If you’re looking to become an online seller using Amazon, then you’ve no doubt wondered what items you should be stocking for sales. As Amazon experts, we’ve had to answer this question plenty of times to a variety of clients.
Even after pouring hours upon hours of research into the topic, it can be difficult to look through the market to find the right product to sell. To that end, we’ve put together this article with the aim of helping you decide what you should sell for your new e-commerce business!
What Makes Items Profitable
Before we dive right into what types of Amazon products are best-sellers, it’s important to understand why they sell so well. Think of it like cooking. If you’re missing certain ingredients or even condiments, it can impact the quality of the food. Therefore, it helps to have a recipe on hand and we’ve got that covered.
Fulfillment By Amazon and Onsite
One thing that’s crucial to the recipe of selling items on Amazon is making the process easy for you. That’s why we highly recommend you look into the Fulfilled by Amazon program that they offer. The reason is that it takes a lot of the headache out of the selling process and is perfect for people who are new to the e-commerce scene.
It’s perfect because using the Amazon FBA program means you won’t have to worry about handling delivery and shipping orders. All you have to do is send in your stock of items to one of Amazon’s fulfillment warehouses. They’ll then store and ship out your orders whenever you receive one. Additionally, FBA can handle a plethora of different customer service issues when the time comes. All you have to worry about is sourcing.
Despite all of these excellent services provided by FBA, it’s still quite possible you’ll want to store your stock somewhere else. Some people like being more hands-on with logistics and that’s understandable. Thankfully, Amazon offers a different service that can still help even if you’re not using FBA.
Onsite is effectively a middle ground between FBA and what is known as Fulfilled by Merchant (FBM). FBM is when you do all of the work for delivering and shipping orders. Onsite is a program that was created to help reduce the amount of money people spend on things like shipping costs and Amazon seller fees.
Essentially, you’ll be able to store your new products wherever you want, but Amazon will still handle things like shipping. This way, you have more control over your inventory and do things with more cost-efficiency. Moving on, let’s take a look at the other crucial ingredients that help to make a product profitable.
Demand
One thing that is a huge driver as to the profitability of a popular product is how much people want a certain item. Therefore, it’s a good idea to pay attention to what items people can’t stop talking about. However, it’s always a good idea to make sure these items aren’t simply fads and not investing too much in them.
That being said, there are a few other things to consider when talking about demand. For instance, you should be on the lookout for market gaps within item categories or niches. A market gap is essentially when the demand for a certain product by consumers hasn’t been met, or there’s too much of a product that people don’t want.
Market gaps can present excellent opportunities to make money. But then, what’s the best way to keep track of market gaps? How do you know which items on Amazon are sought after and which ones are avoided? Well, there’s a simple solution, keep an eye on product reviews!
As you research products and their categories, pay special attention to the reviews. “Why do this?” you might ask. Paying attention to the reviews of items can show you how you can possibly fill the gap in a market. For instance, let’s say you’re browsing a toy category.
You might notice that one of the only options for a certain toy has a lot of bad reviews. By looking at the reviews and seeing what people dislike about the item, you can find a way to fill the market gap. This can be done by looking for an item outside of the Amazon Marketplace.
From there, you can employ a strategy where you buy this superior version of the item on Amazon which has some demand. Once you should be able to sell your stock pretty easily, filling the market gap.
Keywords
Something that can play into your research is what keywords that you use. Many best-selling products will have keywords that generate a lot of traffic online. But how can these keywords make a product profitable? Well, it all has to do with how much traffic that these keywords can actually generate for your product.
Finding out how much traffic certain keywords receive might sound like a tricky process but that’s really not the case. There are a lot of different search engine tools and chrome extensions out there, however, a lot of them cost money or are locked behind some sort of subscription.
There are some free websites, but the quality won’t be on par with what the paid ones offer. But what do these keyword research tools do and why are they so important? They can really help you get a leg up on the competition, for starters.
These tools can gather data in a matter of seconds that would take a single person weeks of research. These tools can provide the following data: The number of monthly searches, related keywords, trending products for your keywords, frequently used words with similar phrases, and even competing products and their related keywords.
By gathering data like this you are incorporating one of the most important ingredients from the recipe for a profitable product. You can use these keywords when creating your own product listings. This will increase the chance of someone finding your product through searches.
Amazon Search Volume and Competition Levels
While it’s definitely a safe bet to observe the search volume of keyword searches via Google, it can be much more advantageous to find this volume on Amazon itself. The reason being that you’re selling products for your Amazon business, not google.
This data is more specific and will help you to pinpoint profitable products. You can do this the same way you’d use any other keyword data tool. Just make sure you find one that specifically works with Amazon. Once you’ve gathered the relevant data, you’ll need to see how much competition you’ll be dealing with in your particular product category.
