How To Choose Your Amazon Product – The Ten Percent Club

So you have decided to launch into selling online and the world of private labelling (PL) but you are stuck, and have no idea how to choose your Amazon product, right?

There is so much conflicting information out there and if you are a member of a Facebook group you mostly get newbies telling you which way to go and what to do. Some of the advice comes from successful sellers who themselves, don’t even know how they found their successful product, or who perhaps stumbled on a great product and for whom there was a huge element of luck involved.

Many sellers who were successful at the start quickly find dozens of new sellers following the same how-to-find-a-product instructions, not surprisingly ending up at the same point and launching the same product! Suddenly page one of a previously underrepresented keyword is crowded with other PL sellers. What happens next is everyone starts dropping their price to compete (a very bad idea and here’s a post about pricing strategy) and the opportunity for selling that product, is over before it really begins.

So it is absolutely crucial if you are going to be one of the ten percent of online businesses that succeed, that you get the product right.

If you google the question, “how to choose your Amazon product” you get dozens of well-meaning bloggers and sellers of Amazon tools and plugins who tell you to start looking on Amazon at the best seller lists and/or choose something you are passionate about.

Another common piece of advice is to walk around your house or office and look at everything you use each day. Does anything stand out that you buy or use regularly, or that evokes some passion in you.

But in the end, the overall goal is to find something that is already selling on Amazon, find a supplier on Alibaba, slap your own private label on it and join the other sellers.

You can do all of those things but most of the advice provided, misses out on telling you…

The number one vital and most important thing you need to know when you choose your Amazon product:

FIND A NEED

If you are ready to start your product research then let me repeat: the single most important piece of advice you will hear today:

DON’T FIND A PRODUCT, FIND A NEED.

There is absolutely NO POINT selling something on Amazon that no one needs. This is the number one reason so many hundreds of new sellers on Amazon are failing. It seems like such common sense that if no one needs what you are selling, then they won’t buy it – but ninety percent of new sellers don’t hear this from anyone and have absolutely no idea that they are launching a doomed product.

Please, whatever you do, do not look on Amazon to find a product – look on Amazon and everywhere else for that matter, to find a need. A need that is currently not being met or fulfilled or not being fulfilled satisfactorily.

There is a reason most smart people spend years waiting for the right business idea to come to fruition, they know they don’t want to waste their time and money on a flop! Unfortunately, Amazon offers a very low barrier to entry, so anyone can do it. This means that those very new to business and with little business know-how can launch a new business with a laptop and a couple hundred dollars.

It makes sense then, that a low barrier to entry would be equal to a low barrier to exit. Or to put it another way, a low barrier to entry is equal to a high failure rate.

So in the Amazon world and the world of e-commerce what is a NEED?

Without going into the psychology of need (but if you are interested, google Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs), we know that human beings have a number of basic needs.

The desire to have our needs met leads to the motivation to find a solution.

NEED = SHOPPING

Not rocket science.

If the motivation to find a solution is strong enough, then human beings will search and continue searching until they find the product or service that fulfills the need.

So if you want to have a business that provides a product that is available on Amazon.com then it makes sense to look for products that meet certain needs, preferably largely unmet needs, that people have.

A good place to start is with your own needs, the needs of your family members and potentially your friends.

Rather than the aspiration to start a business selling products on Amazon, I suggest you start with the aspiration to find a need that you can potentially fulfill with a product. Is there something you do every day that annoys you? A product that continually breaks, continually fails to fulfill its intended purpose? Something that you find frustrating every day?

One thing that frustrates me every time I cook is the oven mitts and pot holders that are currently available. And yet, silicone oven mitts are synonymous with the iPhone cover – that is, products that too many people have tried to launch on Amazon and a market that is absolutely saturated. But as far as I can see, they are all pretty much the same.

For me however, the oven mitt solutions available on the market today do not meet my needs. Not that I am suggesting you get into that market (because it is absolutely saturated) nor am I interested in getting into it myself, but I mention it because whenever I think of my own daily frustrations I always think of the oven mitts and pot holders I own – they are all rubbish!

I am not going to go into why they are no good for me, nor what should be done about it – because I absolutely do not want you to go and find yet another oven mitt and launch it on Amazon. But it is a shining example of an unmet need that I have. However in this case, a product NOT to launch on Amazon.

So the second vital step in selecting your product, once you find your unmet need, is to do a tonne of research. What else is out there, how is this need currently being met, are the products adequate, do they need to be adjusted or remade completely differently to meet this need you have identified?

I can’t emphasize enough that you need to spend a lot of time doing your research. Is this a need you have that no one else has (like my oven mitt example).

The best option would be to find something that needs to be completely redesigned to meet the most common needs. Yes, this is much more expensive than buying something on Alibaba and slapping on a logo, but much more likely to be successful!

The next step, once you have found your unmet need and with an idea in mind as to how you could solve it, is to determine how large the potential market might be.

I have elaborated here on how to determine your market size.

To further illustrate my point, let’s look at a common product that I see being sold by new entrepreneurs and which fails almost every time. The t-shirt. Please tell me why anyone would think that they should open up a new online store selling t-shirts??

Who needs a t-shirt? Well, most of us do and we need them often and in a variety of colors and shapes, designs, sizes and price points. But they are available EVERYWHERE in a variety of colors, shapes, designs, sizes and price points. There is absolutely NO UNMET NEED as far as I can see and just about every single new seller of t-shirts goes out of business or never even gets off the ground.

Perhaps now you can see why.

[Caveat: I will write another post about wants. Some people of course, just want something and it makes no real sense, they just want it. For you to create a product that people want and will pay good money for, is another level of marketing skill altogether.]

There are times when a “me-too” product can work and you can read about that in this article which provides further information to consider when finding the right product to sell.

So in summary, spend your days and your nights looking for an unmet need, then research the products available and determine how they are not meeting the need, next, figure out how you could potentially meet the need with a product and then determine the size of the need (ie the market size).

If all those boxes can be ticked, you may just be onto something.