Product selection plays a very important role in the successful operation of Amazon stores. A successful product selection can help stores create popular products and achieve a rapid increase in store sales and popularity. Therefore, sellers who open stores on the Amazon platform should fully value the value of product selection in store operations and regard it as an important matter throughout the entire store operation process.
Specifically, successful product selection should consider the following three aspects:
(1) Suitable for one’s own situation
Faced with the increasingly fierce market competition in the e-commerce field, sellers can more easily get started and gain a foothold in the market by starting from industries that they are more familiar with and understand. Therefore, when selecting products, sellers should choose products that they are more familiar with and have inherent advantages in quality and price based on their own situation. In this way, they can communicate with consumers about products and establish their own store’s competitive advantage in products.
Supply chain and capital chain are two important chains in cross-border e-commerce. The former includes product selection, logistics, warehousing, after-sales, inventory control and customer service, while the latter mainly involves financial system, cost control, payment period and payment method.
Among them, for the selection of products at the source of the supply chain, many sellers look for B2B platforms or manufacturers based on preliminary market research. However, by selecting products in this way, sellers have weak control over the quality, price, advantages and other aspects of the products, so there are great risks.
For example, on the Amazon platform, Bluetooth products under the 3C category are very popular with consumers. However, some sellers have fallen into operational difficulties while their sales volume continues to grow and their platform rankings continue to rise. The reason is that sellers are not familiar with and understand the manufacturers and products on the supply side, and cannot effectively control the quality of the products, which has led to more and more customer complaints and even warnings from the platform.
Therefore, when selecting products, sellers who open stores on Amazon overseas sites should start from their own situation and first choose product categories and product suppliers that they are more familiar with, so as to effectively control all aspects of the products and avoid being at a disadvantage in terms of price and supply chain; after successfully gaining a foothold in the market, they can conduct a new round of product selection, inventory and sales to continuously expand the market.
(2) Get upstream sources as much as possible
Sellers should try to connect with manufacturers and get upstream first-hand sources to establish advantages in product sales prices. In particular, sellers who select products and inquire about prices on B2B platforms should pay more attention to distinguishing between product manufacturers and agents at all levels, and try to get upstream sources.
(3) Have product combination thinking
Sellers should also have product combination thinking when selecting products, and put differentiated products on the shelves in the store that can meet the price and quality demands of different consumer groups to increase the transaction success rate of the store. Generally speaking, the goods in more mature stores should include hot-selling products, mainstream products and profitable products.
Hot-selling products refer to mainstream products that are combined with current hot spots and can effectively stimulate customers’ desire to buy. Hot-selling products are relatively cheap or have a high cost-effectiveness. For sellers, they can refer to the sales rankings published by Amazon and learn from the top-ranked popular products to create hot-selling products in their own stores.
Mainstream products refer to products in the seller’s store that have price or cost-effectiveness advantages and are very attractive to customers.
Profitable goods are more common in the clothing category, which refers to niche goods or goods that are about to become popular that do not have a basic price in the current market.