Choosing Products to Sell | FREE Course | Module 3

Hi everyone! Welcome back to our Seller Assistant Academy. 

In this module, together we will take the second step towards product sourcing. You will learn how to do quick product research and why you need it.

The explanation may seem a bit complicated at first, but be patient. At the end of this video, I will show how you can do quick product research in seconds.

Let’s begin!

How to Look for Products to Sell on Amazon?

When you start looking for a product to sell on Amazon, you must understand exactly what it is. That means, a product must meet specific criteria. For example, it must have good demand and medium competition, be profitable, must not have sales restrictions, and so on.

However, there are many products you need to research that way. If you will do full-scale research on all products manually, that will take years. 

To avoid that, you must find a way to narrow down your search and do full-scale product research of only those products that are suitable for selling. That saves time and effort.

How to search Amazon products for wholesale, online arbitrage, and dropshipping?

The process of researching Amazon products differs for different business models.

Wholesale product research involves analyzing supplier price lists with hundreds to thousands of products and sellers must automate it to get effective results.

Online arbitrage and dropshipping sellers typically start their search on Amazon, and the tools they use must show which Amazon products are suitable for reselling. When sellers find such products, they look for suppliers offering lower prices to get profits from sales.

Below we will show you how these processes work, which tools to use, and how.

How does quick product research work for wholesale?

To find products to sell on Amazon, wholesale sellers choose a brand to resell and to buy from them products in large quantities to get low prices.

We discussed how to do brand research and select a brand in our second module. The link is in the description. A seller negotiates with a brand, agrees to cooperate, and receives the price list with the products he can buy, and prices.

Typically, this price list includes hundreds, or even thousands of products. Your task is to quickly find potentially profitable deals you can sell on your Amazon account. It’s extremely challenging to do it manually. To do it effectively, you can automate this process.

Quick product research includes 2 key steps:

Step 1. Identifying potentially profitable deals on your supplier price list. You  can do it automatically by using Seller Assistant’s Price List Analyzer.

Step 2. Finding out if you can sell chosen deals on your Amazon account. You  can do it by using Seller Assistant’s Bulk Restriction Checker.

After you select potentially profitable deals you can sell on your account (at best, this will be 20-30% of the brand’s products), you can do extended research of each product.

What Is Price List Analyzer and how does it help wholesale sellers with quick product research?

Seller Assistant's Price List Analyzer helps automate supplier price list processing and identify the most high-margin items for your Amazon store in minutes. Price List Analyzer automates spotting potentially profitable deals on bulk supplier price lists containing thousands of products. 

It automatically converts UPCs and EANs to Amazon ASINs, matches supplier products to Amazon listings, and calculates profitability and other comprehensive profitability metrics for each product. 

To find profitable deals on your supplier price list with Price List Analyzer, simply upload your supplier price list file (.xls or .csv format) containing product UPC or EAN and price. Price List Analyzer generates a detailed report with the profit and ROI for each product, FBM and FBA fees, referral fees, storage fees, BSR, and current Buy Box prices.  Filter the report by profit, ROI, or other metrics to identify the products with the highest potential.

How to find out if you can sell chosen deals on your Amazon account with Seller Assistant’s Bulk Restriction Checker?

To find out what products you can and can’t sell on your Amazon seller account, upload the file with your chosen deals to Seller Assistant’s Bulk Restriction Checker. When it is processed, download a report. 

Bulk Restriction Checker shows a green open lock if you can sell the product; red closed lock with exclamation mark shows you are not eligible to sell a product on your account, a red closed lock means a product belongs to a restricted category and you need Amazon’s approval to sell it.

If you see a red closed lock with an exclamation mark on a number of products, you are not eligible to sell a product on your account. Then, look for another product.

How does quick product research work for online arbitrage and dropshipping?

There is a tool that helps you quickly what’s good for selling and what’s not. That is Seller Assistant’s Quick View feature.

Quick View is a widget that appears on your Amazon search pages. It collects the most essential product details that let you understand at first glance if it has any alerts and you shouldn’t spend time on it. 

You can also put a like or dislike on a product to come back to researching it if needed.

Quick View shows you the following information:

• Product’s ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number); you can also click to copy the ASIN or the product link;
• Product’s BSR (Best Sellers rank) in its main category;
• The number of FBA and FBM sellers selling a product;
• Your eligibility to sell a product on your seller account;
• Product restrictions;
• If Amazon sells the product
• You can also add notes to a product.

As you can see, all these data are displayed on the search pages in a user-friendly, easy-to-understand way.

