Product hunting is the first and most important step in starting your e-commerce business on Amazon. It allows you to find winning products, i.e., products that will sell and bring your profit.

If you make a mistake during your product research phase, you might spend months of work manufacturing a product and thousands of dollars on marketing, only to find out your product won’t sell because the niche doesn’t have enough demand!

While product research may seem daunting, it can be simplified by knowing which criteria to follow and using product research software!

Which Software to use?

With the right product research tool, you can see how many sales a product is getting—an absolute must for success. Without this data, you’re guessing blindly, risking months of effort and thousands of dollars on a failed product that won’t sell.

There are many Amazon product research tools on the market and it’s really up to you which one you use. However, if you want to make the most of your product hunting and get reliable and accurate data, you should go for the best tools: Jungle Scout or Helium 10. These two tools are the most popular ones due to providing the most accurate product data and estimates. You can choose the one that best fits your budget and needs.

Top 3 Product Research Tools

1. Helium 10
2. Jungle Scout
3. AMZ Scout

I won’t go into detail about the differences between these tools. I personally like to use Helium 10, but it’s up to you which one to choose. Just make sure to own at least one tool that can estimate product sales, as this is the most important feature when doing product research!

Amazon Product Hunting Criteria

1. High-Demand, Low-Competition Product

If you want to succeed as a new seller on Amazon, you need to find products with high demand and low competition. These products are known as winning because consumers always search for them, yet there aren’t many sellers selling them. And, when you offer a product people want, and there aren’t a lot of other sellers offering it, you can expect lots of sales!

How Can You Identify a High-Demand Product?

The best, easiest, and quickest way to do this is by using a product research tool like Helium 10. When using these tools, you can apply filters like the number of monthly sales and monthly revenue, which will narrow down the choice of products that fulfill those criteria. The value of these filters depends on your goals and how much profit you want to make per product.

For example, if you want to make $500 per month per product, you must look for Amazon products with a minimum monthly revenue of $1500 following the 33% profit ratio.

How Can You Identify a Low-Competition Product?

Once you find potential high-demand products you would sell in your store, use a product research tool to narrow down the choice by applying the number of sellers filter. This will show you the number of sellers currently offering that product on Amazon.

Another way is to analyze the competitors by looking at the following factors:

• Product listing quality—Look at how well a product listing is created, from the title to the description to the keywords used. For instance, there’s a difference between a product titled “Plastic Organizer” and a product titled “Cube Storage Organizer Portable Closet Wardrobe Bedroom Dresser.”
• Product photos – A good product has professional-looking photos included in its listing. If a product has 2 or 3 low-quality, vague photos, it’s not a competitive one. Hence, you can easily beat such a product by adding five or more high-quality, professionally taken photos, maybe even a video and infographics.
• Number of reviews – The number of reviews is more or less reciprocal to the number of sales. The more sales a product has, the more reviews it has. Therefore, in order to find a low-competition product, you should look for products with a few sellers on the first page and less than 100 reviews.

• Product quality – Look at products that have a 4-star rating or lower because they offer room for improvement. For instance, if you find an onion chopper with a 3.5 stars rating, look at the worst feedback to see what is wrong with it so that you know what you need to improve with your product.

2. Minimum Sales Price of $15

When looking for potential products to sell in your Amazon store, go for those with a minimum sales price of $15. This is because 33% of the price goes to Amazon fees, another 33% goes to production and shipping, and the other 33% is your profit. Hence, if you sell a product for $15, you will make $5 per product, which is a good margin.

I know that selling cheaper products may be tempting for first-time sellers since they want to offer low-priced products to attract buyers, but it’s wrong. Selling a product for less than $15 will drastically lower your margin and not bring you good profit. So, it’s not worth investing your time and money in such products.

3. Healthy Margin

Speaking of profitability, having a healthy margin for each product you sell is essential for the success of your FBA business. If you don’t make a good profit, your business won’t scale, and you will eventually give up and close your Amazon store.

As mentioned above, a 33% ratio explains how all product-related costs are covered by the product’s sales price. If you can set up a higher margin, even better, but even if you can’t, it’s fine.

Based on this ratio, we’d want to spend a maximum of 25% on production costs, leaving us 8% for shipping costs. Following this percentage, if we sell a product for $15, we would spend $3,75 on manufacturing the product and $1,25 on shipping it. So, we’ll cover the production and shipping expenses and still have $5 for Amazon fees and $5 profit. Not bad, huh?

4. A Year-Round Product

An important criterion to consider when product hunting is the product’s seasonality. Is there an all-year-round demand for a product, or does it only sell in a specific season or a few times a year? For example, a garlic press is a general kitchen tool that makes crushing garlic easy. It doesn’t sell only occasionally but throughout the year. However, a Jack-o’-Lantern pumpkin paper lantern sells only before Halloween because it’s a product specific to that holiday.

I don’t say that you can’t make money selling seasonal products, but it’s best to avoid it as a first-time Amazon seller. Once you establish your Amazon business selling mostly year-round products, you may add various seasonal products to your store.

That said, when doing product research, it’s essential to identify whether a product is seasonal. You can do that by using Jungle Scout Chrome Extension’s Historical Monthly Sales tool. Alternatively, you can use Google Trends to check a product’s demand throughout the year.

5. Easy-to-Manufacture Product

If you’re purchasing a product manufactured overseas, especially from China, make sure it’s easy to manufacture. A lot can go wrong in the manufacturing process, and you’re not there to monitor it. Therefore, you won’t be able to catch manufacturing errors, which will result in low-quality products you can’t sell.

Easy-to-manufacture products are those that don’t require much assembly. They are made of one or two pieces and one type of material.

Why Is Amazon Product Hunting Important?

Product hunting on Amazon is crucial because it allows you to find the right products to sell in your store. These are products within your niche that will sell well and will make you enough money so that you can run a profitable business.

By doing product research, you analyze the current market trends to see which products are in high demand and selling well. Also, you identify which products would bring you the most profit and spy on the competitors.

Running a successful Amazon business isn’t something that happens out of nowhere. It requires preparation instead of making guesses and assumptions about what you, as a seller, should sell. After all, starting a business is a big investment, and you shouldn’t make choices based on your hunch; you should make choices based on facts.

Final Thoughts

Amazon product hunting is the first and most important step in starting an e-commerce business on this gigantic platform. Without it, you won’t be able to spot products that will sell and bring profit continuously.

You can search for products manually by using Amazon’s Best-Sellers Rank feature or automatically by using product research tools like Jungle Scout, Helium 10, or any other you prefer.

To find winning products, you should stick to profitable, high-demand, low-competition products that sell throughout the year and are easy to manufacture. Remember, you need to offer products that consumers want, and not many sellers offer them in their stores. Of course, your product(s) should be better than the ones your competitors often offer to stand out from the crowd.

Product hunting tip: When hunting for products, look at the Frequently Bought Together and Customers Also Bought sections. They show what other products people bought apart from the product you’re interested in. This will help you choose additional products to sell in your Amazon store and will allow you to keep up with customer trends. Plus, it will bring you extra profit.