A good product can be sold well without much operation, and a bad product can hardly achieve good results even if it is operated by a gold medal trader. I have seen too many such cases, so product selection can be said to be one of the most important tasks for Amazon sellers, which directly determines the success or failure of the subsequent operation.
Except that factory-type sellers may be greatly restricted in product selection, trade-type sellers still have a lot of room for operation. At present, the popular product selection logic and thinking mode on the market are basically divided into two types: the first type belongs to the speculative pan-category product selection method. Simply put, what is easy to sell is sold. There is no clear category range. The products in the store may span several categories, and there is no connection between the products; the second type belongs to the branded product selection method. Basically, the store products are all under one category, and there is a certain correlation between them. The following is a detailed introduction to these two different product selection methods for readers.
1. Pan-category product selection method
It was very popular in the early development of the industry, and many Amazon sellers started in this way. Because the traffic on the platform was very cheap and easy to promote at that time, and there was not much concept of brand, so most sellers were looking for hot-selling products, selling whatever products could make money, not looking at the category when selecting products, and not caring about the connection between products, only judging whether the product itself has the potential to become a hit, and there was no concept of branded operation at all. However, in recent years, as platform traffic has become more and more expensive, platform regulatory rules have become increasingly perfect, brand traffic and associated traffic have become more and more important, and Amazon has launched a new policy on brands: if the product you sell does not belong to any brand, the brand attribute should be “N/A” (none). It will be more and more difficult to promote these unbranded products in the future. This change has led to this pan-category selection method becoming less and less marketable, and will gradually be replaced by branded selection methods.
Although the thinking mode of the pan-category selection method is becoming increasingly outdated, there are still some specific methods worth learning from on how to directly and accurately locate the hit products.
Method 1: Gold mining method
First of all, I would like to recommend to you a commonly used Amazon selection tool, Jungle Scout. After we enter Jungle Scout, we select its database function. In the database, there is all the data of Amazon products of all categories crawled by the crawler. Then we can filter according to various conditions, such as price, number of reviews and star rating, and finally filter out the target product list we want.
The first filtering condition is price. The unit price of the product is above $20. This price is set to ensure the profit margin. With the increasing cost of in-site advertising and FBA storage, products with low unit prices are relatively at a disadvantage.
The second filtering condition is monthly sales. A monthly sales volume of more than 400 units can be regarded as reaching the passing line. Although there are not thousands of orders per day, sales of 15 to 20 orders per day are also qualified.
The third filtering condition is star rating. Products with an overall star rating of less than 3.7 can be selected. The purpose of this is to find products with poor reviews but still have a certain guarantee of sales.
The products selected according to these three conditions are generally just needed by consumers, and they have basic sales and huge room for improvement.
Method 2: Small and beautiful mining method
There are many small sellers or small and beautiful stores on the market. The characteristics of these stores are as follows: there are not many products, but each one is a boutique hit, and the product category is mainly blue ocean. If such stores can be discovered through data mining, then their products and product selection ideas can serve as a model for us to learn from.
We can use the data filtering function of Jungle Scout to mine these target stores and products. The price is still set above US$20, the monthly sales volume is also set to more than 400 pieces, and the number of sellers is set to 1. That is to say, there is only one seller under this product item, and there will be no follow-up sales.
About Amazon’s follow-up sales system, many novice sellers may not know much about it, so I will give a brief introduction here. Follow-up sales is a unique system of Amazon. Amazon does not want many identical products to appear on the search results page every time a consumer searches, which looks very messy. Consumers click on the same product, which also hits the richness of the product. For example, if a product sells very well, sellers will sell this product. Amazon hopes that there is only one page for each product. However, a monopoly will squeeze out others and monopolize prices, so Amazon introduced the follow-up selling system. When sellers can get the same source of goods as the uploaded products, they can use the same detail page to sell them together, without having to hang a new detail page to describe your product information, pictures, etc.
The number of sellers of the product is the key to finding small and beautiful stores. The reason is very simple. First, no one follows the sale, which means that the competition for this product is not particularly fierce. Although there is a certain sales volume, it will not be easily noticed because the follow-up sellers prefer those hot-selling products. Second, these products may be the sales focus of small and beautiful stores, because they originally uploaded few products.
After finding these stores, we can click to enter the store front desk to view them, and roughly know what products are in these small and beautiful stores, and see which ones can be done and which ones can be learned. These products should provide a lot of constructive opinions and directions for our product selection work.
2. Branded product selection method
Branded product selection method is recommended. The branded product selection method is to first determine a vertically segmented market field, and then find several target products under this category through screening and start to create them. At the same time, according to the characteristics of this category and product, register overseas brand trademarks that match it. After the first few products are successfully created, the subsequent product selection range is still concentrated in this vertical category, so as to ensure that all products under the brand are related and in the same category. Although this product selection method cannot guarantee that every product will be a hit, it will make the product life cycle longer, and the promotion cost of subsequent new products is decreasing. It is also conducive to the creation of private brands and the accumulation of private domain traffic, which is more in line with the general trend of seller branding required by Amazon.