Amazon Product Research - Step by Step Tutorial

hi everyone thank you for watching today's video I'm Jelena and today I'm going to talk to you about product research this is one of the hottest topics we've ever seen amongst sellers and a lot of questions come related to product research so we decided to make a comprehensive tutorial on how we do product research for our own Amazon brands so this is a video that's going to share a lot of values they tuned through the end and hopefully you will improve your product research process too so let's dive right into this basically we use helium tan tool which is a paint throw so we use this tool in order to do our product research right it's a tool that can give you under certain criteria very good examples of what you can some product ideas that you might be able to verify and we're going to explain to you in details how to verify that this product idea is actually viable so this is very very important a lot of sellers don't actually pay attention to this part that a product idea should be verified before they even contact their own suppliers or initiate the order and just move that shipment over to Amazon warehouse so let's start right into this basically how should you start your product research if you absolutely have no idea what to sell if you are if you are 100% new seller and there are a lot of questions open and a lot of doubts and dilemmas in your head so let's try and make this a little bit easier we understand how it feels like and just basically even if you are like a very experienced seller you sometimes might be doubtful whether a certain product idea is worth the try or not so in either way we're gonna try and help standardize this process and help you understand step by step what you need to do in order to get really strong understanding if this product is your winner product or not so I have logged into my helium 10 accounts into the black box tool ideally if you have no idea like what the product is that you want to sell then choose a category pick a category that's close to you by heart like for example I have a dog and I'm very interested in the pen supplies category I just love products that are related to pet supplies I don't really know exactly which plant should be my winning product but I am very interested in these types of products so I'm going to go ahead and choose the category that I have some interest in why is this very important it's very important for you to have a strong interest in that category because you will be building a brand around it so if there is a good product that you can find a winner product is going to be profitable for you and at the same time in a category that you're very interested in then this is something that you should definitely have as your start so I'm going to go ahead and for example choose the pen supplies category this is going to be the first criteria that I set for black box tool the second criteria what we want here is the review cut we want to make sure that this product sells so basically at least let's say 200 reviews is something that we want to take into consideration ideally if you have a very good review strategy in place one or two customers out of ten that 10 products that sold are actually going to end up leaving a review so this means that if your products idea in your category has 200 reviews this actually means that it has sold over 2,000 times so that being said we don't want to leave this filter out and not not use it at all which is going to say that it should have at least 200 reviews and here in the review rating I'm going to choose between two and a half and maximum is going to be four now exactly why did I use two and a half between two and a half and four simple because we want to uncover products that have a very good opportunity to improve so let's just search and I'll explaining and an example shortly okay so here we have more than 200 products found so helium 10 has found some pretty interesting product opportunities for us let's see this first one this is a nylon mesh muzzle I'm going to click on the Aysen which will lead me down directly to the link of this part of the page so ideally what we want to go what we want to do is go straight ahead to the review section that's the social brew section and this is where you will learn most about this product type here you can see that this pet this Dawg muzzle has an adjustable strap and it's made what it was made of and in certain characteristics of benefits of this product solid listing but let's see the reviews why they were so bad this product was solved while it was selling now it's no longer available for some reason but while it was available it was selling with wrong with with very bad reviews which is which is unfortunate so as you can see 40% of the reviews were actually one-star reviews so I'm guessing that this product wasn't really high in quality so if you don't if you choose to sell products that aren't hundred percent quality it's going to bite you in the butt sometime in the future so do not do this if you choose to sell a product make sure it's a high quality product because reviews are everything on Amazon one battery you can actually kill yourselves and this is the kind of risk that you don't want to take so why did we just scroll down to the review section we want to learn what kind of things what kind of functionality could be improved upon this product if there's like a we might be able to add or maybe change the design maybe they didn't use a certain color maybe there was something else that plants that the customers wanted you to wonder this product to have that it's not having at this point like for example people wrote that this product is cute but it will go straight into your dog's eyes they have complained that it's a small size they have complained that it doesn't work that it slides right off the buck oh this one doesn't really explain what is what was bad that it didn't fit ok the size is wrong the strap on would not stay on does not adjust properly and it's like ten sizes too small so like I've just read five things and I could already conclude that the seller there's two things wrong they didn't communicate the sizing properly which is something that you can actually it's a very sensitive thing if you have a product that has sizing or some kind of manure instructions attached to it then it's a at this at this level you have to make sure that you have very strong customer support before and during the purchase so that you kind