Small group workshops to help you learn, optimize, and grow.
.svg){kind=logo}
Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is Amazon’s fulfillment service, which allows sellers to outsource their order fulfillment and inventory management to the eCommerce giant. This service helps FBA sellers not only save time but also scale their business faster and expand their reach more effectively.
According to stats published by Amazon, adopting FBA can help sellers boost sales by an average of 20-25%. In 2022, 64% of merchants have adopted FBA, while only 22% opted for a hybrid model, which allowed them to combine FBA capabilities with their own logistics and customer service processes.
Finding the right products to sell on Amazon is crucial for success.
However, finding products with high demand and low competition can be challenging, especially if you don’t know where to start or have no idea what types of data to analyze. Using an Amazon product research tool helps make the process easier, as it performs tasks like keyword research, product tracking, and supplier research. This in turn helps FBA sellers determine a product’s profitability, as well as source products they can purchase at a low price and then sell for a profit.
Performing Amazon product research allows you to analyze and leverage market trends. You can conduct product research using an Amazon product research tool, which is a software solution that helps FBA sellers collect and analyze a variety of data. This data can include historical prices, price changes, monthly revenue, keywords, monthly sales, number of sellers, and more. By uncovering these datasets, FBA sellers can have a better idea of a product’s sales potential, including potential opportunities they can leverage for growth.
Using the right product research tool helps you identify the best products in your niche. It also helps you identify similar or other niche-relevant products. In addition, these tools let you keep an eye on your competitors, including what strategies they’re using and their products’ performance.
Many Amazon product research tools offer a range of benefits, including:
Threecolts’ Tactical Arbitrage is a product research tool that lets you find profitable products by comparing their prices on different websites. It’s a premium Amazon arbitrage software that searches thousands of stores quickly using its unique matching algorithms, provides you with in-depth analyses of competition and sales velocity, and lets you source best-selling products throughout the different sites that Threecolts supports through reverse lookup. Aside from these capabilities, Tactical Arbitrage helps you dive into bookselling through its Library Search feature, as well as perform Wholesales Research, which lets you upload a wholesale manifest from your suppliers. The software will then analyze that manifesto so you can find the best, most profitable deals.
We did not include Tactical Arbitrage in our list of free Amazon product research tools since it’s not technically free. However, if you want to give it a try and see how it can benefit your FBA business, it does come with a free 7-day trial.
Just because a product is popular doesn’t mean that it’ll guarantee your FBA business’ success. Say you’ve found a “good” product. It’s cheap and it’s something that you can sell for a profit. However, its quality may be subpar. If you decide to sell this product, you run the risk of getting negative feedback from customers, which will eventually translate to low sales.
Conducting Amazon product research lets you analyze various products and their performance. It also allows you to adopt a more data-driven approach, helping you eliminate any guesswork when it comes to determining what your target audience actually wants to buy. At the same time, it helps you identify more profitable products to sell. FBA product research also allows you to uncover potential issues with the product and help you come up with a strategy for developing and selling your products.
Knowing where to start with Amazon product research can be an equally challenging venture, given that Amazon has hundreds of millions of products available. In the previous years, almost 30,000 SMBs in Amazon Storefronts sold over 250 million items to millions of customers.
How do you determine which categories or products to focus on?
As an FBA seller, you want to sell good products that fit the following criteria:
In addition to the abovementioned criteria, it helps if you find a product that’s evergreen (low seasonality) so you can sell it year-round. Moreover, make sure that when researching products, go for ones that aren’t problematic. This means making sure they don’t have any existing trademark or legal issues.
One product characteristic that’s worth looking at is if a product offers opportunities for multiple product-related keywords. This not only helps you identify the search volume for certain related keywords, but it also helps you filter out keywords with high competition so you can optimize your keyword strategy.
Another way to look for potentially profitable products is to check reviews. Get insight from customers and see how your product can be positioned as a better solution overall compared to that of your competition.
With close to 10 million sellers globally, you’ll be facing a lot of competition on Amazon. This is why it’s important to have a niche and pick products that are relevant to that particular market. While you may have lower search volumes for such niche products, this will allow you to tap into a particular market while simultaneously edging out the competition. You can start by picking a product category, identifying an unsaturated niche, and using a free Amazon product research tool to help you find specific products you can sell.
When performing Amazon product research, you’ll want to look at the Best Sellers page. Doing so helps give you an idea of which products are selling really well and which niches have a lot of competition. Product research can also help you uncover new ideas for potential products to sell.
This product research tactic allows you to monitor the competition, including what keywords they’re using, how well their products are performing, and their products’ bestseller ranking and historical sales data. Knowing what other sellers are doing and what’s working for them can help you develop a data-backed strategy that will help you gain a competitive edge.
One of the most important aspects to consider when finding the right Amazon product research tool is knowing what your business goals and needs are. Furthermore, because each research tool offers different features, knowing exactly what your business needs helps narrow down the choices.
Below are some key considerations to keep in mind when finding the right Amazon product research tool for your needs:
The Amazon product research tools on this list are free. However, should you decide to sign up for a subscription to access more features, then you’ll need to consider your budget. Some product research tools are more costly than others. For beginner FBA sellers, opting for free Amazon product research tools or choosing a less expensive solution or subscription plan can be a good starting point. From there, regularly reassess your needs and the growth of your FBA business to determine if your current product research tool is up to scratch.
The types of data you’re looking for will influence the type of product research tool you’ll choose. For instance, you might find a tool that’s well-suited for identifying in-demand products with low competition, while another tool is designed to help you find niche products. Consider your needs prior to choosing a product research tool.
Do you need a tool with a lot of features or are you looking for something more specific? If you have more specific requirements, make sure that the tool you choose offers solutions for such needs. For example, your FBA business may require a product research tool that’s capable of doing both keyword research and product tracking.
