Amazon Product Research: The Key to Making Over $10,000 Per Month

amazon product research

Last updated on February 7th, 2022 at 05:07 pm

I spent 10 days back in the States for the holidays and had the opportunity to share with family about my Amazon business and what exactly it is that I do.

Many are curious and interested to know what I’m selling.

I mean who wouldn’t want to know what can potentially generate tens of thousands of dollars per month?

When I finally explain what I’m selling, I’m usually met with blank stares and raised eyebrows…

“You sell what?”

You see, it’s hardly ever a super sexy product that is going to make you money with this business. Garlic presses, barbecue claws, or bubble wrap aren’t exactly the first things that come to mind, BUT these products sell a lot! (Don’t go into these products by the way—already beaten to death).

I then explain that there is a real, scientific approach towards Amazon product research and that many of my choices are based solely on the data.

I want to share this information with you and give you the insights and tools that I use that help me find products that sell over $10,000 per month on Amazon.

What is Amazon Product Research?

As I explained a bit earlier, the way I like to look at it is as a scientific approach to finding new winning products all based on pure data.

Why?

Well, because you goal as a business owner should always be to create an effective, and yet repeatable process for every single task you do in your business.

This way you have a solid foundation for success that you can build upon with experience.

Now, let’s move on to the exciting part:

My simple process to making over 10,000$ per month.

Amazon Product Research Process

Product research is often the most daunting but important task in the Amazon FBA game. If you pick a shitty product, you’re going to have a tough time selling it. It’s a simple fact.

There are a number of factors that I look for when deciding which product to source, so let’s break them down.

Product Research Criteria:

  1. High Sales Demand – Generally, I am looking for a product that will sell at the very least, 300 units per month. This of course also depends on price and margin but we’ll get into that a bit later.
  2. Low to moderate competition – I want a product niche that isn’t completely saturated and one way to determine this is by reviews. If I can find a product with page one results that have 100 reviews or less, and still making sales, then you have a gold mine. However, this is pretty rare nowadays so I will typically go forward with around 500 reviews and lower, given the other criteria look good.
  3. Room for differentiation – How many ways can you improve a garlic press? Not many. I am looking for products that have potential for improvements or variations that are not yet offered. Is there a way to make it different than competitors? Maybe bundling two things together that would create value, or increasing or decreasing size to better serve untapped markets. The more ways you can make your product different the better.
  4. Profitable Price Point – I want to sell products that will allow me to make at least $8 or more profit per sale. This would require me to find products that are selling for around $17 or more. If I go to the first page results for a particular product and the average price is $15 or less, then I usually will count that out, UNLESS you can bundle in a unique way, which would allow you to increase the price. Many times, this is dependent on how cheaply you can source said product, of course.

This is a very rough guide at what I’m looking for when I start to do my research.

Please keep in mind, there are multiple ways to do product research and everyone will have different criteria based on their own strengths and weaknesses, initial capital, resources, experience, etc.

I am only sharing what has worked for me but I can tell you that when I have more capital and can take larger risks, I will certainly start sourcing larger and more complex products as there are less barriers to entry.

So let’s go through this one by one on the exact steps I take to doing effective amazon product research.

High Sales Demand

Now how do we determine sales demand for a particular product?

Thankfully, there are a number of tools that make this easy for us.

The ones that we’ll discuss today include, Jungle Scout, and Viral Launch. Without getting into explaining how they work too much, just follow along and I’ll do my best to explain as we go.

So I open up Google and search “Amazon Best Sellers”. On the top left side of the website you’ll see “New Releases”. Click there to get the highest performing new released products on Amazon.

new releases

I then dig into one of several categories. If you’re a new seller, I’d suggest you stick to the following categories so that you don’t need additional approvals:

  • Home & Kitchen
  • Office Products
  • Patio, Lawn & Garden
  • Pet Supplies
  • Sports & Outdoors
  • Tools & Home Improvement

For this article, I will use Home & Kitchen as an example.

