Find HighQuality Products on Amazon Overview Are You Approved? Browser Extensions to Help with Research Methods to the Madness Research Using the Manual Method Searching for products manually Sales estimator Find a particular page in search results Filtering products Decision time Research Using Amazon Power Tools Searching for Products with the JS Web App Accessing the Brand Owner and Buy Box Seller Info Analyzing the Brand Owner with JS Use the JS extension to find more Brand Owner products Find similar products from other Brands Spy on Your Competitors Key Point Other Sourcing Methods
Overview The best way to find highquality products is to observe what is already selling well on Amazon. You don’t want to be a pioneer when selling on Amazon, at least not when wholesale sourcing. Buyers are much more likely to purchase a product with existing Reviews and Star Ratings because it gives them confidence that the product has already been tested and approved by other Buyers. © Liberty Transfer, LLC Find HighQuality Products 1
In a perfect world you would find products with these attributes: ● tons of monthly sales ● not sold by Amazon ● no other Amazon Prime sellers ● friendly suppliers, excited to work with you ● always in stock at great margins In the real world this rarely happens, but with a little detective work we should be able to come close enough to make it well worth our time. However, there is one attribute you should not compromise with; don’t try to compete with Amazon for the Buy Box, walk away from any product being sold by Amazon.
Are You Approved? There are many categories in Amazon’s catalog that require preapproval (aka ‘gated’ categories). The very first thing to consider is whether or not you’re approved to sell in a particular category. Don’t waste time researching products that you can’t sell. Visit this link for the latest information: Categories and Products Requiring Approval Not sure which categories you’re approved for? Go to your Seller Central home page, hover over the INVENTORY tab (top left) and select Add a Product. In the top left corner should be a small link named ‘Selling application status’, click it and you should see a list of the categories where you’re approved to sell. There are services that can help you get approved in gated categories. Do a Google search for ‘amazon ungating service’. You should see plenty of options.
Browser Extensions to Help with Research I have found the Chrome browser to be the best for researching products on Amazon. If you don’t already have it maybe now would be a good time to get it. Consider installing these extension in your browser to be more efficient with your time: © Liberty Transfer, LLC Find HighQuality Products 2
● add the DS Amazon Quick View extension to your Chrome browser . When searching or browsing for products on Amazon this extension will show the Best Seller Rank (BSR) under the product image and if you hover the cursor over the image you’ll see a popup with more product information. This extension allows you to see the BSR without clicking through to the detail page. ● install the FBA Calculator Widget on your Chrome browser. This takes you straight from an Amazon product listing to the Revenue Calculator, showing all fees associated with that particular product, and revealing the profit potential. With the BSR, an estimate of the monthly sales volume (shown below) and a few other pieces of information, you can make an educated guess as to whether to move forward with a particular product.
Methods to the Madness There are several methods used for finding great wholesale products to source. We’ll concentrate on a few that I think work the best. Here are the models we’ll be looking at: ● Research using the manual method ● Research using Amazon power tools ● Spy on your competitors The manual method uses free tools but takes longer to get results and the power tools method makes use of paid tools providing quicker results. Remember, we’re only looking for products right now. We’ll learn how to find the suppliers in the next Section of the course. You can picture this process as a gigantic funnel where we dump hundreds of thousands of Amazon products, and through a process of elimination we will squeeze out a relative few products where we attempt to find the wholesale suppliers, analyze their pricing and place an order if the numbers look good. Let’s go hunting!
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Research Using the Manual Method If you’re on a limited budget, or just cheap like me, you can use the manual method for sourcing products. It’s a great way to start! Running an FBA wholesale business on a limited budget is very doable. If you have less than about $1000 then you might want to start here. We’ll show you how to find profitable wholesale products without spending lots of money on the research software and services used by most experienced wholesale merchants. Your research will take longer but you’ll build confidence with your knowledge obtained by using more manual methods. At this stage you should be preserving as much money as possible to purchase inventory later on. All we’ll need for this method is the Amazon.com website, the browser extensions, a free sales estimator tool and a few hours to invest. Let’s get to it!
