This is a guest post from Jordi Ordoñez. Jordi is an Amazon seller consultant who has written and participated in La Vanguardia, Shopify, Prestashop, Radio Nacional de España, Capital Radio, El Español, Revista Emprendedores, Brainsins, Marketing4ecommerce, eCommerce-news.es, SEMRush and other media. He provides Amazon training at The Valley, Foxize, EOI, Esic and other business schools.

For Amazon sellers, it’s essential to conduct thorough product research before releasing a new item or even launching variations of your existing lines. The marketplace competition is fierce: Merchants face white hat and black hat sellers, plus Amazon Retail and Amazon white brands — sometimes all four in the same niche!

Without proper research, it’s challenging to find a lucrative product and matching supplier. To add to the complexity, you need to analyze your niche as a whole for useful industry insights. Thankfully, powerful tools like Helium 10 and Jungle Scout are available to simplify this undertaking. They’re designed to identify what works and what doesn’t, streamlining the product research process for you.

Along with explaining the value for your store, I’ll walk you through how to conduct Amazon product research and show how each tool works.

The importance of product research

To avoid running a generic Amazon seller profile, you need to conduct exhaustive product research. Anyone can find an item using Jungle Scout, source it on Alibaba, and start selling it on Amazon. That includes your competitors and even the item manufacturer, who almost always offers a better product and pricing by cutting out the middle man.

So, you need to uncover a more competitive option, and the only way is to dig deep into product research (hence the need for robust tools). This extends to your suppliers as well; a typical manufacturer that appeals to the masses might not be your best bet. You should also consider less mainstream options like Tmall, 1688, Spocket, HyperSKU, DH Gate, Made-in-china, and trades and fairs.

Based on my experience, I’ve pinpointed the characteristics of a great product, which I’ve broken down below.

Quickly sourceable

You can find great manufacturers in many countries like Turkey, Poland, Mexico, Hungary, India, or Pakistan, to name a few. I personally love sourcing from countries that are connected to my own by road and train so I have at least two alternatives to freight shipping to ensure prompt delivery. After all, if the product performs great on Amazon, you don’t want to wait three or four weeks to refill it.

Patentable

Let’s say you analyze the market, settle on a great idea and manufacturer, and build your product. You’ll want to protect your idea so the same manufacturer or other clients don’t steal or copy it, so go for patentable ideas.

Pricing

The right product for Amazon FBA is a $25–$30 tier product that’s small and shippable in two days. However, if you opt for high-ticket products, that means fewer competitors and bigger profits. Think outside of the box when it comes to product research.

Variations

A product should be able to grow and diversify. After all, it’s easier to launch a new variation than an entire product.

Expandable categories

Finally, try to find products that can expand to other categories or subcategories, or even beyond Amazon. If you sell a sports item, for example, look to sell it on Walmart, Decathlon, Sprinter, Tradeinn, and other online marketplaces.

What is Helium 10?

Helium 10 is a powerful suite of tools designed for Amazon sellers. It provides a range of features to help you optimize your eCommerce business, including product and keyword research, listing optimization, and much more. Helium 10’s product research tool is particularly useful for finding profitable items to sell on Amazon. As an Amazon seller myself, I use both Helium 10 Black Box and Xray, which is a Helium 10 Chrome Extension.

What is Jungle Scout?

Jungle Scout is another popular tool designed for Amazon sellers, with a focus on product and keyword research. Their tool provides detailed information about items like sales data, pricing, and reviews to help you find profitable products that meet your criteria.

Both Helium 10 and Jungle Scout’s tools contain millions of products on their databases, but the key to finding great ones is how you analyze the data.

