Help! Where Can I Find Inventory or Products to ebay and Amazon?!?

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How To Sell Products On Amazon - My Amazon Private Label Product Researc...

Learn from this awesome tutorial from Online Seller Mastery.

Avoid These 5 Amazon Product Research Pitfalls On Your Path To Success

By Greg Mercer

The formula to finding a perfect product to sell on Amazon is deceptively simple: find a product with enough demand, limited competition, and enough profit margin at the end of the day to make it all worthwhile.

Through my experience researching and launching dozens of products, I have learned many lessons the hard way. There’s no need for you to go through my learning experiences yourself. In this post, I will outline five mistakes that Amazon sellers make when they research products.

#1. Undifferentiated Product
The “land grab” days of Amazon are gone. It is more competitive and saturated today, where you can’t just private label yoga mats, BBQ gloves, and silicone wedding rings and collect your hefty checks. These days it would be hard for you to sell products if you are putting up an undifferentiated item.

These gloves are an example – there are dozens of products with nearly the exact same features and benefits:



As you can see, it is hard to determine any difference between these three gloves, except maybe the price. Which segues into the next common mistake I see…

#2. Priced Too Low
The minute that you as a seller start racing to the bottom by offering a cheaper price than your competitors, you are putting yourself in a world of (financial) hurt. Your pricing decisions should not be based on your competitors’ pricing, because you don’t know their sourcing costs, their profit margins, or the rationale behind their pricing scheme.

But if you price your product below your intended price point based on the competition, you undermine your business. Your unit economics are all out of whack as a result, and perhaps even worse, you position your business in the “low-cost and low-quality” quadrant.

#3. Not Calculating Profit Potential
One dangerous oversight new sellers make while doing Amazon product research is underestimating the impact of Amazon’s fees. You can quickly use Seller Central’s fee calculator to get an accurate estimate based on a similar product or ASIN.

Jungle Scout also pulls this information and calculates the net profit (retail price minus Amazon fees). For example, this is what the net column looks like for cell phone car mounts:



You can take it one step further and calculate what your profit will be, after you incorporate your Cost of Goods Sold (COGS).

For the first result at the top, WizGear, you can see a breakdown of the costs and add in your Product Cost. Assume it costs $1.00 to manufacture and ship to Amazon warehouses. The profit per unit sold is $1.92. This does not account for promotions, marketing or ads, or returns.



#4. Not Improving the Product
Relating to the first mistake I mentioned (not creating a differentiated product), sellers have a gold mine of customer feedback if they just look at the existing poor reviews of competitive products.



For example, one product that I sell had good sales (more than 300 units per month), but poor customer reviews. I knew that if I could improve the product, I could quickly sell more than the existing brand with an inferior product.

After reading through the one and two-star reviews, I noticed a pattern of complaints that a plastic feature kept breaking. I worked with my supplier to create a version with a metal piece to replace the plastic piece. I crafted my listing to emphasize this metal feature, and it has been selling quite well for over a year since launching!

#5. Choosing Too Small a Niche
What happens if you put a billboard in the desert? No one sees it, no one cares. Make sure you put yourself in an active market! The same applies to product niches on Amazon.

I sometimes see people who get too niched-down, in obscure categories. Take for example a “decorative fish net”, used to decorate home aquariums:



Look at the “Product Information” on the listing, and note the Best Seller Rank. In this case, the BSR is #35,509:



You can plug that number into our Free Sales Estimator to get an accurate estimate of how many sales per month the product generates. You can get the estimates for several products in a given niche to get a good idea of how many sales the niche typically gets in a given month. I like to see 3,000 sales every month for the top ten products in a niche.

You can see here that those decorative fish nets are selling only around 188 units per month.



In Conclusion

Greg Mercer
These are just five tips that can help you avoid pitfalls that plague new Amazon sellers.

I am a firm believer that anyone can achieve great success on Amazon with the proper strategy, work ethic, and tool set.

I am currently running a case study where I have shown every step of the launch process of our product “Jungle Stix” with complete transparency to show you how the whole process works, in every detail.

We are now selling about $18,000 per month, more than half of which is profit.

(SOURCE)

Best Product Category For New Resellers On Ebay And Amazon?

