How to Find Profitable Products to Sell on Amazon

If you want to become an Amazon seller, one of the toughest steps is how to find profitable products to sell on Amazon. Here are our steps for getting started!

Finding profitable products to sell on Amazon can be overwhelming. In fact, it is often the most difficult step of the process. Many new FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) sellers get frustrated with scouring bestseller lists, hot selling items, analyzing product listings and competition because this process can be maddening and time-consuming. Some sellers aren’t even able to proceed beyond this step.

So, are you wondering how to find profitable products to sell on Amazon and what would the perfect FBA product looks like?

What Does the Perfect FBA Product Look Like? 

If you’ve read previous articles on this topic, they have probably recommended the following guidelines to look for in a product.

  • relatively high value per size/weight
  • not fragile/breakable
  • not hazmat

Using these limited criteria, you might be thinking that a diamond ring is light, expensive, almost non-breakable….it must be a perfect product. Right? Wrong…who buys their engagement rings on Amazon? You probably also read this:

  • Product Requirement: Similar Products Have a 5,000 Best Seller Rank or Smaller in Main Category

This guideline is ridiculous. Products with best seller rank 5,000 in Sports & Outdoors will perform less than sellers than ranked 15,000 in the Home and Kitchen category. And this…

  • No Brand Names within Product Category

Well, this is an interesting opinion… Some experts say that you can’t sell basketball balls, headphones, keyboards, bed sheets, car parts or any cell phone cases?

Once I find the time I’ll read that expertise to see how they came to that conclusion, I’m curious though it has nothing to do with common sense.

Another situation is when one product dominates the market and they have built enough trust and authority to draw most customers to them. Competing against them is pure masochism.

  • Lightweight (Preferably under 2-3 pounds)

Okay, this is true, but…by picking a lightweight item, you can also limit yourself. There are fewer competitors on large items. That being said, all the above is true but not enough for a profitable product to sell.

Before we start with this Step-by-Step Guide for How to Find Profitable Products to Sell Tutorial, one more thing. If you plan just to slap your own sticker to a Meat Claw, Baking Mat, Garlic Press, Selfie stick or any other generic product you’ll be warring with everyone else.  Everyone who learns someone’s magic formula starts selling the same mediocre crap.

To succeed in selling on Amazon, you simply have to be better and somehow unique.

I’ve learned hard way from my mistake. My first product failed and I was about to quit, but luckily my 2nd product ended up being a massive hit. What did I learn from my failure?

Buying a product based on instinct instead of based on detailed research is by far the biggest mistake you can make. A profitable product is a result of preparation and detailed research. In this article, I share a tutorial for what to sell on Amazon.

What to Sell on Amazon

When you’re choosing a product to sell on Amazon, there are multiple criteria I use to help determine what will be profitable. (Here is a spreadsheet I use to find out if a product will be profitable.)

Profitable products are:

First and most important, a product with good positive Return on investment (ROI)

The most common mistake that new seller makes is to calculate a profit margin without a ROI calculation. Let’s say for example you comparing two products, a knife, and a spoon.

The knife had a profit margin of 30% while the spoon had a profit margin of 20%. But then you look at the ROI for each and ROI for knives is 53% compared with an ROI of 120% for spoons.

With just looking at the profit margin, clearly you would make a mistake and have gone for knives, but the ROI calculation reveals how much better is to invest in spoons.

A product that can be sold for $20 or more…why?

There are sellers who are successful selling products $10 and under in Amazon’s Amazon “Small and Light” program. Competing with them can be difficult when FBA fees for you could average $4 and their fees are $1. These inexpensive products also may not have the best return on investment. Here is an example.

#1 Best Seller in Toddler Utensils

At first glance, this looks like a good product. It is small & light, and it sells well. It also has 2,364 reviews, a rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars, and 30 answered questions. However, take a look at Fulfillment by Amazon Revenue Calculator.