This is important because if you know many people are selling an item or product, you can see if the competition is high or low. This will, in turn, help you determine whether or not it would be a good idea to enter that particular market within Amazon.
Determining the competition levels is not something that can be done with a tool, like with keywords. Instead, the product research needs to be done by yourself. Specifically, you need to be researching what is known as a Compound Annual Growth Rate or CAGR. In simple terms, this is the rate of return that’s required for an investment to grow.
In terms of selling on Amazon, the investment would be your products. People do research on different products all the time so you can easily find documents on the CAGR about your items by including keywords such as “CAGR” or “market growth” in your search.
This research will ultimately help you decide whether or not it’s smart to put a product or item out on the market. Especially if you find that your product has low competition.
Market Size
Another thing that’s extremely important when deciding what items are profitable is to look at the potential size of the market for your items. This ties in with demand because if there’s a big enough demand for your product, then it will no doubt have a large market.
You will have to consider just how big you can make your business if you plan on centering it around one item or product. If your research shows that the market surrounding your item is growing with no signs of stopping, then you might have an excellent opportunity in your hands. Always be sure to monitor the amount of demand associated with the items you intend to sell.
Avoid Competing With Big Brands
Unless you are some sort of marketing or business wizard, you should never go head to head with another big company. This is especially true if you know that Amazon brand products themselves are a part of a category you’re interested in. Honestly, going up against Amazon on their own platform is a horrible idea, you might as well be giving your business death by superior pricing.
Remember, you’re starting a small business here. Therefore, you’ll want to go up against other small businesses so that you have a fighting chance. By competing with sellers similar to yourself, you’ll have an easier time sticking out from them. Otherwise, it’s like an ant trying to stand up to a full-grown man.
The Best Selling Items On Amazon
Now, we’ll finally get into the subject you’ve been waiting for. Which categories of products are the hottest on Amazon right now? We’ll tell you by giving you each of the categories and then further break down what categories are perfect for the beginning Amazon seller.
The top categories are as follows:
- Electronics
- Clothing and Jewelry
- Toys & Games
- Video Games
- Books
- Cell Phones and Accessories
- Movies and Television
- Pet Supplies
- Personal Care
- Cameras and Photography
Before we break down some of the categories, you should know that we won’t be able to cover the electronics in this article. The reason being is that the electronics category is notoriously difficult to get into because there are huge companies, like Amazon, that you’d have to compete with for sales.
And because we’re aiming to educate people interested in starting up their own selling business, we’ll stick to the less competitive markets for the time being.
Clothing and Jewelry
Starting off with the next of amazon’s best-sellers, it can be a bit difficult to nail down completely what is going to be in high demand here. The popularity of different clothing items and jewelry constantly fluctuates based on seasonal attire. Therefore, things like sports shorts, short sleeve t-shirts, and yoga pants or shorts are incredibly popular during the summer and are hot items at the moment.
Things will obviously change once winter and fall roll around. The smart thing to do here would be to start selling things like sweaters, pants, and various other appropriate attire. The same thing goes for spring too. Also, face masks are top-selling products for the time being due to the pandemic.
This is also a pretty good place for sellers who are just starting out since a lot of beginners, as well as professionals, are a part of this category. It can be pretty crowded but at the same time, it’s a lot easier for someone to make their own private label products with a hig profit margin.
Books
This top-seller category has been booming as of recently. It has become super easy to self-publish books on Amazon and many people are taking advantage of that. Of course, you can’t talk about books on Amazon without talking about Kindle, which some people have a lot of money on.
In fact, people have been able to make thousands of dollars a month just by using Kindle. They effectively make it a passive stream of easy income. But it’s not a get-rich-quick situation, mind you. Getting yourself on this side of Amazon can result in either a full-time business or reliable side income.
There really is a lot of opportunities to be had in the books category of Amazon. If you’re someone who loves books and is interested in that industry, this is definitely a route you should consider.
Cameras and Photography
This is a category that new sellers might have an easier time getting into. It’s not nearly as crowded as the clothing and jewelry categories and there’s a broad range of items within it. This category covers things like home cameras, disposable cameras, and other gadgets like selfie sticks and rings.
The trick here is that you’re not trying to make a new camera, but rather a new accessory. We’re talking about things like lens caps, camera bags, lighting sources like selfie sticks, stands, and other similar products. These are all types of good products that are especially profitable in this category.
The only downside about this category is that there are some pretty big brands within it. However, it’s pretty easy to avoid them altogether and the sub-category of accessories itself isn’t dominated by the big brands, unlike the electronics category.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, finding the best items to sell on Amazon is a very involved process. You have to do a decent amount of research and legwork to figure out which categories are particularly profitable. And even then you’ll have to do more research about the different products and which ones have a good chance of returning value on the market.
Regardless if you’re doing retail arbitrage, dropshipping, or just trying to get a new product idea out there, we hope this cleared some things up about what you should sell.