Searching for products manually Surf on over to the Amazon.com home page and click on the gray tab on the left side of the search bar (see screenshot below). Scroll down to pick a category in which you are approved to sell . Since the Home and Kitchen category does not require approval let’s select it for our example as we scroll down the list of categories. Next, type the open and closed brackets, [ ], into the search bar and hit Enter. Here’s what it should look like:
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What’s returned in the browser is called the Results Page. Using [ ] in the search box will return ALL the products available in that category. The reason for this goofy search is simply to create a huge list of products to throw into our funnel. As you can see, there are more than 60 million products in Home & Kitchen. This will list the first 400 pages of what Amazon believes to be the most relevant products in the Home & Kitchen category. Our first filter will be for Reviews and Sales Price. So, go down the left side of the results page and set the Avg. Customer Review filter to 4 stars & up, then set the Price filter from $15$50 and hit Go. These 2 settings put us in the “sweet spot” for products suitable for wholesale sourcing. The results now show over 300,000 products instead of 60 million. Don’t worry, we aren’t going to look at all of them. On the results page, notice the Amazon Best Sellers Rank or BSR for each product listing being reported by our extension which we installed earlier. See the red circle and borders in the screenshot below. And notice that our Avg. Customer Review and Price filters are working just fine. Note: You’re only interested in the BSR for the toplevel category, so don’t pay any attention to the BSR numbers below the toplevel number. As a general rule, these products will be ordered from best to worst as far as sales velocity or BSR. We will be looking for BSR’s that sell well with minimal competition, so the first pages will probably be too competitive. The further we go into the catalog, the higher the BSR’s will be.
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Let’s start funneling down.
Sales estimator Let’s say we want to find products that sell 1020 units per day, or 300600 per month. The good folks at Jungle Scout have created the free Jungle Scout Estimator tool which will give us this info (we’ll be using the paid Jungle Scout extension and web app later in the course). © Liberty Transfer, LLC Find HighQuality Products 6
Note: Each Amazon category has it’s own set of BSR numbers, so a BSR in Home & Kitchen is completely different from a BSR in Sports & Outdoors. Also, BSR’s change constantly, so the numbers shown below may have to be adjusted when you’re running this exercise for yourself. Now, open the sales estimator tool , click on the Home & Kitchen category and enter a BSR of 5000. I see that BSR 5000 has about 600 sales per month, or 20 per day. So we’re pretty close to having a target BSR for this category (1020 units per day). Notice the higher the BSR, the lower the sales volume. I play around with the BSR and find that BSR 15000 estimates 300 sales per month. Now we know to be on the lookout for products with BSR between 5000 and 15000 within the 400 pages of results. Now we just need to find products with BSR between 500015000. This is our target BSR range.
Find a particular page in search results In order to find products within our BSR range we need to be able to jump around to different pages in the search results. Amazon doesn’t provide a way to jump around so we have to be creative. Go to the bottom of this first page and click on page 2. The results page now has a URL address at the top of the page and you should see two page designators inside this URL. The first one looks like this: sr_pg_2 and the second one looks like this: page=2 . Here’s an example: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref= sr_pg_2 ?rh=n%3A1055398%2Ck%3A%5B+%5D%2Cp_ 72%3A1248915011%2Cp_36%3A15005000& page=2 &keywords=...blah.blah.blah If you change each ‘ 2 ’ to ‘ 200 ’ you should be taken to page 200 of the search results. Use this method to move around in the catalog and find products within your target BSR range.