Money loosing product

This product has a selling price is $2.42 and FBA the fees alone are $3.01! This means this product would lose money, even if you get the product for free with free shipping to the Amazon fulfillment center.

2-3 products with few on without reviews on the first page…why?

There is not too much competition and it is easy to compete with products with less than 20 reviews. It Is VERY difficult to get organic reviews, especially after Amazon Update on Customer Reviews in October 2016.

No product with 1000+ reviews on a top spot

In this circumstance, this one item sells and dominates the market.

There is a demand on Amazon

It is very hard to create demand on Amazon, instead, try to leverage the existing demand. You should be sure your top three product keywords get over 100,000 monthly searches.

Jungle Scout is a very cool tool that allows you to search Amazon buyer keywords by how much the Amazon search volume for those keywords is trending.

Choose Products That are Non-Seasonal

When you’re looking to find profitable products to sell on Amazon, you’ll want to as yourself if the product that you’re considering be sold all year long? Stocking only seasonal products can limit your sales. For example, you don’t want to have hundreds of Easter Bunnies in stock at Christmas time. As a new seller, you can’t really afford to sell only three-month out of the year. You will have a bigger opportunity for sales with non-seasonal products that can be sold any time of year.

A good tool you can use to figure out the trends and demand for a particular product is Google Trends. For example, if you are interested in selling cutting boards, you can see that the interest and demand has increased over the years.

google trends for amazon product

One cool thing you can do is check the “Forecast” box to see the projected trend is for the particular product. You can actually see whether a product is getting more popular over time.

You can purchase including shipping for less than 33% of the sales price

In order to make a profit, you need this margin to be successful. Otherwise, there is no chance to be profitable.

Not fragile/breakable items

Breakable and fragile items can be difficult to ship and broken items can generate refunds or returns. To save yourself a headache, focus on selling non-fragile items.

Initial, trial purchase can be less than 200 units

If you want to invest more, I would buy 4 or 5 different products rather than a lot of inventory of one product. You’ll maximize your chances of success by having multiple possibilities for success.

No cheap Chinese electronic devices

Trust me, you will have more refunds than sales.

No branded products

Most trademarked brands will diligently protect their product lines and brands. For practical business, avoid reselling anything with a trademark to avoid potential legal issues and lawsuits.

If sourcing in China go for a simple product

If you keep the product simple, quality and functionality won’t be an issue. This can help you avoid unpleasant surprises from your supplier.

find profitable products

How to actually find profitable products to sell on Amazon?

When finding profitable products to sell on Amazon, here are a few proven methods to help you find the best products for you.

Simple, no headache method

This method consists of looking at the product on Amazon, finding a similar or better product on Alibaba, getting a quote, using the FBA revenue calculator to figure out total costs and margin, and then buying small test order to see if the product is successful. Then (if it is successful) order more. If it isn’t, don’t reorder and repeat the process with another product.

NOTE: This method can be easy, but it can also cause you to lose money. Do NOT do it.

Manual method #1

Go to Amazon and type in a popular search term like “Glass Measuring Cup” and see what the suggested results are before pressing enter. Take a look at those suggested items.

find profitable products to sell on Amazon

Browse until you find a product that complies with all the criteria. Go on Alibaba to source the product. Using this method, be ready for endless hours spent in front of the monitor.

Manual method #2

Spend some time and browse Amazon by category and subcategory. Take a look look at the top-ranked items. When looking at those lists, take a more in-depth look for products that have bad reviews. Click on those negative review and see what the complaints are.

Once you realize what the common complaints are for other products in this category, source a similar product that fixes those issues. For example, if your research tells you that flexible cutting boards ranked high, but the reviews state that users are unhappy with the really then mats, then look to source some heavier duty cutting boards. If you are researching tents and a highly ranked tent is reviewed that it is too big, look for a smaller, but comparable version to sell.

NOTE: Making a product that is better than others listed on Amazon is extremely difficult when capital is tight, molds for a factory are more than expensive.

