Product selection in the same category refers to finding more advantageous products for sale by analyzing the products under Amazon categories. Many sellers will give priority to the links of the Best Sellers Top 100 in the category when selecting products, because these products have high sales rankings and a large number of reviews, which shows that buyers have a rich demand for such products; coupled with the abundant domestic supply and relatively low prices, it is also convenient to drop ship. However, in the actual operation process, even if all these products are put on the shelves, orders may not be generated. The mistake made by these sellers is that they did not take into account the factors of platform competition.
The method of selecting products through the Best Sellers list itself is not wrong, but it is not difficult to find that most of the top rankings are evergreen and brand-name products that have accumulated thousands or even tens of thousands of reviews, with an average rating of more than 4 stars, and are constantly adding variants to accumulate sales rankings. The listing time of these links is generally more than 3 years, and the keyword search ranking is also very stable. Once the same style is selected for listing, it is difficult for the new link to obtain sufficient exposure and traffic under the same keyword exposure, and the subsequent operation will be more difficult.
Therefore, the core of product selection in the same category is to select the blue ocean from the red ocean, that is, to give priority to competitive factors in the process of product selection. Operators should find blue ocean products that have not yet been fully developed under the hot-selling product categories. For sellers of any size, occupying the emerging blue ocean market must be the most advantageous choice. Once the blue ocean market segment is occupied in the early stage, in the later operation process, as long as the product quality is guaranteed, a certain number of reviews are accumulated steadily, and FBA is ensured to be in stock, advantages can be accumulated continuously for long-term operation. Even if a large number of competitors pour in later, sellers who enter the market first can maintain a certain sales volume.
From the perspective of goods, operators first need to find the hot-selling product types, and then identify potential products one by one. For example, the women’s skirt category has always been a high-traffic category, with many design styles and patterns, and it is easy for new blue ocean products to appear. Operators can first locate the “Best Sellers” and “New Releases” list products in the “Dress” category to analyze the emerging styles in the current market. In summer, most skirt styles are sleeveless and short-sleeved as the basic styles, so operators need to focus on printing and special designs.
By clicking on the link, operators can find many similar products that have been put on the shelves recently, and their sales are stable and ranked within 100,000. Some sellers may think that the product selection process is over and they can prepare to put the products on the shelves for purchase and send to FBA, but if they do so, they are still trapped in inertial thinking and do not really understand the relationship between product selection and the market. It is not difficult to find out from the step-by-step analysis of the links that the same type of links are mostly put on the shelves in March and April, and it takes about 3 months of operation to push the links to within 10,000.
For other categories, the time difference of 4 months may not be long, but the cyclicality of clothing categories is very strong. Considering that most of the United States is located at 30°~50″ north latitude, summer will end in August and September, so the selection of products in late July should target autumn and winter styles. Operators need to at least select long-sleeved styles as the direction of product selection to leave sufficient operation time for later link operation promotion and FBA delivery time.
Through the comprehensive comparison method, the difficulty of product selection has been greatly reduced, but there are still certain difficulties in the selection of specific styles. For products with a high degree of standardization, such as table lamps, since their functions are relatively fixed, operators need to analyze the shopping situation of buyers and select products with more suitable specifications; for products with a low degree of standardization, such as clothing, not only must certain judgments be made on the shopping needs of buyers, but also products with the most suitable selling point combination must be found. For empirical product selection, rich product knowledge, keen market intuition, and in-depth understanding of the supply chain are often required to increase the explosive rate.