Filtering products After you locate a potential product you need to apply some more filters to weed out poor prospects and focus on the good ones. These criteria aren’t etched in © Liberty Transfer, LLC Find HighQuality Products 7
stone (except for #1) but you will greatly improve your chances by following these guidelines. So, our target products: 1. should not be sold by Amazon (they don’t like to share their customers) 2. should not be a nationwide brand name (getting an account is unlikely) 3. should not be ‘made by’ and ‘sold by’ the same company (private labeled) 4. should have no more than 5 Prime sellers (see example below) 5. should weigh 2 lbs or less (look at ‘Product Details’ for weight info) 6. should have package dimensions of 18” x 14” x 8” or less (lower fees) 7. should have a solid CCC sales rank history (see example below) If any product flunks one of the first 3 guidelines, just stop and go on to the next product. Otherwise, don’t be too rigid with the guidelines. If you find a quality product, go with it. To find the number of Prime sellers for a product, find the link to the other sellers on the product listing (usually on the right side of the product page). Here’s a screenshot to show what I mean:
In this example, click the ‘ 14 new ’ link to see all the other sellers of this product. Then check the ‘ ✔ Prime ’ button under ‘Shipping’ on the left side of the new page. This will list only Prime sellers sorted by sales price. Make sure Amazon is not
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one of them! This list shows only Prime sellers, and represents your competition for this product. The fewer the Prime sellers, the less the competition. If the product makes it to #7 then go to CamelCamelCamel.com , input the product ASIN or URL and hit enter, on the CCC page, notice the ‘Price History’ tab, it will show if Amazon has ever been a seller of this product. Note: if Amazon has a sales history in CCC but doesn’t show in the Prime seller list, they may just be out of stock for this product, so be careful. Then click on the ‘Sales Rank’ tab to analyze the BSR history (see below). Here is an example of excellent sales rank history:
The upper left and upper right of the chart shows excellent BSR during the Christmas sales season. The middle dip could indicate an ‘out of stock’ period. Your products don’t have to look like this graph, but you do want to see some consistent sales rank history within your target BSR range. Less consistent © Liberty Transfer, LLC Find HighQuality Products 9
sales rank equals more risk. This chart will also show seasonal products whose BSR will resemble a camel’s back, hence the name, camelcamelcamel.
Decision time If all the above guidelines have been met then you should try to contact the supplier of this product and obtain a wholesale account. You just found a potential product! Congratulations! What now? You can either stop and go to Section 3 and learn how to find the supplier of this product and request an account, or what I like to do is put this product into my Amazon Wish List and keep looking for other products. Then go back later to the Wish List and search for suppliers. The Wish List can be found by clicking on the ‘Your Lists’ tab at the top right of the product page. Feel free to play around with the targeted monthly sales and BSR in the Jungle Scout Estimator tool. And change the Price filter if you want to look at lower or higher priced items in the search results. I would stick with the 4 stars and above in the Avg. Customer Review filter to help reduce the number of returns. Returns are pooey. The example I’ve used above is just a suggested starting point and you may prefer to look for products with different criteria. In other Lectures we’ll be using some paid Jungle Scout tools to speed up this whole process and help us be more productive.
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Research Using Amazon Power Tools In the following Lectures we’re going to kick it up a notch and use some paid Power Tools to make ourselves more efficient and productive. Remember, we’re still only looking for products to sell, not the actual suppliers. That comes in the next Section. There are several Amazonspecific tools which can speed up your research. My personal favorite is Jungle Scout. Jungle Scout has both a web app for filtering products by specific criteria, and a browser extension to show estimated sales numbers and other metrics. Notice I said estimated . Amazon does not give out their actual sales numbers so the geeks at Jungle Scout have created their own algorithms to estimate sales based on the BSR. Every time I’ve checked my actual sales numbers against the Jungle Scout estimates they’ve been pretty close. So I’ve come to trust their tools. I will provide links to these tools in the Resources section of the course. Our goal in the following Lectures will be the same as in the Manual research method. The only difference is the speed at which we’ll find the products.
