3 Steps for Earning £100,000 Through Amazon FBA:
In January I launched a new Amazon FBA product, and after just 3 months of selling, it had made me over £90,000 in revenues and £20,000 in profit!
What made this situation even sweeter, was that I was the only seller of this particular product, and because of the product research method that I used to find this particular product, I was the first seller to market, which gave me a huge head start when it came to getting reviews and making as much money as possible. The good news is that today, I’m going to be running through the strategy that I followed to finding that product, so that you can mimic it when you want better Amazon FBA product research results, hopefully allowing you to find and sell a killer product before anybody else.
Step 1: Finding A ‘Base Product’ That Interests You
Finding and then selling a successful Amazon FBA product is always made a lot easier if the product that you want to sell is in a category that interests you, because often it means that branding and improvement ideas for the product come a lot easier to you. With this in mind, when I first began my Amazon FBA product research, rather than mindlessly scrolling through lots of random product categories on Amazon, hoping to find something half decent, instead I decided to only look for top selling product ideas in the categories that were naturally of interest to me.
To make this part of the process as painless as possible, I used Helium 10’s Black Box tool, which effectively works a bit like google – except instead of you being shown websites after plugging in your search criteria, you’re shown Amazon products that you can sell. To use it, login to helium10.com, select ‘Black Box’ from the tools dropdown, and then start looking through and ticking all of the categories and sub-categories that you think will contain products that interest you. Here’s a complete Helium10 guide if you want to know more.
Once you’ve ticked at least 5 of these, change the minimum monthly revenue to be 5,000 or more, set your minimum price to 15, and then press apply, where a list of top selling Amazon FBA products that are in categories that interest you, should load. Take a look at each product in the results, and for every idea that you think will be fun to sell and that you’ll be able to get creative with, add it to your short list. As soon as you’ve got 10 unique products ideas that all interest you, you can move on to the next step, which is where you’ll hopefully be turning a product idea into something tangible that you can actually sell.
Step 2: Use Suppliers To Turn Your Shortlist Into Exclusive Products
Once you have a shortlist of product ideas that you think you’d enjoy selling with Amazon FBA, head to Alibaba and start searching for lists of Amazon FBA suppliers of each product that you marked down in your list. The reason that you’re doing this now is because you’re going to be using each supplier that you message to help you a list of product ideas into a list of actual products that nobody else is offering on Amazon yet.
So – to do this, go to Alibaba.com type in the name of the product that it is that you want to sell, and then for each supplier that appears that looks half decent, press the contact button and then send the following message:
“Hello, my name is [Janson] and I am very interested in your [name of product]. However, I am also interested to know what other products you have in development that are shortly due for release, please can you let me know?
If you can aim to send this message to at least 5 suppliers for each product idea that you have, after a few days, you’re going to find your inbox packed full of emails from suppliers where they are literally handing you brand new product opportunities – in categories that you’re interested in – on a plate. And because you used my secret strategy of asking for products that are still in development, the chances of you being first to market with product that you’re told about is extremely high – increasing your chances of success, and increasing the amount of profit and market share that you’re going to be able to take on Amazon.
Before you start getting excited and placing pre-orders for a product that nobody else has yet – you do still need check 2 more things, which is the product niche’s general demand and whether it’s going to be profitable for you to sell.
Step 3: Verifying Profitability & Demand!
Every single Amazon FBA product that you want to sell, needs to have existing category demand in from shoppers on Amazon. Before you even think about placing an order with a supplier, you need to make sure that you check this, no questions asked. Go to Amazon – search for the product niche that most closely resembles what it is that you want to sell, and then when the page has loaded, run the X-Ray tool, which is part of Helium 10’s Chrome Extension.
Once you’ve pressed the X-Ray button, you’ll be presented with a pop up that will tell you exactly how many units are being sold each month by sellers in your chosen category, as well as how much revenue they’re generating. At a minimum, you should expect to see demand of at least £5,000 or more from 5 or more sellers – if you don’t see this, and the numbers are all sub 1,000, then unfortunately, there’s not going to be enough demand from customers for you to make a decent amount of profit, regardless of what the product is and how early you are to find it compared to others.
If it does look like there’s sufficient demand, then the final thing for you to check before you can start getting excited, is the profitability. Selling your own Amazon FBA product is an amazing feeling, but it’s one that will quickly become a painful one, if the product isn’t able to make you a profit.
By messaging the supplier that gave you the product idea in the first place, you can quickly understand how much it’s likely to cost to get your product manufactured and then shipped to an amazon warehouse on a per unit basis. Once you’ve got that information, either load up and fill out my free Amazon FBA profit calculator – which you can download here – or use the Helium 10 profit calculator that’s a part of the Chrome Extension instead. If you’re struggling and need help in calculating your profit, before proceeding further make sure that you ask your accountant to double check your figures for you. If you still don’t have an accountant, I recommend Osome for Amazon FBA businesses. Here’s a discount link if you’d like to try them.
Once you’ve filled out the calculator, if you see a profit margin of more than 30% before ads, then this is where you can start getting excited and using your creative juices to think about how you can brand the product and make the offer so irresistible to customers that they want to buy immediately.
And that is the exact strategy that I followed to find an Amazon FBA product that made me over £20,000 in profits in 3 months before any of my competitors even had a hint that it was going to become available.
1. I used Helium 10 to help me put together a list of product ideas to explore further.
2. I then spoke with the suppliers of these ideas and asked what other products they had that were soon to be released.
3. I made sure that the product niche actually had demand, and the product would make me a profit on Amazon – that’s all there is to it, it’s a very simple strategy that very very few people think to use.
I hope that this product research tutorial gives you lots of motivation and a new release of energy to go out and find a product that helps you to smash it. If you’re still struggling to come up with any ideas or move forwards with your product research, then check out my Amazon FBA mentorship programme the Smashers Academy, which is a beginner to advanced training programme that comes with my full support, and aims to get you ready to sell on Amazon in as little as 12 weeks.
If you want to know more about my Amazon FBA journey as a seller and as a mentor, read my blog post on My 5-Year Journey with Amazon FBA: What The Gurus Don’t Tell You.
If you want to learn how you can create an Amazon FBA business yourself, then check out my free training where I’ll teach you everything you need to launch your first product on Amazon and scale to $5,000+ in monthly profit.
Or if you’re ready to begin your journey and want to start with the best chances of success, apply to become a member of HonestFBA’s training programme where you’ll receive guidance & support from our team of 7-figure Amazon FBA seller experts whenever you need it.
