This post is by Danny McMillan, a London-based Amazon Seller who sells in Europe and the US.
Imagine the situation: you’ve decided to sell a new private label product on Amazon. You find a supplier, agree the details, and place an order with them. You receive the units, create a great listing on Amazon, get some Sponsored Product Ads running… and then the problems start.
Your product just isn’t selling. Maybe your average cost per click is three times what you expected. Maybe your product turns out to be inferior to your competitor’s version. Or maybe there is simply no market for it and the units won’t move whatever you do.
These kind of problems are common, but can often be avoided. If you test the product and the market before committing to a big order, you can discover and fix a lot of problems, and change your approach before taking on stock. This is an organic method, based on testing a number of different factors in your chosen product category. Your results may differ if you are planning on a large scale launch with hundreds of giveaways.
There is a misconception that product testing is costly and time consuming. That doesn’t have to be the case, as you will see in this post. I’ll show you some of my favorite product testing hacks, which will help you generate rich and accurate market data, create better products more quickly, and carry out sample tests to save you a lot of money further down the line.
View Top Product Sourcing Tools1. Find popular products using AMS
Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) provides valuable access to Amazon’s marketplace data. You can use it for keyword research that will show you which products are popular and which aren’t, and save you from wasting time and money testing items that have no market.
The first step is to get access to AMS.
Using Vendor Express to get into AMS
UPDATE 14 MARCH 2018: Amazon has announced that it is closing Vendor Express.
You can only access AMS through Vendor Central or Vendor Express. Vendor Central is invite-only, but anyone can apply for Vendor Express. Both of these programs are for businesses who want to sell products directly to Amazon, wholesale, that will then appear as “sold by Amazon”. You have a lot less control over pricing (and other factors) than when you sell through the marketplace yourself, but that doesn’t really matter here – all you are doing is trying to get access to AMS. Never use Vendor for a product you would want to sell yourself in the future. Getting back control of your listing is a world of pain.
Your goal isn’t to make loads of money from this product, it’s to get into AMS.To be accepted in Vendor Express you have to offer a product to Amazon. So your first step is to go to AliExpress and find a cheap product, for example a stove protection cover or vibration pads for washing machines. Don’t overthink this part as your goal isn’t to make loads of money from this product, it’s to get into AMS. Just breaking even from this product is fine.
Something to remember when sourcing a product is to make sure you can get a proper invoice from the supplier. When you come to offer the product to Amazon they may want to see a proof of purchase, and a standard receipt won’t cut it. Use the messaging system on AliExpress and make sure that the supplier can provide you with a proper invoice.
Once you’ve selected a product, go through the steps in Vendor Express and create a listing, as you would if you were listing on the Amazon marketplace. Make sure your listing contains an image on a white background, and develop out the keywords so that Amazon are more likely to take the product. Basically, at this stage you want to show Amazon you are making an effort; so invest time populating the fields and completing them as required.
When you come to offer the product to Amazon you have to determine your asking price. Make sure you’ve worked out all your costings and once again, aiming for break even point is fine.
Amazon will then review your product and, if you are successful, ask you to send in some samples. In most cases they ask for 12 free samples, but you can just ship half of those by updating the sample amount column.
Once Amazon raises a purchases order for your product, you’ve been accepted into Vendor Express and should be able to access AMS. Don’t overthink the whole process – you’re not trying to find a best-selling private label product, you’re just offering a product to an algorithm to get into AMS!
Using AMS to generate keyword data
AMS is a great platform with three different advertising options: Sponsored Product Ads, Headline Search Ads and Product Display Ads. Remember that you aren’t actually going to pay for advertising, it’s just the data you want to access. At the time of writing, Amazon are rolling out Headline Ads in beta on Seller Central to large accounts. So one day you could potentially do this part of the process in Seller Central, if Amazon provide the same level of data there.
In this example we are going to be using a Headline Search campaign, which is the wide banner you often see at the top of search results on Amazon. You need three products to create a Headline Search ad, so choose any three products (they don’t have to be your own) and set a budget.
Once you put a budget in, a panel appears below and allows you to add keywords. As you start typing, you will get suggestions. As I start typing “bully sticks”, a list of suggestions appears with a traffic score for each one, which can either be low, medium or high. For “bully sticks” the traffic score is low, but for the related term “dog chews” the score is medium.
The traffic scores are a great way to find out which products are more popular. It doesn’t give you detailed numbers, but it does give an indication. I recommend you stick to products with medium and high traffic.
However, remember that traffic varies by category. If you’re in the science category, most keywords are likely to have low search traffic because the category doesn’t get the amount of sessions and conversions that home and kitchen does, for example.
With these searches I generally find that broader is better, so I use single words such as “dog”. This allows me to start building up keywords, without missing any important ones, because it gives a wide view of what dog-related products people are searching for. For example, I can see that “dog toys” are high traffic whereas “dog nail clippers” are low.