Searching for Products with the JS Web App I’ll start by opening the JS (Jungle Scout) web app and select some filters before running a search of the Amazon catalog. Here’s what it looks like:
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There are 3 main sections to the tool: 1. Category selection on the left 2. MinMax product attributes in the middle 3. Product size, Seller filters and Keywords on the right In the Manual research method we searched in the Home & Kitchen category looking for products with these main attributes: ● not sold by Amazon ● 4 Star Reviews and above ● $1550 sale price ● BSR between 500015000 ● monthly sales between 300600 ● no more than 5 Prime sellers ● lightweight and small packaging As you can see from the JS dashboard this is pretty easy. Let’s plug in the same criteria now. Start by clicking the red arrow button to clear the filters. Now make these selections: ● select the Home & Kitchen category ● input the MinMax Price, $1550 ● skip Net for now ● skip Rank since we already know the MinMax estimated sales target ● input Est. Sales (monthly), 300600 ● skip Est. Revenue and Review for now ● input minimum 4star Rating ● input max weight 2 lbs. © Liberty Transfer, LLC Find HighQuality Products 12
● ● ● ●
input max of 9 sellers (not all may be Prime sellers) skip Listing Quality for now select Standard for Product Size Tier select Fulfillment by Amazon and Merchant in Seller (weeds out Amazon)
Now click on the green Filter Database button. Here’s the result:
Jungle Scout found 363 products meeting our search criteria. Pretty slick, huh? How long would it take us to do this with the manual method? Here are the first few product results:
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We can now see the Brand owner next to the product image. This is the supplier of this product that we want to contact for a wholesale account. Under the Brand owner, we have tabs to take us directly to the Amazon listing, or store it in the JS Product Tracker for later analysis. At this point we have several hundred candidates for finding wholesale accounts.
Accessing the Brand Owner and Buy Box Seller Info Let’s click on the dark blue button for the first product to go directly to the Amazon product page. This will show us links to the Brand owner and the Buy Box seller:
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The Brand owner is ChefLand and the Seller is Utensil Pro (a Prime seller). I would first click on the ChefLand link to get a feel for what other products they offer. I’ll talk more about the Seller link in the ‘Spying on Your Competitors’ lecture later in the course. So let’s just look at ChefLand for now.
Analyzing the Brand Owner with JS When I click on ChefLand I see that they have a huge shop on Amazon. Notice the search bar at the top is now targeted only at ChefLand products. Let’s do the open/close bracket trick to see how many products they have. Here’s the result:
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That’s a pretty big store. If we could get a wholesale account with ChefLand we would have a bunch of products to choose from.
Use the JS extension to find more Brand Owner products To get an idea of what other profitable products they might have, we’ll turn on the JS extension for this ChefLand page. I click on the J S icon in the extension bar of my browser and I see the JS tool, like this:
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JS has collected all the data for the first page (16 products) of search results for the ChefLand store. I sorted the Est. Sales from highest to lowest and you can see that JS estimates thousands of sales each month. However, one thing that is disturbing is in the Seller's column on the far right. There’s only 1 seller for most items, which means that Utensil Pro (the seller, remember?) probably has an exclusive agreement with ChefLand to be the only seller on Amazon. This is not unusual for big stores like ChefLand. Utensil Pro may even be the ChefLand Amazon store name. Tip: One way to filter around situations like this is to input a minimum of 2 Sellers in the JS web app and run a new search of the database. Tip: If you see that the Brand Owner and the Seller are the same you should probably move on to other opportunities. It’s unlikely the Brand Owner will want to share the Buy Box with you. The main point here; you can see how finding just 1 good product can lead to finding many more when using tools like JS. © Liberty Transfer, LLC Find HighQuality Products 17
Find similar products from other Brands So far we’ve only looked at products inside the ChefLand store. Let’s back up a bit and see how to find products similar to ChefLand using the original ChefLand product listing. This will give us options in case we can’t get an account with ChefLand. If we return to the original ChefLand product page (the 200 pack of guest towels) and run the JS extension, we will see similar products from other brands. This will give us new brands (suppliers) to pursue for wholesale accounts. It looks like this:
Notice the new Brand names. Where does JS get these products? These products come from the Frequently Bought Together and Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought sections found below the guest towel listing. You now have several new Brands to go after. First though, ignore products where you see AMZ in the BB Seller column (red boxes). AMZ = no fun. Just click on one of the Product Name links and go analyze that product like we’ve just done above. © Liberty Transfer, LLC Find HighQuality Products 18
Tip: If you have access to the JS web app, you can save interesting product pages into the JS web app Product Tracker by clicking the orange ‘+’ along the left side of the JS extension dialog box (small red box). This saves them for later analysis. You should now have a list of proven profitable products and the names of their suppliers and sellers. There is one more method where we can make use of this information.
