Finding Amazon Products

Criteria 1 – BSR

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To add a plugin to your site, proceed with the following:

Plugins >> Add New >> Popular >> Install

To start, I would recommend adding WP Super Cache and Yoast SEO, which will speed up the page loading time and help search engines crawl and rank your blog articles!

BSR stands for “Best Sellers Rank” and is a number Amazon uses to represent how well a product is selling relative to all the other products within the same category. The lower the BSR, the better the product is selling, and visa versa. Each top level category has its own BSR.

To find the BSR, go the product page of any Amazon product and scroll down to the “Product Information” section. It will say “Best Sellers Rank”, and then, for example, something like “#1999 in Kitchen and Dining”.

We want to use the BSR for the top level category when comparing potential products. We do not want to use any sub-level categories, as these will give us skewed analysis.

I would recommend choosing a product that ranges in BSR from 400 to 6000. This seems to be the sweet spot, as anything lower will likely be too competitive, and anything higher won’t be doing a large enough sales volume to make it worth while. If it’s outside of this range, then you should probably avoid it.

Criteria 2 – Selling Price

The second criteria for selecting a potential product is the selling price. I would recommend aiming for a product that you can sell for between $17 and $70 dollars. Products within this range should have a high enough profit margin and won’t be as expensive when it comes to placing your first inventory order.

You will notice that some products will have multiples prices listed, such as the recommend price, regular price, and sales price. When doing price comparisons, always use whatever price the product is actually selling for, and ignore the rest.

For example, if it’s “on sale” for $29.97, but the MSRP says $39.99, use the $29.97 for your comparison. Many sellers run year long “sales” to increase the perceived value of their product offer, so using the actual price they are letting their product go for is best.

Criteria 3 – Reviews

The third criteria is the number of reviews a product has. Reviews are important because it gives you a good idea of the level of competition a product has and how much work you will have to put in to get that product ranked at the top of the search results.

If there are multiple products all containing 1000+ reviews, then it will be very difficult to get to the top of the search results and compete. These products have likely been selling on Amazon for a long time.

That being said, the opposite is not good either. If product idea is so new that there are no established products containing a high number of reviews or a BSR that is within our range, it means that the product is still unproven, and will be too risky to try selling.

The ideal scenario is that there are 2 to 3 products containing 50-200 reviews, that all have a BSR within the 400-6000 range. This means that there is a proven demand for the product, yet the competition is still low enough that it will be much easier to compete and get the product ranked to the top of the search results.

When developing a new product to sell, I would highly recommend reading the reviews of your competition. Go through the 5 star reviews and the 1 star reviews so that you can see exactly what people are liking and disliking about the product. Our goal is to develop a high quality product that stands out from the competition and will receive 5 star customer reviews organically.

Criteria 4 – Size and Weight

The fourth criteria is the size and weight of the product. This will have a direct impact on the profit margin. The larger and heavier the item is, the more it will cost to ship, both from

your manufacturer to Amazon, and from Amazon to the customer.

To find the size and weight of a product, go to the product page and scroll down until you see “Product Information”.

I would recommend choosing a product that is no larger than 12”x12”x12”, or some other variation of a similar volume, and no heavier than 5lbs.

Criteria 5 – Private Label Potential

The fifth and final criteria is whether or not you can private label the product under your own brand. Simply put, this means that you can create your own version of the product, using your own custom packaging with your brand name and logo, ultimately making it your own product.

Generally speaking, the more generic a product is the more likely it is that you will be able to create your own version of it. We want to avoid anything that is trademarked or patented.

We obviously cannot go selling iPhone’s, however, iPhone cases are fair game. That being said, I would not recommend selling iPhones cases because it is an extremely competitive market, but you get the idea!

You now know the 5 criteria that myself and many other successful Amazon sellers use to find the hottest product opportunities available today.

If you have an idea, do a search on Amazon, analyze the competition, and see if it’s a viable product opportunity. When thinking up ideas, try to remain conscious of the items that you use on a daily basis. The less obvious the idea, the better, so dig deep.

If you can’t think of anything off the top of your head, start by going through the Amazon’s top 100 products in each of the top level categories to get the wheels turning. I like to use the filter bar on the left side of the page to narrow down my search results to better fit my criteria.

Go ahead and compile 10-20 product opportunities in a spreadsheet, and then try to narrow it down to the top 2 or 3 options, based on the criteria that you’ve just learned!

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