If you are getting started selling on eBay and are new to amazon FBA in 2017 you will learn what Steve believes to be the best products to get started with online.

How to Sell More Amazon Products 

Through Differentiation

By Karon Thackston

A little over a year ago, I met Chris Guthrie online. “Keen” doesn’t even begin to describe the level of common-sense smarts Chris has when it comes to successful Amazon sales. The fact that he created the AmaSuite collection of seller tools (and made it available to the public) so others can follow in his footsteps only goes to show the standard by which he lives. I’m excited to have Chris back as a guest on the Marketing Words blog and I know you’ll be enlightened by what he’ll share today.

——————————————

One major mistake new Amazon sellers make is creating a “me too” product.

What does this mean? It’s defined as creating a product that’s exactly like the competition but doesn’t add any extra value. These sellers forgo differentiating their products and simply ask the manufacturer to add a new label. This is not the way to build a great sellable brand.

With just four steps, I’d like to outline how to differentiate your product with a methodology I’ve applied from the beginning of my Amazon sales career … successfully!

Step 1: Find What’s Working

The best way to see what’s working well is to look at the Best Sellers category for a product. Take note of the product images and you’ll quickly see what’s drawing people in.

If we look at the six best sellers for “grill brushes” (aka BBQ brushes), here’s what we see:

● Most of the top sellers have thick bristles with multiple rows.
● A lot of the titles say “18 inches.”
● Every listing except one has 5 bullet points.

Step 2: See What’s Not Working

Reviews are and will continue to be a goldmine. It’s the best opportunity for finding what people like and dislike about a product in their own words.

The BBQ brushes in the first, third, and fourth positions look quite similar and would be a perfect example of applying differentiation through analyzing reviews. They’ve all got thick bristles, are 18 inches long, and — best of all — there are 2,896 reviews for us to look at.

Yes, that’s a lot of reviews and certainly a healthy amount of time. But it’s the upfront work you’ll need to get moving in the right direction.

Flaw #1: Bristles end up in food

Flaw # 2: Bristles not long or wide enough for infrared BBQs

Flaw #3: Handle breaks easily

This just goes to show that no matter how well a product is selling, you can always find improvements to meet demand.

Next, we need to understand which is the most important differentiation to pursue because that naturally leads us into our ideal BBQ fanatic.

Step 3: Aggregate Your Findings

As you look through the reviews, you’ll start to see very clear buckets. Your picture of a disgruntled customer will take shape and it’ll start to become very clear which problem you should attack first.

In our case, BBQ brush bristles falling off is a major problem and has the chance of causing major health problems — none of which we want to be responsible for. So now it’s time to unleash a bit of creativity into your own findings…

Ask yourself this question:

What is one thing I can change to this product that would make this product better?

Often, with physical products, it can be as simple as the material, packaging, or dimensions. Think of the smallest leverage point to allow the biggest impact for your customer — and your business.

Once you’ve answered that question and determined which modification is the most important to your product, you’ll need to find a manufacturer. More specifically, one that’s already producing BBQ brushes similar to what we’re looking for.

If you haven’t done this before, you’ll need to follow a few guidelines so you know what you’re talking about.

Step 4: Find Your Manufacturer (Remember to Be VERY Specific)

Finding the right supplier to source your product from is an entirely separate conversation, but typically you can find a supplier via Alibaba.com if you’re just starting out. The key is to make sure the supplier you work with is receptive to making changes to the product for you so that you can release something that is truly differentiated.

A few things before we go:

When you contact the supplier, be as descriptive as possible about what you’re looking for. This includes the size of the pallet, order quantity and, of course, your modifications. Try to communicate as many as possible.

Many of the strategies I use to produce a differentiated product can take a lot of time, but that’s the reason why I built AmaSuite. One of the software tools available inside AmaSuite helps you analyze every review for a single product and look for frequent combinations of the same words. With this information you can quickly determine some of the commonest complaints customers have about a product, as well as what people like the most.

(SOURCE)

How To Rank Your Products On Amazon

How To Rank Your Products On Amazon

By 888 Lots

Selling on Amazon is awesome. It really is. It’s taken regular people and given them six and seven figure incomes. I know this. I work with them.

But being a successful Amazon seller means understanding how to rank your products on Amazon.

Easier said than done my friend.