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Spy on Your Competitors Our competition is the Buy Box Seller, or any other Prime seller offering the product we’re interested in. I placed this method last because it builds on the searching and filtering lessons from the Manual and Power Tools methods. You may ultimately decide that spying on competitors is the most productive method of all. Our goal here is to find new brand owners (suppliers) that we can contact for wholesale accounts by finding the suppliers already being used by our competition. So, in this spy game, instead of finding products and then the suppliers, we’ll be finding the suppliers and then looking for profitable products. Earlier, in the ‘ Accessing the Brand Owner and Buy Box Seller Info ’, we showed some links on the product page which give us access to the seller’s storefront. If you recall the seller was ‘Utensil Pro’. When we clicked on the Utensil Pro link we’re taken to their Amazon home page, which looks something like this:
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I’ve circled another link which will take us to their storefront and show us a list of their suppliers. Like this:
You can now see at least 15 Brands that Utensil Pro is using to source products. And you can see that ChefLand is by far the largest supplier. If we click on one of the supplier links we’ll be taken to the supplier’s Amazon page. Let’s click on Winco as an example. Here’s what we see:
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Notice this shows a total of 46 results. These are the 46 Winco products being sold by Utensil Pro. If we click on the product link (Winware Stainless Steel Dredges…) we’ll see the product page which has a link for all of Winco’s products. It looks like this:
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Click on this Winco link and we can see all of Winco’s products on Amazon:
You can see, Winco actually has over 6,800 products available on Amazon. Two other important points about this particular listing: First, this product has been designated by Amazon as an Addon Item because of the low sales price. What this means is Amazon won’t offer this product as Prime unless the total order is at least $25, or nonPrime unless the total order is
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at least $35. Since our target sales price is $1550 we won’t have to worry about this, but it’s worth bringing to your attention. Stay away from Addon products. Secondly, notice there are 27 “new” offers starting at $0.01, a single penny! How can this be? Well, this product is so inexpensive that the seller makes all their money from the shipping fee, which is $4.99. Don’t waste your time on products like this.
Key Point Spying will give you lots of supplier information but you still have to determine if the suppliers have products that are worth pursuing. So, go back to the Manual method or the Power Tools method and apply your filters on some of these products to see if they fit into your funnel. If they fit, go after an account with the supplier, if not, move on. For example; if using the Manual method, go back to the ‘ Sales estimator ’ lecture and filter products from there, or, if using the Power Tools method, go back to the ‘ Use the JS extension to find more Brand Owner products ’ lecture and filter the products from the seller’s store instead of the brand owner’s home page. Jungle Scout extension works equally well in either scenario. It makes no sense to get a wholesale account from a supplier and then discover they have no products that will make you money. Make sure they have at least one product that fits your criteria.
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Other Sourcing Methods There are several other lesser known methods available which will most likely be the subject of Bonus material in this course at some point. Here’s a short list if you want to explore: ● Trade Shows there are thousands of trade shows across the country. Some are huge with thousands of suppliers and some are small and targeted at specific niches. The TSNN , Trade Show News Network, is the bible on trade shows, so check it out. Many wholesalers attend the ASD trade show in Las Vegas each spring. There’s probably a trade show near you and they can be excellent places to meet suppliers. ● Offshore sites like Alibaba and AliExpress have wholesale products available for import, mostly from China. I’ve found wholesale products at these sites when I couldn’t find them from U.S. suppliers. Start with a small purchase to test the quality and match to the product you’re looking for. ● AtoZDatabases this site has literally millions of listings of businesses in the U.S. and can be sorted by companies offering wholesale products. There is a paid version, but I have access for free through my local library website. ● Worldwide Brands this is a paid membership site with a large, searchable directory of certified wholesale and dropship suppliers. I have used them before and they are a reputable company. Next, we will take the list of suppliers we’ve discovered and ask them for a wholesale account.
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