A step-by-step guide to Amazon product research

Step 1: Define your product criteria

Before you start your product research, you must define your product criteria, including product category, price range, sales volume, competition level, and the like. These help you narrow your search to find products that meet your requirements. I myself prefer to stick to categories I already know or products I have experience with. Avoid categories like:

• Promotional categories: The ones that have 50% or more of their products discounted
• Amazon Retail populated categories: Unless you have a strong brand or a different USP, selling something like coffee, which has lots of established brands under Amazon Retail plus Happy Belly and Solimo (Amazon’s own brands), is a bad idea
• Chinese sellers populated categories: Low pricing and margins, listing hijacking risks

Step 2: Use Helium 10’s Black Box tool

Once you’ve defined your product criteria, you can use Helium 10’s Black Box tool to search for products that meet your requirements. (I prefer to start my journey using Black Box and Xray, then move to Jungle Scout.)

Black Box is a powerful tool that allows you to filter products based on a range of criteria, including product category, sales volume, and price range. It also provides data on factors like estimated monthly revenue, review count, and ratings.

The filters I like to apply are:

• High growth products
• Low rating products
• New products skyrocketing sales
• Large/Oversized products with no SFP

You can learn more about using Helium 10’s filters strategically in this article I wrote.

Consider other markets as well. According to Jungle Scout’s “State of the Amazon Seller 2022” report, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Australia, and Japan are Amazon’s fastest-growing marketplaces.

Of course, always look for new ideas and angles in product research. Helium 10 has some great posts on how to find keywords with a high search volume and a low number of indexed competitors quickly, or how to use their tools for competitor analysis.

Step 3: Analyze product data using Jungle Scout

After you’ve listed potential products with Helium 10’s Black Box tool, you can turn to Jungle Scout to analyze the data further. Jungle Scout provides sales data, pricing, reviews, and other critical product information. That can help you identify items with high demand and low competition. Jungle Scout’s database is 475 million products long and growing, so you’re all but guaranteed to find a lucrative investment.

The keyword research tool is also great to help you calculate margins based on the products’ related keywords cost per click (e.g., broad match, exact match keywords) so you gain a more detailed look at your potential profit and loss.

Step 4: Validate your product ideas using Helium 10’s Xray tool

Now that you’ve identified potential products using Jungle Scout, you can embrace Helium 10’s Xray tool to validate your ideas’ profitability. Xray uncovers data on factors like sales volume, revenue, and competition level and allows you to analyze the keywords being used for top-ranking products in your category.

I like to look for:

• % of Amazon Retail listings in the niche
• % of Amazon Brands in the niche
• % of popular/known brands in the niche
• % of Chinese sellers in the niche (nearly half of the top third-party sellers on Amazon are based in China)
• If my competitors use lots of variations
• Daily Sales Velocity to rank on page 1
• If there are any products with only a few reviews on page 1 (this implies I can generate sales without having lots of reviews and rank on page 1)

Other elements you need to check manually include:

• The number of sponsored products on pages 1 and 2
• The presence of any sponsored brand videos
• If your competitors use A+ pages
• If your competitors use discounts

Helium 10’s Chrome Extension is also useful to download, as it reveals ASIN per ASIN and the 5,000 main reviews on your competitors so you can explore bad reviews to pinpoint product weaknesses.

Step 5: Finalize your product selection

After analyzing your data using Helium 10 and Jungle Scout, you should have a strong list of potential products that meet your criteria. It’s essential to evaluate each of them carefully and choose the one that fulfills your requirements. Consider factors like profit margins, competition level, and demand when making your final selection.

To search existing products and their popularity, Helium 10’s Xray has an “Alibaba Suppliers” feature that checks for items on Alibaba, while Jungle Scout boasts its own supplier database. You can also use the free Aliprice Chrome Extension to reverse look up product images on Alibaba, Tmall, Aliexpress, JD, 1688, and other Asian Marketplaces.

Conclusion

You need to introduce new products regularly to keep your store’s catalog fresh and your profit margins healthy. Performing Amazon product research with Helium 10 and Jungle Scout is an efficient way to find lucrative items to sell on Amazon.

Define your product criteria and learn your niche to build a list of options. Then, narrow it down through manual research using Helium 10’s Black Box tool or Xray extension, as well as Jungle Scout’s product database.

Remember to evaluate each candidate carefully and select the product that offers the best profitability and has both low competition and high demand. By relying on these tools, you’re sure to find your next Amazon bestseller.