Click into this category and you’ll see the top level 100 best new releases as well as a number of subcategories. Generally, the top level category is going to be quite competitive but you can still find some hidden gems in there.

At this point I open up my Jungle Scout Chrome Extension and run it.

jungle scout product research

Jungle Scout, in a nutshell, uses a sophisticated algorithm to map the Best Seller Rank (BSR) to a sales estimate. Essentially, it will give you estimated sales volumes for every product on Amazon.

Another great feature is that it shows you the number of reviews, price, and the listing quality score (LQS). Together this information is invaluable for selecting which product to begin to source.

Once the extension pops up and begins to run, I will then click the button that says “Extract Next Page” until all 100 results are showing. Please see image below:

jungle scout data

Once that is complete, Jungle Scout’s features really shine.

[Side Note: Many people use this tool in different ways and I have yet to see a video or blog post teach this method so I hope people will see this and find it useful. I believe the more ways that you can differentiate your process and methods the better.]

Jungle Scout has a filters feature which allows you to sift through hundreds of results based on a few criteria. For this example I will narrow down by reviews, price, and sales. See below:

jungle scout product research

I want the minimum price to be $17, minimum sales 0f 300 per month, and only 100 reviews or less.

Based on these inputs, we get 39 results.

At this point, I’ll go through and pick something that looks interesting to me that I’d like to get more information on.

I’ll open up the product listing, evaluate photos, copy, and reviews. Then I’ll type this product’s main keyword into the search bar.

For example, I found “Egglettes Egg Cooker – Hard Boiled Eggs” so the main keyword here would be “Egg Cooker”.

Type this keyword into Amazon Search bar and make sure it is set to “All or All Departments” so that we are searching Amazon’s entire catalog, not just a specific category.

Search the keyword “egg cooker” and run the Jungle Scout extension.

jungle scout product research

From these results, you can see that this product has great demand but also several listings with over one thousand reviews.

Personally, at this point I would probably cross this off the list as a potential product. It’s too competitive and most of the first page results look similar, if not the same, leaving no room to stand out from the competition.

Rinse & Repeat

I will pretty much repeat the above process until I find a product where the first page results look like this:

amazon product research

Look at all those listings with less than 50 reviews selling over 1,000 units! That’s a winner in my book. The process above took me less than one hour to find this guy and I plan to source this soon, hence the blacked out areas 😉

What is the best Amazon Product Research Tool?

My next step is generally a quick validation using Viral Launch’s Market Intelligence Tool. Here’s a snapshot of the Viral Launch dashboard for the same winning product I found above:

viral launch product research

This is a must have for anyone who is serious about getting into Amazon FBA.

Although Jungle Scout is good for a quick and dirty approach to product research, Viral Launch takes it to a whole new level. They give you insights on the entire market, price and sales trends, and tips or warnings. They also utilize past BSR rankings to give you a more accurate picture of sales and performance.

It really is Jungle Scout on steroids. In fact, if you are crunched for time and don’t want to search directly on Amazon, you can use their Product Discovery tool that will spit out top performing products in a matter of seconds. It honestly makes the research process so much easier.

That all being said, I still like to have both as I think it gives me a competitive edge in the research process. I don’t want to do the same thing that everyone else is doing.

After I’ve found 4 or 5 products that look good to me, I’ll start the validation process—tracking competitor’s inventory, BSR, and keyword search volume. This is all to ensure that the top competitors for the main keyword are all selling enough to meet my monthly sales requirement.

Final Thoughts

This is, in a nutshell, how I go about researching products that make over $10,000 per month. to sell on Amazon. As you can see, there is nothing really magical or exciting about amazon product research. It can be boring and tedious but this is where the most effort is needed. A good product choice can pay returns for years to come.

Each person has their own way of doing amazon product research but that’s what makes Amazon so amazing! There are hundreds of ways to make this business work. The best thing you can do is to take action, and learn as you go. You will never find the absolute perfect product to sell, but at some point you just have to jump in.