The goal of this blog post is to teach you to become an Amazon product ranking ninja using an array of tactics. You have to think of yourself as a mad scientist. You’re running a ton of experiments with the goal of achieving a high rank with great sales volume for relevant keywords.

Let’s put on our lab jacket and jump right into these experiments.

Experiment #1: Source a Low Competition Product

Ranking #1 for a keyword on Amazon isn’t actually that hard if you have a lot of money. Since sales velocity is the #1 ranking factor on Amazon then all you have to do is use a blast service like Viral Launch or do a ton of giveaways to get you to the top. This method doesn’t work effectively as it has historically but is still powerful.

In addition to a blast you can just spend a ton of money on Amazon Sponsored Products to help rank for main keywords as well.

With enough capital it’s possible to compete for top spots in some of the most competitive markets. But staying in those top spots will only be temporary.

This method is definitely a brute force method and overall doesn’t work well if you’re looking to be profitable quickly.

How do we define competition?

It’s very simple. After typing in the main keyword for the product you want to sell analyze the top 10 listings. I like to look for 3 or more sellers with less than 50 reviews. Additionally, I don’t like to see any listings with more than 250 reviews in the top 10.

This ensures that I can come into the market and rank for top keyword phrases fairly quickly.

So that’s experiment #1: Find and source a product with low competition based on the above criteria. If you already have a product you can skip this experiment.

Experiment #2: Keyword Research and Listing Setup

This is one of my specialties. In my former career in SEO and in my current position as an Amazon PPC consultant I’ve spent hundreds of hours doing keyword research.

I’ve come to the conclusion that keyword research is important on Amazon.

Why? Because it works.

Let me give you some insight into the mechanics of how keyword research influences organic rankings.

When you create your title, bullets, description, and back end search terms you’re telling Amazon’s technology exactly what you want to rank for in the search results. The words in your listing are a form of communication.

Amazon’s A9 algorithm cannot read your product’s mind so it’s your job to tell them exactly where you want to be positioned organically.

I’ve used a ton of keyword research tools. Maybe too many. But at the moment there are 4 keyword research tools I use frequently:

• Merchant Words
• Keyword Inspector
• Top 3 Competitor Listings
• Websites

Basically I use the keyword I used to find the product as the keyword I do the research with. For example, let’s say we want to sell ‘nose trimmer’. I would then go to Amazon, search for that word, find the top 3 organic listings and analyze them. I would take notes on keywords I want to add into my listing.

Below is a screenshot of the listing content for the #2 organically ranked product for ‘nose trimmer’.

The title is the first place to look for keywords. I’m seeing ‘nose ear hair trimmer’. Also, I see the words ‘beards’ and ‘mustaches’ in the bullets. I could go on forever with finding keywords but I think you get the point. Make sure these words are in your listing. That way your listing can be correctly organically positioned on Amazon.

A more advanced way to spy on competitors is to use Keyword Inspector’s reverse ASIN tool. This tool shows you exactly what keywords your competitors are ranking for on Amazon. That’s some pretty powerful data. They also give amazon search volume estimates which are great for PPC as well.

Also, we could take ‘nose trimmer’ and plug it into Merchant Words. Merchant Words will give us a list of keywords containing ‘nose trimmer’ along with estimated search volume. Knowing estimated search volume is extremely important because it predicts how much traffic you can potentially get to your listing:

Finally, go over to google, plug in ‘nose trimmer’, and read the product listings of competitors with their own websites or listings on Google Shopping. This can give you insight into the types of phrases to use in your listing, back end search terms, and Sponsored Ads.

Setting up your listing content is crucial to gaining traffic on Amazon. Add your most important keywords and keyword phrases in the title. The title makes a HUGE impact on Amazon SEO and ranking.

Then put the rest of the keywords in the bullets and description. Bullets are definitely more important than the description so make sure you figure out a way to prioritize keywords.

You don’t need to mention your keywords more than once on the front end (title, bullets, or description) but you probably will to make it easy to read for the shopper.

I recommend filling up the title, bullets, and description with as many characters as possible. Some might say otherwise but as long as it brings value to the reader then it’s okay. Using all of the characters is important because it will give you the maximum amount of organic ranking positioning.

