Understanding what a good Amazon FBA product looks like from a beginner’s perspective is pretty straightforward – lightweight, brandable, not fragile, not in a saturated market, and so on. However, understanding what a bad product looks like is a little bit trickier, especially so because in some cases a product niche on Amazon may look like it’s currently got low competition.The reality is that there are hundreds of new sellers behind the scenes all preparing to sell the product that they’ve just found because of how it appears, meaning that the niche is about to become saturated very very quickly.
Determining whether a niche is about to become saturated due to tons of people finding that niche is very difficult to do, unless you’ve got access to someone that sees the hundreds of product ideas that new sellers are coming across and looking into and can give a lot of tips on how to find a product to sell and which Amazon FBA products to avoid.
Thanks to my role as an Amazon FBA mentor, I have a distinct advantage over people that are doing their product research alone, which is I’m able to understand if a niche is about to very quickly become saturated and a dead duck in the water, judging by how many times I get sent it as a product idea to review. So, using that knowledge and the experience that I’ve gained over the past 5 years of selling, here are the products that you should avoid selling as a beginner in 2023.
Massage Gun
The first Amazon FBA product that all beginners should avoid, not just in 2023 but probably forever, is the massage gun, a niche that blew up in popularity towards the end of 2021 and throughout 2022.
When looking at the figures behind the massage gun niche on Amazon, it’s easy to see why people get so excited when they first come across it. Some sellers are making an absolute fortune, in some cases around a $1,000,000 in sales in a single month, which when you see how much they cost to make, is likely netting them upwards of $150,000 in profits, all from a single product.
If you’re new to selling on Amazon and scratching your head wondering why this is a bad product to sell, you won’t have to do too much digging to find out why. While the current sellers of massage guns are making an absolute fortune, take a look at what each of them is offering that’s different to the competition. The answer is very little. Given that a massage gun has a fixed design with one single function, it can’t be differentiated easily, which is something that you can see when you scroll through the search results.
It’s one of the challenges of selling on Amazon – all of these listings look the same, making it virtually impossible for a customer to differentiate between each seller. If you were to start selling this product too, you’d be lost in a sea of competitors with no real way of competing for the customer’s attention, other than on price, which is a recipe for disaster.In addition to that, if you were to somehow find a way win the customer over, in order to obtain a front page position on Amazon and not disappear into the ether, you’d need to be able to afford enough stock satisfy the huge amounts of monthly demand, which according to Helium 10’s figures would require a substantial investment. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So, if you come across the massage gun niche, feel free to have a look at the figures as an insight into how much money some people are making, but after that, swiftly move on because this is my first product to avoid in 2023.
Weighted Hoola Hoops
Any Amazon FBA product related to health and fitness has seen a huge surge in demand since the pandemic, as more people have become increasingly focused on their wellbeing. From this change in trend emerged an entirely new type of product, which was some sort of weighted electronic hoola hoop.
If you’re a beginner that’s already started looking for a product to sell with Amazon FBA, then you may well have come across this niche already and thought it was a good product idea – and I don’t blame you. It’s got strong levels of demand, with some new sellers making upwards of £100k a month, and from a quick glance down the search results it looks like a relatively new niche that isn’t particularly saturated yet.
As somebody that can receive up to a hundred of my students product findings a month, I’m telling you now that the weighted hoola hoop niche is one to be avoided because I have had this product sent to me too many times to count. If I’m getting overloaded with the same idea from a very small sample of up and coming Amazon FBA sellers, think how many other new sellers are coming across this idea too, indicating that it’s a niche that’s soon about to become very overcrowded indeed.
Once you delve into this niche a bit deeper, there are other warning signs that this is one to be avoided. It’s a commodity product whereby the customer probably won’t care about branding, and it’s very difficult to visually differentiate with every listing looking almost identical. Most importantly, if you really do your homework, you’ll find that it’s actually a patented product, so selling it without permission will mean you’re infringing on someone else’s IP and the listing will eventually be pulled and removed by Amazon, leaving you with hundreds of units sat collecting dust in your garage.
Air Fryer Accessories
If you’re a big foodie, then you’ll undoubtedly have heard of the air fryer, which is a product that has surged in popularity over the past year as people have shared their recipes to make tasty but healthy food over TikTok and Instagram. This surge in demand has led to an entire niche starting to flourish on amazon, which is air fryer accessories.
Just looking at the search data over time for a generic phrase such as ‘air fryer accessires’ shows you just how explosive the growth in this niche has been, and that hasn’t gone unnoticed when people have been doing their product research. In the past month alone, I’ve been sent countless emails from students that are looking at the air fryer accessories niche, which does currently look very attractive.
So, why is the air fryer accessory niche on my 2023 bad product list if you’re just finding it now? Despite it ticking a lot of the boxes, the main thing that concerns me is how frequently this niche is appearing in front of my students doing their product research, which is a very small proportion of people out their across the country searching for a product to sell. In my view, this is a niche that is going to soon become very saturated, so unless you’ve got an awesome idea for how to stand out from the crowd and differentiate, it’s one that I’d park for now until you can get more clarity over just how competitive it’s likely to become.
Boob Tape
Boob tape is a product that has been around for decades, but for one reason or another, it’s only just becoming a popular product to sell on Amazon. The top seller is currently making around £30,000 a month, and given they’re effectively selling elastic tape which is cheap to produce, I’d wager they’re making at least £10,000 profit from this product alone.
While I won’t lie, looking through all the listings and images in this niche was quite an enjoyable experience, it did make it quite clear to me that this is a niche to be avoided if you’re just starting out with your research now, and that’s because it’s a product that’s very hard to differentiate given it’s effectively a roll of tape being sold.
Every listing looks more or less the same, which means that as the niche has become more competitive, we can see has resulted in sellers not being able to differentiate and compete on anything but price, which has hampered profits over time. Boob tape is also a commodity product, i.e., it’s not something that people would likely value paying a premium for over others, so for that reason, it’s one that I’d avoid if you’re currently doing your product research and looking for something to sell in 2023.
Those are 4 popular products that, despite looking quite good according to the data and even according to the product research tools themselves, are likely to result in you not achieving much success if you were to consider launching them in 2023. Remember to do Amazon product research the right way.
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