of like prevent these things from happening and misunderstanding around them around the size and if there is a product that has a size category that's a very strong specific of this products then you have to make sure that the return and we found product process is very simple and straightforward for customers because they already are kind of like disappointed they have waited for this product to arrive and then if the sizing is wrong and then they're already kind of like are unhappy and the only thing you can do to make them happy is to provide them a seamless very easy to follow a process around product returns of refunds so this seller didn't do this second thing they did did wrong was to create a product that's not high quality like strap that will not stay on on dogs that you have to that you have to like you know keep Mazal there is a very missed opportunity for your core functionality of this product which is like it should stay on if it's it was put on so let's see what else ideally so you should take your time you should read every single of these bad reviews not just one that were rated as one star but also two and three stars and four stars even to find what are the most common objections that the customers had about this product opportunity so if they like for example if you decide that there's there's an additional functionality that you can improve upon this product then this is 100% something you should do make sure to find gaps in the market that you can fill and kind of like problems that you can solve with your new improved product and this is called product tuning this is a phase in a product life cycle it's called product tuning this is something that usually has made a lot of money for some Amazon sellers who are very savvy around this process you don't have to know a lot you just have to take your time and read through all these reviews make like a table of suggestions of what could be done to improve upon this product for example you know that this product sells because it has more than 200 reviews so this means that probably was sold anywhere between 1,500 and 2,000 times so this is a very good product opportunity that will sell so if this is a there is a certain functionality that you might be able to improve upon make sure to do so let's just say that for example this is a product that we have an idea how we could improve and there is a gap in the market and you know how you would do this and for example you have an idea who might be your supplier for this type of product how do you verify that this product idea is actually viable the dis world be profitable for you that will provide you with the cash flow that you need to build a brand first of all you have to be clear with yourself what you want to achieve are you looking for a product that would you will just like sell as a side income or you just need a product that will that will be your flagship product so that you can build a brand upon it if you're looking for some kind of side income sidekick project product it will occasionally occasionally bring your sales then it's not a big issue if it's in a competitive category but if you're building a brand then you if you come into this project with an idea of building a brand long term whether that would be a business that you will later I'll sell or you will scale it up to six seven figures stuff like that then it's a long term idea and this approach with the product research should be long term for you even if it takes you months do product research right by all means take your time because this is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle that a lot of sellers are missing and that's why they have like you have examples where sellers try and then they keep on trying and that they're like sold 12 different products and the 13 product was actually successful and they don't even know why and the reason for it is because they liked process behind it and structure around actually looking for the right product opportunity and they maybe fell in love with their product idea they are emotionally attached to this product type and they just won't admit to themselves it's not gonna work so don't be that person instead of that listen to the now seven elements I'm going to share with you that you should use to find the right product opportunity the first element is the primary product PS our primary product PS are basically primary product is something I call primary product is something that's basically you've chosen to be your product idea for example this is going to be your primary product alphabets mesh nozzles nylon mesh puzzle is going to be something that we want to sell let's say for example now we have discovered that there's a functionality that this product lacks that we're going to fix so we're going to choose this product to be our primary product to verify this idea we're going to check what the situation is with the current competition of this product so let me go ahead and use this product Aysen to run it through the runner tequila that actually I'm not going to use a cinnamon to search through keywords let's find more qualified ideas through keywords since we know that our product is a dog muzzle this is going to be the phrase that we're going to use as our core keyword to search for a competition second so basically what we're going to do is search the whole niche and choose under these given keywords what is the most what what let's say two or three products are the closest to the one that we want to sell these will be our competing products our primary product is a dog muzzle so I'm going to go ahead and type it in the search term and search for some suggestions by Helium them okay so here we have 184 products found and I'm going to go ahead and download this excel file because it will be a lot more manageable and easy to use when it downloads feel free to pull it up and open and open this file and let's start analyzing okay the first element like I mentioned like I said is the primary products BSR let's quickly sorry let's quickly go back to the helium fan tool and find our recreate the search that I did the first time so that we can find our alphabet dog muzzle we want to make sure that we have a strong understanding what this product PSR is basically the higher your PS are which means the higher the number lower the ranking this is something to keep in mind if you count 200 really rating meaningful 2.54 I think that this was the search that's why they're out sorry about that I was supposed