I hope this post was helpful and I look forward to sharing more tips and strategies on how I make this Amazon business work for me!

11 Comments
  • Reply Alex R

    January 10, 2018, 10:08 am

    This is awesome, it might be time to pick up a side hustle!

  • Reply Glizelle

    January 25, 2018, 3:15 pm

    Used your link to get Jungle Scout. I hope it did something!

  • Reply wayne

    March 11, 2018, 7:50 pm

    can you please explain the rinse and repeat part? if you search for the same thing wont you get the same results again? please explain what you mean rinse and repeat thanks

    • Reply hbevins

      March 12, 2018, 2:54 am

      I don’t mean search the exact same page, but use the same method to keep searching through different categories, sub-categories, etc, until you find some good results.

  • Reply jz

    April 5, 2018, 10:11 pm

    Hey Harrison, thanks for the useful post.

    Do you mind elaborating on the 300 sales per month criteria. Is that 300 sales per product on the front page, or is that 300 average? Oftentimes when researching , a few products on the front page will have 300+ sales / month but 50% of the front page results will have 50 or less sales.

    What do you think of that situation?

    • Reply hbevins

      April 6, 2018, 12:03 am

      Hi JZ, thanks for reading. By 300 sales per month I mean 300 sales per product. It doesn’t matter what page or from what keywords those sales are coming from—I just want to hit 10 sales/day on average.

      When you say that a few products have 300+ sales but others have 50 or less, you need to dig a bit deeper. Why do those other listings have so many more sales? Are they name brands? Are they driving external traffic? Do they have hundreds or thousands of reviews? Just because a few listings have a lot of sales doesn’t mean it’s a bad product to go after. For example, the next product I’m launching only has one competitor right now who is doing about 2000-3000 sales per month, BUT, they only have 30 reviews. So I know I can go in there, differentiate, add more value and take a piece of that pie.

      I hope that helps.
      Best,
      Harrison

  • Reply Klaus Behnfeld

    April 5, 2019, 6:18 pm

    Dear Harrison, my name is Klaus. I’m a german citizen currently living in the bautiful harbour city of Sydney, Australia. I’m complete new to this game and have limtrd computer knowledge. I’ve explored a lot of sites, attended webinars etc. etc. I’m finding your information easy to follow. Thank you . You made my day. I have not subscribed to either JS or VL at this stage. I hope you don’t mind if I stay in touch with you. I’d most grateful if you can assist me with any future questions I might have. I’ll try hard not to overstay my welcome. I was fortunate enough to live in the USA for about 10 years. My business heart will always be there. It’s the right country for doing business.
    Thank you again.
    I wish you a fantastic day and every success for the future.
    Best,
    Klaus

    • Reply hbevins

      April 6, 2019, 12:10 am

      Hi Klaus,

      Thanks for checking out my blog!

      I write this blog so that I can connect with more like minded people. I’m happy I can be of help.

      Feel free to post comments with questions on any posts or using the contact form and I’ll do my best to get back to you!

      US can definitely be a good place for business considering the large consumer base there. I hope you can take advantage of that and wish you well.

      Cheers,
      Harrison

      • Reply Klaus

        April 6, 2019, 10:43 pm

        Thanks for your reply Harrison,

        Advise please, if I may. I used to be the Chairman of the Board ( not meaning to compete with the legend Frank Sinatra) and director of a number of companies and therefore spoiled always having access to an Executive Assistant with complete computer skills. I used a dictation machine. She typed. You know the drill. I enjoy to forthcoming freedom of the Amazon project working on my own.
        I’m currently working from an iPad. In order to fully utilise the services of either Viral Launch or Jungle Scout, or both as you do, should I upgrade to a laptop.
        I’ve also come across Algopix. Do you know them??

        With many thanks in advance,

        Klaus

        PS do i need to fill in the box below with my details every time I write to you?

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