move on to the next product idea.
Selling On Amazon Vs Ebay
Amazon and eBay offer very different experiences for both buyers and sellers.
While many new sellers naturally wonder if its better to sell on Amazon or eBay, our experience is that this decision largely depends on the item you are selling.
For this reason, we sell on both Amazon and Ebay.
Here is a post that goes into detail on , including how we decide where were going to list any given product.
What To Sell On Amazon Fba
Regarding what to sell on , its crucial to remember that its a price-driven marketplace. This means that people visit the website to find the best deal. Thus, your products must be attractive to your target audience and often in a particular price range.
When it comes to , the criteria for the products you choose to sell remain the same as when you sell on Amazon and manage and ship orders yourself.
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How To Choose The Right Products To Sell On Amazon
Of course, before you can properly understand how to find products to sell on Amazon, it’s helpful to first choose a specific type of product that you’d like to sell.
So, if you’re trying to decide what to sell on Amazon, you’ll want to keep the following things in mind:
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Cost: How much does the product typically cost? You’ll want to look for something that isn’t too expensive to purchase, but not so cheap that it will be difficult to make a profit.
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Shipping: Are these products easy to ship? Shipping costs will play a large role in your business, so the easier an item is to ship, the better.
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Competition: Just like with cost, you’ll want to find the right balance when it comes to competition. You won’t want to get involved with a product or category that has too much competition, however, you also don’t want to start selling a product that no one is interested in.
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Customers: Who is the ideal customer for the product you’re looking to sell? Can you enter into a niche market with highly engaged customers? Can you fill a missing need in a specific market? Thinking about these possibilities will help you find the right products to sell.
All of this being said, there are a number of research methods you can employ to decide what type of products you want to sell on Amazonincluding using tools from Amazon themselves. Here are three strategies you can use:
How To Sell On Amazon For Beginners In 2021
Amazon is a popular platform for both sellers and shoppers. To cope with the rising demands of the sellers, it has rolled out its FBA service. This service allows sellers to leverage the platforms powerful distribution network and customer base to make their business dream come true. For retailers, its the most popular choice of platform.
FBA stands for Fulfillment by Amazon which means Amazon will store your products in the Amazon inventory, fulfill your orders, and offer customer service. If you want to use the Amazon FBA service, you have to create an Amazon seller account and add FBA to your account. Its important that you set your business up in compliance with the guidelines on the website.
Create your product listings and inventory or integrate your inventory data into the Amazon platform. Prepare the products to be delivered, and send your products into Amazon warehouse. When the customer places orders, Amazon FBA will fulfill the orders and send all necessary shipping and tracking info to the customers. 24/7 customer service is available for both sellers and customers.
As a seller, you will be free from the processes attached to inventory, packing and shipping orders. This system means its quite easy for you to get started. Amazons robust FBA model supports and allows you to scale your business globally too. Besides, if you are an Amazon FBA seller, you are qualified for free shipping on orders over $25 and $49.
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Choose A Business Model For Selling On Amazon
On Amazon, there are six popular business models that sellers use to connect with customers and get a sale on the platform. The following are the business models most prevalent on Amazon:
- Handmade: 6%
- Wholesale: 26%
- Private Label: 67%
Its important to know the type of business model to utilize on Amazon, so you can ensure that it fits and maximizes your marketing plan, the types of items youre going to sell, earning goals, and more. The section below explains each business model in more detail.
What To Sell On Amazon
Undoubtedly, you can obtain an impressive profit from selling products on Amazon — but it’s critical you’re able to offer unique, budget-friendly products with minimal competition to truly succeed on the site.
Over-saturation on the platform proves it’s more difficult than ever to stand out, so it’s not smart to sell on Amazon for the sake of selling on Amazon. Instead, you want to ensure you’re truly able to offer something of value.
If you have a product in mind, follow the tips above to refine your strategy and find a niche segment within a larger demographic. If you don’t have a product in mind, start with the basics — what are the most-searched keywords on Amazon, and which products are most successful?
