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This topic seems to come up time and time again, how do I find hot selling items to sell on eBay, Amazon, or my own website.
This is both an art and a science. There isn't necessarily a single tool that just magically spits out items we can sell that will make us money. There are a few tools which will point us in the right direction. A couple of paid tools is Jungle Scout, as well as Terapeaks Category Research Tool which lists every eBay category and is color coded to show what categories are hot. You can then dig deeper into these categories to see sub categories and even products that are hot. I'm going to cover things pretty in depth in this post but if you'd like to see an actual screencast of the process and stats here's a good Youtube Video.
Those are the only tools that will give us product ideas. There are plenty of other tools we can use to actually vet a potential product and find things such as if the trend for that product or niche is gaining or falling in popularity, sales stats of those products so we know how much sells in a given week, the sell through rating, etc. As far as free tools Unicorn Smasher and Camel Camel Camel are two great free resources. In terms of paid programs again you can use Terapeaks product research or Jungle Scout to pull this type of data.
In terms of actually comming up with ideas, some people like to search Amazon's hot selling list looking for ideas. Some people like first selecting a niche and then finding products that buyers of that niche are interested in. One of my personal strategies which is tough for a newbie but easy once you have a bit more experience is basically just browsing Ali Express, Alibaba and DH Gate and looking at products. When I see a product which peaks my interest I'll search those products on eBay or Amazon, I'll use some of the tools mentioned above and see how well they sell and lastly I'll compare the price I can acquire or buy wholesale versus what it's selling for on eBay or Amazon. If the margins are huge I'll be less cautious as I dont need to sell a ton of products to make my money back. For example one of my hottest selling items is a $2 item I sell for $29.95. If I buy 100 pieces of inventory, once I sell about 15 pieces I've made my money back so even if I get stuck with teh rest of the inventory I've already made my money back. If it sells well I've made my money back after 15 units and the rest is just money in the bank. If the margins are slimmer I'm quite a bit more cautious in entering the space. Not only do I have to sell a larger percentage of my inventory to make my money back, but furthermore, with smaller margins I can't lowball the market and dump my inventory if it comes to that like I would with the $29.95 item. With that item even if I wasn't selling I could drop my price to say $10, massively undercut the competition and still be in the green.
Now when it comes to searching for products there's no hard or fast rule about a product must do such and such amount in sales or have a sell through rating over 50% or anything like that. If I had to nail down rough numbers I'd like to see at least 3k a week in sales with a 40% sell through rating or more but again, if a product has a really high sell through rating I may decide to sell it even if overall sales are low as that tells me there's not enough people selling that item. If a product has huge margins again I may settle for a lower sell thru rating or a lower overall sales number. Another thing I'll do to check a product is run a search on Amazon. If the search results all have over 1,000 feedback that may be a product I'll shy away from as its going to be too tough to overcome such established sellers. If there's some products on first page with reviews of less than 100 I feel pretty confident I can catch up to those sellers with a well optimized listing, some external promotion of my product on social media and blogs, and by giving away a few products for free in return for a review.
On the topic of competition, don't be scared because other people are selling your product. Your pretty much never going to find a product with no competition and even if you do it's only a matter of time before people take notice and come compete with you. Another tip, don't get hungup on being the lowest price. There is always someone willing to work for less margin than you so dont worry about being the lowest, I routinely charge 30% more than the competition but I still outsell my competitors because I put together better listings, I have a better understanding of ebay and amazon SEO and how to optimize a listing, and I feel I can do a better job of selling and marketing a product than the competition.
Now eBay is much different than Amazon in terms of winning the buy box on Amazon where multiple sellers can share the same listing as opposed to eBay where everyone has their own unique listing. On Amazon I'm a big fan of either bundling or private labeling. I won't go too in depth on this as it could be a book on its own but basically the idea of private labeling is taking a generic product others are selling and comming up with your own branding and packaging. The idea of bundling is putting together a lot of cheap items to add some perceived value or make a package. Both these thigns will keep others off of your Amazon listing so your not fighting in a price race to the bottom with 10 other sellers on your listing. Bundling in a nutshell would be as opposed to selling a fire starter alone, you may buy a few cheap survival items ie a firestarter, compass, and a paracord bracelet, calling it a survival pack and selling it for say $15 where as each one of these items probably cost you less than .50 cents. It also deters competition as its easy for someone to source one item and hop on your listing but most people who "piggyback" are lazy and will not go to the trouble of sourcing 3 items or a collection of items so this allows you to keep your own listing and not compete with other sellers for the buy box.
Lastly I wanted to touch on the topic of how to sell stuff on Amazon and eBay. They are both essentially search engines alot of people forget that. Because of this you can optimize your listing in a way to where your product can rise above other products when buyers are searching for your product or similar products. This comes down to many factors, some are somewhat out of your control when starting out like sales rank and seller feedback, if your a new seller your somewhat behidn the 8 ball. That said you can optimize your listing by using the maximum number of pictures, put as many items specifics as you can, have a well optimzied title with lots of keywords buyers are searching for. For example dont put in your title number one seller on ebay or amazon. No buyer is searching for that, however terms like Watermelon Slicer, Kitchen, Fruit, Corer, etc for a kitchen product would be terms buyers are searching for. YOu should also have a long and detailed description, dont just say Watermelon Slicer for sale, not only is that not professional, it doesn't give buyers much to go on and lastly it's not effective optimization for a listing.
One thing I really want to stress is that you can't throw an item up on Amazon sit back and hope it sells. A few years back you could buy Oil Diffusers off Alibabab for pennies and sell them for $29.95 all day long, those days are gone, there's a lot more competition on Amazon in general and specifically FBA. You really need to do some external promotion ie social media, blogs, content marketing, youtube videos. Not only will this drive traffic to your listings which in turn could lead to buys, but it's a longterm strategy as well. If someone reads a blog post about cooking and then winds up linking to your Amazon cooking item that tells Amazon people searching for cooking like your item and you'll begin ranking higher for that keyword.
Hopefully this gives you some insight into how to seek out eBay and Amazon items. As i explained above there's a wealth of tools to help you find products as well as vet products but at the end of the day until you actually list and try to sell an item you really dont know how well its going to do. I often recommend to newbies start with cheap items like sub $3 item, there's even plenty of items you can find for 0.20 to 0.50 cents. You can buy 100 pieces of inventory and only set yourself back $20 or $30, if it flops oh well you waste more money than that on dinner. If a product does well you load up on the next order or potentially decide to private label that product.
One last thing, if your totally and completely lost and are looking for product ideas or want a list of product ideas to act as guidance on the types of products you ideally want to be looking for checkout this list of hot selling products in various categories.
If anyone has any questions on what I've explained feel free to drop a post below and I'll reply to any questions.
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