Below is an example of a product listing with room for improvement:

First, we see that they’ve only used 78 of the 250 characters possible in the title. The title is the most important piece of content in a listing. Capitalizing on those 250 characters is crucial. Also, title character limits can vary so make sure you hover over an ‘i’ icon and it will show you…like this:

You can do that for the bullets and product description as well. Keep in mind if you go past the limits Amazon can suppress your listing. That’s no good because that means Amazon has taken the listing out of their search engine. No worries though. As long as you make the change your listing will be live again instantly.

For most products the limit is 100 characters per bullet but hover over the ‘i’ icon in seller central to verify for yourself. If our limit is 100 characters then we see in the above listing they are only using 47 characters. That leaves plenty of room for more keywords.

I don’t think we necessarily need to analyze the description because as long as you apply the recommended methods for the title and bullets to the description you’ll be fine.

In regards to the back end search terms I recommend adding your keywords from the front end (title, bullets, description) to the back end. Be sure to take out words like ‘and’, ‘if’, or anything else that isn’t relevant. You don’t need any unnecessary words on the back end search terms.

Also, use spaces, don’t duplicate keywords, and don’t add brand names to the back end. The best way to optimize them in terms of characters is to add 500 characters per row for the first 4 rows. I know it’s possible to add up to 5,000 characters but research shows that more than 2,000 characters can break the indexation of the back end.

Experiment #2: Choose 2 of the above tools to do keyword research and save them in an Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheets in preparation for writing your listing. Use the above listing recommendations to optimize your listing with keywords from the keyword research. Remember to use character limits to maximize the amount of RELEVANT keywords you put into the listing. This will maximize your organic exposure on Amazon and help with ranking your product for several keywords.

Experiment #3: Pricing

Pricing can play a big role in ranking on Amazon. One of the fundamental principles of Amazon is that a lower price increase sales velocity…and increased sales velocity results in increased rankings on Amazon.

Do research on your market and determine what you want your full price to be. Then record what your break even price is.

How do you determine pricing for your product? Look at the top 10-15 listings in your market and make notes of their prices. Then develop a price that is competitive with the market. If you price too high you’ll kill your sales volume and any chance of ranking well on Amazon. I’ve seen it happen before.

To increase ranking dip your price below your competitors to increase sales velocity. Then increase the price by $0.50 to $1 every 3 days. Record the date and amount of every price change. Running this type of experiment will give insight into how much profit you can extract from the market before seeing a dip in sales velocity.

How does this help with ranking? Well, in addition to getting a huge boost in sales velocity because of the low price, finding the ideal price point allows you to be as profitable as possible while maintaining your organic positioning. Now you have extra profit to invest in Amazon Sponsored Ads, inventory for Q4, or a vacation to Disneyland. 

Experiment #3: Use the above method to find your market’s ideal price point.

Experiment #4: Giveaways

Amazon rocked seller’s world on October 3, 2016 with their ‘Update on Customer Reviews’. This update stated that Amazon sellers are no longer able to ask for reviews in exchange for discounted or free products.

This is huge. Giveaways are fundamental to launching on Amazon because they increase sales velocity while providing social proof with product reviews.

Sellers can still use giveaway (Review Kick which is now Jump Send, GetBSR, etc.) and launch services (Zonblast, Viral Launch, etc.). It’s just that now they can’t directly ask for reviews in their email follow-up sequence when the product is purchased at a discount.

You should definitely use giveaway services when launching, re-launching, or to gain traction in the market because they definitely help with organic ranking.

How many product reviews should you target? I recommend targeting the review count of one of the competitors in the top 10 organic search results. This isn’t a hard and fast rule because it’s important you use the data you collect during your giveaway to determine how many reviews you need. It is a good general measurement.

The bottom line here is giveaways and launch services are an essential ingredient in the recipe for ranking your products on Amazon.

Experiment #4: Use a giveaway or launch service to increase organic sales volume and gain higher organic positioning in your market.

1. Amazon Sponsored Ads

I spend a lot of my time consulting on Amazon Sponsored Ads for other sellers.

It can definitely help with ranking on Amazon. How? Well, let’s say you use a launch service like Viral Launch and you target the keyword ‘nose trimmer’. I highly recommend making sure that you are bidding on this keyword phrase in the exact, phrase, and broad match.