Once you have a list based on keyword research, consider similar products the user might find more compelling or useful than the ones currently listed on Amazon.
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Developing Your Amazon Best Seller
Just because these categories are the best sellers on Amazon does not mean that your product has to be in one of these categories. In fact, having a product in one of these categories could be a terrible idea! These are the best sellers, so youre guaranteed to have a ton of competition.
Amazon has a whopping 41 different categories at the time of writing. Almost every one of these is ripe for a creative entrepreneur.
However some product ideas are simply going to have more competition than others.
But how can you know which one is best for you?
S To Getting Your First Sale
Here are the 5 steps to take to get your first sale on Amazon:
Sound easy? Thats because it is!
There is no excuse for not getting this done in the next week. By dedicating just a few hours, you could have your first product listed for sale and be in line to earn your first profit on Amazon.
Remember, EVERYONE starts with 0 sales and the first step is Sale #1.
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Pay Attention To Amazon Customer Reviews
Reviews are everything on Amazon. Even the most affordable products wont survive if theyre not consistently bringing in positive reviews.
Look at the feedback before you invest in an item. Customers who love products will likely make more repeat purchases and fewer returnsand those are the kind of customers you want.
Youll also want to pay attention to the review volume. Ideally, you want to find products with thousands of reviewsthats how youll know its a safe bet.
However, some other excellent options might not have as many reviews yet. They may only have 50 or so reviews. Read the feedback and see if theyre fake reviews or genuine. If theyre real, the product still might have great potential.
Use A Chrome Extension To Research Products In A Niche Market
There are two popular chrome extensions to help you conduct keyword research on Amazon — , which shows you monthly sales volumes on products, displays products with low competition, and allows you to save products to track them over time. Undoubtedly, Jungle Scout’s analytics can help you quickly and efficiently narrow down on a product or an industry in which you could excel. However, Jungle Scout is relatively pricey, particularly if you’re just starting out.
Unicorn Smasher is Jungle Scout’s free alternative — while the data isn’t as accurate as Jungle Scout, and it lacks some of Jungle Scout’s sophisticated features, it’s nonetheless a helpful free option to gather estimated monthly sales and estimated monthly sales revenue for Amazon products.
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To Make Money On Amazon Or Any Business You Need Certain Things
Before you even start to have visions of handfuls of cash coming your way, you need a few things checked off the checklist in order to make money on Amazon or with any business:
- A sufficient gross margin
- Determine your overall startup costs
- Figure out your break even point
- Forecast your revenue
- Implement performance-based marketing based on revenue projections
- You have to move inventory-if you dont move the inventory youll lose money due to product costs and storage fees
High Margins Are King
Once you have a product that passes all the requirements above, you can now find suppliers who will provide you the product that you will private label at low costs compared to what you can sell it for .
As mentioned, China is the first thing that people search for when it comes to affordable suppliers. A quick check on Alibaba for the product you want to sell will reveal to you a slew of results to choose from.
Open the pages of products youre interested in purchasing and compare their prices with the ones on sale at Amazon. Ideally, you want to find a product that costs at least 75% less than the retail price on Amazon.
For example, if you see the average retail price on Amazon is $10, you want to pay no more than $2.50 for that item.
First and foremost, its what determines if youre making or losing money. You dont want to do all this work just to break even do you?
You also need a healthy profit margin to cover hidden fees that come with selling on Amazon that youre probably not accounting for when youre working on finding what to sell.
For example, Amazon charges both short term and long term storage fees for keeping items at their warehouse.
These numbers are always changing, but its a variable cost that you will have a hard time estimating at this early stage in the process.
Youre also going to get returns from customers. In some cases you can resell those items as used, but there are still costs involved there and many times its just a loss.
Dont forget:
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Accept Amazon Pay On Your Website
Amazon customers save their shipping and payment information in their Amazon accounts for later use. You can let them check out with this saved information on your own website by accepting . Not only does this spare customers from having to enter information on your website, it also signals that your business is secure and trustworthy.