You can go through many products and get rid of unnecessary results. That may be the products you can’t sell on your account, private label products with one FBA seller, products with IP complaints, and so on. You can find the link to install Seller Assistant on the video description.

Let’s see how each of the product metrics shown by Quick View helps you choose the products you can further research.

ASIN

To be able to locate a product on Amazon, you must know its ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number).  It is a unique combination of letters and figures given by Amazon to each product in their marketplace. It helps find and track items. Quick View shows you the product ASIN and lets you copy it in one click.

You can find more information about Amazon ASIN in the link on the video description.

Product categories 

Your quick product research always starts with identifying if a product is popular in its category. 

All products in Amazon’s catalog are divided into categories and subcategories. This helps find products more easily. Examples are Home & Kitchen, Baby, Automotive, etc. Home & Kitchen has subcategories like Kitchen&Dining, Bedding, Bath, etc. In turn, Kitchen&Dining has subcategories such as Bakeware, Coffee, Tea&Espresso, Kitchen Cookware, and more.

Some categories are trendy and have high demand, while others are less popular. 

6 most popular product categories on Amazon are:

• Beauty&Personal Care;
• Home&Kitchen;
• Automotive;
• Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry;
• Electronics;
• Appliances.

You can find more information about the Top Amazon Product Categories in the link on the video description. Quick View shows you the product category in which the product is most popular. 

Eligibility and restricted categories

You may not be allowed to sell specific products on your account. That may be because you are a new seller or your seller performance is insufficient. 

Also, some products can be restricted. That is one more reason why you must know the product category. Amazon has restricted categories otherwise called gated.  Examples include hazmat (dangerous goods), Grocery&Gourmet Food, Sexual Wellness, Fine Art, and more.

If a product is restricted, you can’t sell it without Amazon’s approval. Amazon will not allow you to list your offer until you get approval, and you must check it before you buy the products. Typically, you can ungate such products, but you will need to apply for approval and provide Amazon with additional documents, including invoices and other documents specified by Amazon.

Some sellers prefer to avoid restricted products. However, more experienced sellers prefer to sell in gated categories because the competition is lower.

You can find more information about restricted products on Amazon in the link on the video description.

Quick View shows if a product is restricted or you can’t sell it for other reasons. 

• If you see a green open lock icon, you can sell it. 
• If you see a red closed lock, a product is restricted. 

How to find BSR and how to use it?

After you select products you can sell without problems, it’s time to see how well they sell.  Amazon doesn’t show monthly sales of products. To understand that, you must use the product’s  Best Sellers Rank (BSR). BSR shows how well the product sells compared to other products in its category.

The lower the BSR number, the more the product sells. A good BSR must be between 1 and 50,000, with 1 being the best. BSR is updated instantly. That is why, to understand that the product will have good sales over time, you must look at the average figure and the trend — upwards or downwards. 

Quick View shows you these figures without scrolling product listings. It shows the product’s BSR in its main category. That helps see at once if a product has good sales and is worth researching further.

You can find more information about Amazon Best Sellers Rank in the link on the video description.

The FBA and FBM seller count

Next thing you must estimate how many sellers offer products on the listing. That tells you two things: if a product is sold by a private label seller and how high is the competition.

If a product is sold by 1 FBA seller, most likely it’s a private label seller. You can’t sell such products because the PL seller has rights to his brand. You shouldn’t sell such products. If more than 15 FBA sellers sell a product, the competition is very high. A product potentially good for selling must be sold by 2 to 15 sellers.

Quick View displays the number of FBA and FBM sellers offering the product. That allows you to exclude products sold by 1 private label seller, and avoid products with very intense competition where you have more than 15 sellers.

Checking if Amazon sells the product

Lastly, you must check if Amazon sells the product. Amazon can sell some products as a seller in its own marketplace. If they sell a product, it’s almost impossible to compete with them. As a huge retailer, they always get the best offer. Therefore, it’s better to find another item to sell. 

Quick View alerts you if Amazon is a seller. You can see an orange sign saying «Amazon». 

How to quickly estimate if a product is good for reselling?

Now let’s see how to do quick product research with Quick View.

We will take the ASIN B09NW83XJ2 as an example. It’s a pack of paper towel rolls.

Quick View shows that this item has very good sales (#14 in Health & Household category) and doesn’t have restrictions. However, it has 3 FBM sellers. Also, Amazon sells this product. That means, the product is not suitable for selling.

With Quick View, you can also like and dislike a product to see later if it needs to be further researched and add notes to it.

That’s it for now. In the next module, I will show you how to look for a product supplier.