Not all Amazon FBA product research tools are made the same way. Some require a bit of a learning curve, while others are designed to be beginner-friendly. When choosing a product research tool, you may want to opt for a solution that’s less complex and easy to use for everyone involved. If you want to scale your operations eventually, you can always switch to a more robust tool later on. Moreover, you need to consider the time it takes to use the tool. If you want something done quickly, then opting for a fast and easy-to-use product research tool would be your best bet.
Different solutions offer different tools and features. However, many Amazon product research tools share common tools including ones for trend projections, stock tracking, and expense catalogs.
Jungle Scout’s free Amazon product research tool lets you check average monthly sales numbers for specific categories. It’s a great tool to use if you’re planning on launching a new product. To use the Sales Estimator tool, you’ll need to key in the sales rank of the product you want the data of. Then, identify the Amazon marketplace in which your products are sold. Lastly, you’ll need to specify your product’s Amazon product category. Click the “Estimate sales” button to generate a product’s monthly sales data.
Pros
Cons
Helium 10 has a suite of Amazon product research tools designed to help you find winning products to sell on the platform. It has a free Amazon product research tool for Amazon FBA sellers in the form of a Chrome extension, which has 700,000 users. With this tool, you can quickly and easily perform product research to identify potential products to sell, as well as uncover potential selling opportunities. The free Chrome extension also gives you access to key information, such as product insights, sales estimates, and detailed reviews for potential products. You can also use this tool to identify a particular product’s strengths and weaknesses based on user reviews, as well as find suppliers and calculate your product’s profitability. Note that signing up for a free Helium 10 plan can give you access to its other Amazon product research tools including Black Box, which lets you discover high-demand, low-competition products, and Xray for ASINs, keyword research, and market insights.
Pros
Cons
AMZScout offers several free tools for FBA sellers, including its Amazon Sales Estimator tool, which lets you calculate your estimated monthly average sales. To start using the tool, go to Amazon.com and look for the product that you’re planning to sell. Find its best seller rank (BSR) and copy that number. Open the Amazon Sales Estimator tool and enter the following information: country, item category, and sales rank. Click the “Calculate Sales” button to get your estimate.
Pros
Cons
SellerApp is a popular Amazon product research and analytics tool that offers a range of free product research tools, including the following:
Pros
Cons
Use Google Trends to uncover the historical trends of potential products and give you a better idea of how interest in that certain product changes over time. Using the data you collected from your search, you can better identify which product keywords to use and when.
Pros
Cons
CamelCamelCamel is a free price tracker that monitors millions of Amazon products. It notifies you when prices drop so you’ll know the best time to source your products. It also lets you view Amazon price history charts for three price types, as well as product sales ranks.
Pros
Cons
Sonar is a free Amazon FBA product search tool that focuses on keyword research, so you can find the right keywords to improve your Amazon SEO and product listing visibility. It lets you find relevant keywords and their search volume from a database of over 180 million keywords generated by global Amazon shoppers. It also has a reverse ASIN lookup feature that lets you identify and monitor keywords used by your competitors. As of writing this article, the keyword tool only covers two marketplaces: Amazon US and Amazon DE.
Pros
Cons
Here’s a bonus: you can use Amazon itself as a product research tool. You can check various pages, such as its Best Sellers page or Movers & Shakers page, to get a good idea of potentially profitable products. Note that if you’re looking at the Best Sellers page, you’ll see products that are performing well, which may make it difficult for you to compete with them. Therefore, you may also want to check out Amazon’s other pages or lists like New Releases and Gift Ideas to find other winning products.
Finding a good product to sell on Amazon is more than just looking at sales figures and best seller rankings. It requires a good amount of research and doing so can help you find the right products that will set your business up for success. However, product research can be a time-consuming venture.
If you’re just starting out as an Amazon FBA seller or if you want to uncover more product opportunities, using free Amazon product research tools can help you save a lot of time and money. What’s great about these free product research tools is that many, if not most, of them offer options for upgrades, giving you access to more tools and more powerful features.
Aside from helping you find the right products, product research tools can give you an idea of what the competition is doing, let you determine market demand before making an investment, discover what other Amazon marketplaces are doing and what opportunities lie in these new markets, and allow you to leverage data so you can make better business decisions.
When you’re ready to scale your Amazon FBA business, use a marketplace management platform like Threecolts to build customized solutions for growing your business. Threecolts has a suite of products, such as SmartRepricer for automated pricing and DimeTyd Sellers for profit recovery, designed to help your business grow faster and become more agile.
As with any data analysis tool, the accuracy and reliability of the data provided can vary. Some tools will use algorithms or historical data to estimate sales numbers. Others will rely on real-time data. No tool or database will be exactly what you need - the idea is that you have enough reliable data to make smart decisions. Check out software review sites for customer comments - they’ll provide some (unvarnished!) opinions on what’s helpful and what’s not for each of the software tools you’re considering.
Yes, usually software tools set limits on what data they’ll provide with a free account. Understandably, they are running a business too! So you may get limits on the number of searches you can do, or you’ll only get a portion of the data you want to see, with the rest hidden behind a paywall. You can still get a good amount of actionable data, even when using free versions of tools, so don’t let these limits dissuade you.
It depends on the tool! Some will provide you with general analysis and data across all product categories, and others will offer data that drills down into niche segments. Be prepared that it may take some testing to find the right software tools for your unique business situation.
Browse through and read our other blog posts that are data-driven insights with our very own proprietary data and learn more on Mother's Day trends and best practices, Easter sales, price elasticity of demand, Amazon FBA fee changes, Amazon product title optimization, winter seasonal products, Amazon end of year sales, Valentine’s Day trends and best Amazon fulfillment centers by location and throughput.