Amazon doesn’t differentiate sales from ads and sales from organic. They are counted the same in their algorithm. This means sales from ads contribute just as much as organic sales to ranking on Amazon.

Something to keep in mind is advertising is a type of ‘ranking’ on Amazon. Why? Because Sponsored Ads appear above organically ranked products in some searches:

In the above Amazon search for ‘creatine’ all I can see on my screen is Sponsored Ads listings. That means I have to scroll down to see organic listings. These are technically ‘ranked’ higher than organic listings because Amazon gives preference to their advertising platform.

Also, by bidding on a variety of keywords your ads will appear in different parts of the market on Amazon. Once you get sales for these keywords you will increase your organic rank on top of having Sponsored Ads spots.

Before we wrap up this post I want to share true stories from two different sellers. The results will blow your mind.

A Tale of 2 Sellers

Jane taught herself how to sell private label products on Amazon by reading blogs, listening to podcasts, and interacting in the Facebook groups. This is how a lot of Amazon sellers started.

After learning from everyone else she decided that she needed to take action.

She found a low competition product with 2-3 sellers in the top 10 listings with less than 50 reviews and the top players only having between 100-250 reviews. Also, there were no Sponsored Ads showing for the keyword.

Jane decided to do some heavy keyword research to optimize the title, bullets, description, and back end search terms. She also got high quality photography done and started using Sponsored Ads.

Guess what? She did no giveaway, had no reviews, and started selling the products profitably right away with Sponsored Ads.

After about 8 days her product was in the top 5 and she’s doing great.

On the other hand we have Jeff. He went through the same learning process as Jane except he entered a high competition market.

3 or more sellers in the top 10 had 500 or more reviews for the main keyword.

Jeff did a 100 unit giveaway coupled with aggressive Sponsored Ads campaigns.

The Amazon Sponsored Ads sales skyrocketed along with the keyword rankings and sales rank. The listing was optimized beyond belief with relevant keywords, keywords from PPC data, spanish words, and misspellings.

The listing was ranked organically on page 1 and had the #1 Sponsored Ads spot for the main keyword. Organic organic sales only increased to a measly 2 or 3 per day.

Jeff was losing money and not gaining any traction in the market even though his rankings were great and he was doing well with Sponsored Ads.

Why? Because competitive markets don’t follow the same rules as low competition markets.

How do I know this? Because I’ve spent hundreds of hours optimizing accounts and analyzing reports.

Here are a couple of additional observations I’ve made about competitive markets that lead to this erratic behavior:

1. Established Brands Dominate the Market – How do you know? Type the brand name as a keyword into Merchant Words and find out if the top brands in your market have search volume. If so, then that’s bad news because they brand loyalty. You’ll also most likely recognize national brands for specific products.
2. Listings With Ongoing Reviews – If you notice that your competitors keep getting a ton of reviews then it will be difficult to keep up.
3. Black Hat Tactics – Sellers in competitive markets will use tactics that break Amazon’s Terms of Service to win in their market. It’s the truth.

Also, here’s a quick video on how to spot competitive markets.

In Conclusion

Selling on Amazon is a great opportunity for a ton of people. Amazon has taken regular people and created motivated entrepreneurs. It’s an amazing place.

But being successful on Amazon means knowing how to rank your products to generate sales volume. And to rank on Amazon it’s crucial to understand the experiments you can run to influence your ranking.

I highly recommend running some or all of the above experiments. In general, they work. I’ve tested them over and over.

That’s it folks. I hope you enjoyed learning how to rank your products on Amazon.

Thank you so much for reading and please try a few of these tactics out.

Leave any comments or questions below.

(SOURCE)

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Amazon Bans Giving Free Products In Exchange For Reviews

By The Selling Family

Recently, Amazon announced that it was updating its policies to prohibit third-party incentivized reviews.

In other words, Amazon sellers can no longer offer free or discounted products in exchange for reviews - unless it’s done through Amazon’s own Vine program (which we’ll talk about later). The change is effective immediately, which has some sellers scrambling!

The one exception to this is for books. Amazon said it will continue to allow advance review copies of books.

Amazon has always prohibited sellers from paying for reviews. But they had allowed sellers to provide free or discounted product in exchange for reviews, as long as that information was disclosed in the review.  That’s why we were seeing so many reviews that said “I received this product for free or at a discount, but the thoughts and opinions are all mine” or something to that effect.