Manual method #3

Spend some time and browse eBay and AliExpress listings to gather product ideas and compare those products with Amazon listings. Like with previous manual methods, this can also time-consuming. You can easily spend days without any progress.

Use a paid tool

Using the manual methods listed here can be effective, but can also be time consuming. However, did you know that there is a paid product tool that can make this process easier?

One of the best and most famous tools for researching the best products to sell on Amazon is Jungle scout. This tool does cost, but it can save you so many hours of work, that it is definitely worth the money. In a second, you will get thousands of potential products. This would take many, many hours if you were doing this manually.

So what filters do you set when you’re using the Jungle Scout Web App?  Using Jungle Scout you can set filters for:

  • Price range
  • Number of reviews
  • Categories you want to see
  • Best-seller rank
  • Weight
  • Average rating
  • Fulfillment type

When doing searches, it is extremely important to use your own filters and not someone else’s (like ones you’ve found online). It’s important use your own filters and play with the tool. Change filters until you find something like shown below.

what to sell on Amazon

This shows huge sales and only a couple of reviews…Bingo! If you are interested in learning more, read a Jungle Scout review.

Hire a freelancer

amazon product research fiverr

Still need ideas for products to sell on Amazon? Hire someone to help you do the research!

I use Fiverr often and bought many Fiverr gigs. While I personally have never bought product research on Fiverr, this is definitely an option. I suggest Fiverr if you still don’t know where to start, you need some fresh ideas or simply you are just lazy to do the research on your own.

As you can see in the image above, there are many “amazon product research” related gigs and some of them are with over 150 reviews. so it’s obvious that people buy those gigs a lot.

Fiverr can help you with Amazon keyword research and with photography as well. I personally hired a photographer from Fiverr for all my Amazon products.

Summary for Finding Profitable Products to Sell on Amazon

Like many potential business opportunities, getting started selling on Amazon can take some considerable research to be successful. While there are a few different methods you can pursue in order to achieve your goal, it is possible to pick  products that have great sales potential.

Once you have picked a product or products, then you can start with all the other steps to starting an Amazon FBA private label business.

36 thoughts on “How to Find Profitable Products to Sell on Amazon”

  1. I like it when people come together and share ideas. Great site, continue the good work!

    Reply
  2. Great post sir. Thanks for the 411. I am thinking about doing drop shipping through Amazon and my own website however its difficult to know which company to use. Looked at Aliexpress, Trendsgal, Doba, Dropshipaccess. Sigh. How to know which is best with Amazon? Which of your posts would help with this?

    Reply
  3. Very interesting article, helpfull and very usefull. Thanks a lot, is “Global Sources” website a reliable platform where I can find manufacturers that truly has their own factories in China?

    Regards,
    Mehdi.

    Reply
  4. Hi Peter – would you recommend purchasing the junglescout browser extension or the full software?
    Also, within keyword inspector, should I go to the trending keyword search?

    Reply
    • Hi, I am using Jungle Scout Web App and Keyword inspector mostly for reverse ASIN but I’m not the smartest guy on the world 🙂

      Reply
  5. Hi Peter,

    What do you mean by “2-3 products with few on without reviews on the first page…”

    I understand what “with few …reviews on first page” but what do you mean by 2-3 products? Do you mean 2-3 potential competitors?

    Reply
    • Hi Peter,
      Thanks for the detailed information you’ve provided. Very helpful.
      I’m new in this and trying to understand what do you mean here by ‘reviews on the first page’? what is the first page ? the page where you as a buyer land upon clicking on the product and scroll down to the review part? if so then any item with more the 10 reviews will show these reviews on the first page.
      Second question i have is what do you mean by ‘No product with 1000+ reviews on a top spot
      Only one item sells and dominates the market.’
      For example in the category ‘Babies’ there are Video Baby Monitors , do you mean that if there is an item that has more then 1000 reviews > not to enter into this kind of products?

      Thanks again

      Reply
      • Use your example and type “video baby monitors” in Amazon search bar. You’ll get 20 pages of results but we’ll look only search results from the first out of the 20 pages.