to search for it through the products product tab sorry let's quickly recreate it once more okay so basically product category was pet supplies the rear view count was mainly two hundred weight point five for search these were the conditions so I'm hoping to find it again okay so here it is our primary product is alphabets national zoo so BSI ranking for this product is very very low so ideally you want to have your PS are less than a hundred and you want at the same time it want to have less low reviews low BSR which means two hundred and fifty thousand that's like extremely low and at the same time low number of reviews could actually mean a good product opportunity I'm going to explain into more details this so for example if you have a primary product and it has a little be s R and as somewhere let's say between 200 and 500 reviews that are also bad and you have read that found some flaws in this product you might be able to fix this might be a good opportunity you might be onto something but we have to check how do you compare basically what I did was the previous step I went ahead and I searched for dog muzzles and then I downloaded the list of all these competitive products and brands that are also selling doll muzzles and here helium 10 has supported us a long list a detailed list of all these muscles that other sellers are selling what do we want to know out of all these all this information what is something that you should focus on this is the review count so you want to make sure you add the and filter out all products that have more than a thousand views want to know how competitive this product is if you have more than three competing products that have more than a thousand reviews this is an extremely competitive category so it's important to remember more than 1000 reviews if you have more than three products that have more than thousand reviews this is an extremely competitive category in this case we have four different products that are very selling really really well they have more than 1000 reviews and just let me see how many of them have more than 500 yes definitely we have 10 products that have more than 500 reviews this really means it's a very very competitive category at the same time we have products some of the products that have their BS are less than 1000 which I'm guessing in this category is very very very high ranking like for example we know that these two products they're actually killing it in the market and probably their reviews aren't so bad either if you just go ahead and search for them you will see that it all fits in so basically this now we have compared that PSRs and number of reviews for your own product and for your competing products are not very favorable for this product this would be the point where we will kind of give up on this product and just go ahead leave the product and find another product opportunity you should repeat this process for as many times as you need to until you go ahead and find actually a good niche for your bride so as you can see this product has a pretty good product price awesome reviews also number if you use a lot of answer questions they're very there it's the building the brand around had supplies so this is something that someone's already been doing for a while so if you however want to make sure that this is the right product and you are a hundred percent sure that this is that you want something you want to sell then make sure you have a long term strategy in place and that you have enough patience to work with zero profitability for months and like Bentley it in terms of workforce and someone to help you out with the brand and with marketing and that you have enough time to dedicate to the brand that you have enough understanding around how business works in general especially in a predefined business models such as Amazon FBA so that you can kind of like hold on to this battle for as long as it takes for you to build up and have traction so this product has in our sales velocity so that it can start showing up on the first page of the search results which is usually when things start to kick in and basically the profitability starts for you however if you are not on user if you're a new seller then definitely you should avoid competitive categories because more experienced sellers know exactly the tips and tricks and stops that you should do to get around with with a certain product and just fight its way through the ranking and they usually have enough funding and enough work for us for for them to pull out this project so my kind of like recommendation if you're a new seller you should avoid competitive categories products like these that have really high PSR rankings that you where you have a competition that has high BSR ranking and at the same time huge amount of reviews then this is something for you to avoid if you are an experienced seller or already a businessman who is trying to enter the Amazon FBA market and has enough patience time resources funding in order to stay on the market for as long as it takes for you to build a successful brand then by all means go ahead and do it there there are always things that competitive competition is doing wrong you should watch them and learn from them but not copy that but do better than that so it all depends on the kind of situation that you are currently on at this point we have went through the first four elements of choosing your right product basically first element is your target your primary products PSR which was our in in this case this was our primary product at the Alpha pet nylon mesh nozzle we know that the bs are in the number of reviews is actually pretty cool for our primary product but in order to understand whether this product idea is viable you have to compare it to a couple of other products which we have did we have done and we have actually found out that there is more than 10 products with a huge amount of reviews we're pretty strong vs our ranking already they they are selling and they have a lot of reviews and it's a very competitive market for us so these covers the next three elements of product research which is let me repeat again first one is BSI of your primary product we have checked that second one is the PSR of your competing products which is let's say at least top three products who should have less than a thousand reviews and VSR should be more than let's say 500 at least if it's in a competitive category which in this case we have enough we have enough proof that