Customers checking out with Amazon Pay can complete their transaction much more quickly, especially when shopping on mobile. They also appreciate not needing to “give” their information to another business, which can help earn you more customers who might otherwise be hesitant to buy from a brand they’re unfamiliar with.
Shift4Shop makes it simple to add Amazon Pay to your website, alongside any other payment methods you prefer to use. With more alternative payment solutions than any other platform, Shift4Shop lets you tailor your online store to any type of customer, anywhere.
Conduct Keyword Research Specifically For Amazon
There are keywords specifically geared for the Amazon platform, as Amazons search engines work differently than other search engines. To find essential keywords to use, leverage Chrome extensions or online software like AMZScouts Keyword Search Tool and Helium 10s Cerebro. With these tools, you can see how many searches a specific search query gets.
Then, once you have your list of keywords, incorporate these into your product names and descriptions. This will help your products rank higher when prospective customers key in related search queries.
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How To Choose Products To Sell On Amazon
To a large extent, your profitability on Amazon is tied to the product category you choose to sell in and how well you can create a distinct brand. If youre selling simple commodities like kitchen utensils or paper products, its going to be hard for your brand to stand out from the crowd.
You also need to become and how to optimize your listings to rank higher when people search.
Thats why its crucial you understand private-label products.
Private label products are goods or services made by one company to be sold and branded by another company.
With private labels, goods can be created by third-party producers, which allow you to sell them under your brand name with your personalized logo.
As said, I would recommend the private label method. But why will I do that?
The Exact Steps To Finding Overseas Private Label Suppliers
Follow these steps to open an Alibaba account and buy from Alibaba:
First: Go to Alibaba and click on Join Free
Second: Enter your Email address and verify that you own it. Try to not use your main/personal email if you dont want your inbox clogged up with supplier emails.
Third: Fill out your basic information. Password, location, first name, last name, and telephone number. Alibaba asks you for Company name..Do not panic. The name can be whatever you want.
Fourth: Confirm your personal information and complete the opening of your new Alibaba account. Now you can start buying products on Alibaba.
How to open an Alibaba account
Minimum Requirements to Select the Perfect Supplier
- Accepts Trade Assurance, Paypal, or AliPay
- Theyre a Gold Supplier
- Has been assessed and certified checked onsite by Alibaba
You want to keep your money as secure as possible. So checking all these boxes is a way to make sure you protect yourself when looking for a good supplier.
Startupbros must have requirements in a supplier:
Now, lets dive deeper into Alibaba payment methods and which ones would be better over others.
Overview of Alibaba Payment Methods
Suppliers like to compete on price but some might be willing to offer you a better one.
Finding a supplier making the exact product you found on Amazon is crucial. Youll see that sometimes the pictures are even the same ones that are selling on Amazon.
Side Note: Were not doing that when we list our product!
Copy and Personalize This:
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How To Find Suppliers
Next, once youve decided what youre going to sell on Amazon, youre going to need to find suppliersâunless, of course, youve opted to make and manufacture your own products. From sites like Alibaba to AliExpress, there are a variety of ways you can go about finding the right suppliers for your products.
With this in mind, on a basic level, one of the first things you can do is to perform a Google search for suppliers of your product. Once youve found a couple of options, you can contact them for more information.
Alibaba is a popular site to find suppliers when selling on Amazon. Image source: Alibaba
As you go through this process, however, youll want to make sure the supplier is reputable and that theyre offering you a good price. Here are a few product sourcing strategies to keep in mind:
- Get samples: Before you choose a supplier, youll want to ask for samples and actually get a feel for their products. This will not only help you choose a good supplier, but it will also help you start thinking about how youre going to list and advertise your products. Plus, getting physical samples of the product will give you the opportunity to evaluate them and decide if theyre worth selling.
- Read reviews: If possible, its always helpful to read reviews of suppliers and see how other business owners feel about working with them. As you might expect, a supplier with a handful of negative reviews probably isnt going to be someone you want to work with.
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