        Btw, number of reviews is the number next to the yellow stars.

        Now, there you’ll see that product on a top spot has 15k+ reviews, second product has over 2k reviews. We can say they are dominating the market and it will hard and expensive to beat them.

        Reply
  6. Hello, friend, now i have not brand, what do i do when i list my product on amazon UK ? could i fill into my store name on the “brand name”.

    Reply
  7. Good work, very helpful. I am not a newbie on Amazon and I have tried JS for some days, but still very hard to find a profitable product for sale, it seems that every products is highly competitive.

    Reply
    • Actually, for me, finding products is the easy part. Designing, photography, listing optimization and ranking up is the tough part.

      Reply
      • Hello Peter, Am John from Kenya,thank you for your post and it is so communicative, am planning to sell products on Amazon is there a way I can ship them to western countries? Or can i focus on offering services?which one between the two works best?

        Reply
  8. Thank you for sharing. This question may sound naive. Could you elaborate on ROI? Why would ROI of one product be more than other? Looking at spreadsheet is it sufficient to look at ROI over one month period only?

    Regards
    Allen

    Reply
    • This is copy-paste from my article https://dollarsanity.com/how-to-start-an-amazon-fba-private-label-business/

      Sample calculation to help you understand: Let’s say you have $1,000 to invest and have to choose between bottle and can opener.
      Bottle opener retail price: $15
      Sourcing, shipping, sent into Amazon costs: $5
      You can buy 200 units
      Amazon Fees: $5
      Total cost/unit: $10
      Profit margin: 33% ($15-$10)/$15*100
      ROI ($5/$5): 100% (profit margin/cost of goods) (at the end you have $2,000 in your pocket)
      Now let’s calculate can opener.

      Can opener retail price: $15
      Sourcing, shipping, sent into Amazon costs: $7
      You can buy 143 units
      Amazon Fees: $3
      Total cost/unit: $10
      Profit margin: 33% ($15-$10)/$15*100
      ROI ($5/$7): 71,5% (at the end you have $1,715 in your pocket)

      Despite the same profit margin, a bottle opener is obviously the better investment if both products move the same in a given period of time and you will earn $285 more with the same amount invested. The return on your investment is higher, so you will be able to reinvest that money sooner and have more inventory on hand earlier.

      Reply
  9. hey peter
    awesome blog thanks for sharing your knowledge
    i`m` pretty novice in businesses but started to make one on AMZ
    here is my confusing issue for example wooden hanger has both huge and few reviews on couple of first pages is that mean i should jump to other categories and stuffs?
    i mean a specific product could be found with huge sale and few reviews but there are some other products in the same page with tones of reviews…what i need to do ?
    thanks mate

    Reply
    • I suppose those low reviews listing are the one with low prices. They are recently launched and sellers trying to get some sales momentum by pricing lower than main competitors.

      Reply
  10. hello again more i search on unicorn smasher more get confused
    shall i buy EXACTLY the same product which has huge sale and few reviews ?
    two pretty similar product just next to each other on same page are really different in monthly revenue why?
    thanks a lot

    Reply
    • One is ranked for only few, or maybe only one keyword while another one is ranked well for almost all keywords related to the product.

      Reply
  11. Hey Peter
    hope you doing well
    its Yanoush again
    there are several pay tools on keyword inspector.com which one is more useful for the U.S. market place?
    Regards
    Yanoush

    Reply
      • Hi Peter,

        I find your article very helpful and straightforward. I’m still in the research phase and I also try to anticipate the next blocking points which I now perceive to be the: how to sell, as a company or as a person? I have a small business in Romania, can I use it to extend my sales abroad by using Amazon? Or, as for start it would be better to focus on selling items on my own account. Thank you in advance for your kind support!
        Best regards,
        Andreia

        Reply
  12. Hi , I’m jeanette. Love you helpful hint!!! I’m want to get started in this business. Just recently divorced. What to do?

    Reply

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