this is a very competitive category a lot of part of said combination of PSR and the number of reviews is less than favorable third element is the number of reviews for your primary product idea which is in this case it's cool but if we compare it to the rest of the competition there's more than enough of them that have more than 500 reviews so this is some this is a point where we would kind of like stop with this product research and stop contemplating about this product idea because it's already too competitive there isn't enough place where else if we're a new seller so that would be the four elements the fourth elements being number of reviews of your competing products the fifth element of finding a great product opportunity is the price for example you should really pay attention to what the price is because your your price should be strong enough to cover all these expenses that you have before hand and at the same time feeds your business enough cash flow so you can grow and potentially expand your brand so from my experience product price shouldn't be lower than $17 this is something that's like consider the rule 17 up to 70 is something that would be somewhere in the middle would be perfect simply because you don't want to make it too low because if the product price is too low then you're gonna have to sell tons of it and deal with reviews and deal with the returns and all kinds of things if a product is too cheap you just have to you're just gonna have to produce and sell so much of it in order to kind of like earn any kind of profit so you don't want to make the price too low let's keep it at 17 at its lowest as a baseline price and you don't want to at the same time keep it too high unless you are very very specialized like for example brands that sell things and they have high quality sayings it's perfectly fine for them to sell something at a $300 but at the same time products they're a little bit higher range in terms of price usually don't have a lot of velocity and sales velocity is the number of sales per month that you have for your product and if you don't have a lot of sales per month on a certain product then you think so you're gonna move really slowly so ideally between 17 and 70 and my experience has proven to be the perfect price for your product and this is the range that you should kind of like a strive strive around to have for your product the six elements of your products opportunity research is pl potential product listing potential now ask yourself that this product has a very good potential to build a brand upon what if this product opportunity is actually the winner if this product is some product is going to sell so much that you will build your brand around it if this product is some kind of like product that is very hard to build your brand's around that this is something to give up they give up on if you have a long term strategy so if you want to build a brand make sure to choose a product that is that has a very well-defined audience right for example for pet supplies for dog owners you have 100% clear understanding what the audience is and how can you market through these people outside of Amazon to like ideally if you use Amazon FBA and things really kick start and everything works what works out well then I like later on you're gonna want to build your own e-commerce website where you will build your own try themself to that I might have an email list that you will market to and your Facebook page with a lot of lights and this will be multiple streams of traffic for your website and in that case for example Pet Supplies category is pretty cool because you know exactly what dog owners need what they want what they like what they did like and just generally how to build content for the for the brand so basically think think thoroughly through whether this product idea that you have is something that you can build a whole brand around whether this would be a brand just for doll muzzles or this would be a pet supplies brand that will sell not only done puzzles but everything else for dots or etc so make sure to think about the audience that the potential audience that who will kind of like want to have this product and they're like so there's like see well you should have a very clear understanding of who they are so that you have a clear understanding of how to market to them that's the six elements of great product opportunity and the seventh element of course is the profit margin you can't move further without the profit margin so there is a great tool by Amazon called the FBA calculator and I'm going to share the link to this tool in our video description and this tool is used to calculate your profit margin for a product idea that you have so for example if you have like we do how do we have chosen this primary product alphabets mesh nozzle we can go to FBA calculator enter the Aysen to the calculator and then we will calculate what the average profit margin is compared to the price that this product carries and and everything else I'm going to shoot another video on how to use this tool but to shoot a short video about it so basically for now I'm going to share this link in the description the topic is profit margin so basically your profit margin recommended should be anywhere between 25% and 40% of the of the price that you sell the product so if your products cost $15 your margin should be at five dollars out of these 15 and this is something that's proven to be viable and there are methods in which she kind of like break down this profit margin into one portion of its gonna go in advertising the other portion is going to go into creating a better product imaging and just around building your brand and stuff like that so it all depends it all depends of the course in which she had in mind when he first started doing the product research so that being said let me wrap it up seven elements the first element being BSR of your primary product second element BSR of your competing products third elements reviews of your primary product the number of reviews four elements the number of reviews of your competing products fifth element is the price which should be between 17 and seventy dollars sixth elements potential to build a brand around this product and seventh element what is the profit margin that you will calculate through the FPL ket calculator by Allison so let me know how this goes try this system of ours that has proven to be wildly successful for us and good luck thank you for watching