Although the announcement said that incentivized reviews only made up a fraction of the tens of millions of reviews on Amazon, it’s obviously been enough of a problem for Amazon to finally act on it.

Amazon’s policy update, under prohibited seller activities and actions, now says, in part: “…you may not provide compensation (including free or discounted products) for a review. Review solicitations that ask for only positive reviews or that offer compensation are prohibited. You may not ask buyers to modify or remove reviews.”

Here’s our opinion:

It’s about time!

As a buyer, it’s been hard to trust any product and whenever I’ve seen a disclaimer on more than the first two reviews, I move on to the next one.  I want to know that the product is genuinely good, not just a reviewer trying to get free products and a seller willing to give away hundreds of units of the products.

The disclaimers indicated to me that a seller was probably trying to buy their way to a good rank and didn’t have confidence in the product, and also probably hadn’t made the effort to create a good listing.

I would choose a good listing, with zero reviews before I chose a product that had hundreds of product reviews that were all because of free products.

This Change Benefits Buyers and Sellers In The Amazon Community

This new policy change is a good one for both buyers AND sellers.  I know it may feel like a punch in the gut to some sellers, but in the long run, it will make the good sellers stand out above the strategic ones.

Buyers will now have more confidence in their purchasing decisions, knowing that reviews come from people who actually bought the product and who weren’t being “bribed” or in cahoots with the seller.

Of course, this wasn’t the case for everyone. Soliciting reviews is a pretty well-known technique to help launch a new product and get it noticed so it can then take off on its own merits.

But too many sellers abused the practice and would just look to beef up the number of reviews in order to sell something that was mediocre at best. There have even been places that taught this strategy and people who charged for the service. We have been opposed to this practice.  

We believe in creating awesome listings that show up well in search and display exactly what the buyer is getting from the start of your item going up on Amazon.  You can learn our strategies in our Profitable Product Pages course.  

As for sellers, this update is great news for those of you who work to make good listings and sell quality products. Finally, your products will stand on their own without others taking shortcuts to get ahead of you with an inferior product. (We understand of course that some people will still try to work around the rules, but this should still cut way down on the numbers.)

Most of the sellers affected by this rule change are those who do private label, which is a more advanced technique. But it also can apply to sellers who create bundles. Same idea: the updated policy levels the playing field and means those of you who work to create something of value won’t be undermined by those who take the “easy way”.

When you do private label or create bundles, you need to know how to take good photos to best show off that product. You need to understand how to use keywords and how to write a good description.  All things we talk about in our Profitable Product Pages course!

And most of all, you need to provide something of value to buyers. That would mean a great product that solves a problem for them or meets some demand, or a well thought-out bundle that groups together related products and makes life easier.

These all takes some time to learn and, once your product goes live on Amazon, it also takes a little time for the product, show up in search results and get noticed, and for sales momentum to build up.

You can also look to promote your products and advertise and find ways to get the word out to give it a boost. This is a legitimate way to attract buyers, rather than trying to find a way to make your product look better than it really is.

Amazon Vine Is The Only Way To Get Legitimate Reviews In Exchange For Products

Again, there’s nothing wrong with soliciting reviews to help launch your product and get it noticed. The problem was when sellers would abuse that and created situations where the review gave off the impression that something was much better than it really was or sold much better than it really did.

The Amazon best seller rank was being manipulated in these scenarios because hundreds of sales would come in and the rank would skyrocket to the top of the lists!  But the items may not have even had 1 legitimate sale.

Amazon recognized the legitimate side of soliciting reviews and said sellers can still do so, only they need to use Amazon’s own service, called Amazon Vine.

Here’s Amazon’s description of how Vine works:

“Amazon – not the vendor or seller – identifies and invites trusted and helpful reviewers on Amazon to post opinions about new and pre-release products; we do not incentivize positive star ratings, attempt to influence the content of reviews, or even require a review to be written; and we limit the total number of Vine reviews that we display for each product. Vine has important controls in place and has proven to be especially valuable for getting early reviews on new products that have not yet been able to generate enough sales to have significant numbers of organic reviews.”

These are great features. It means that products will no longer have a ton of “fake” positive reviews.

And by limiting the number of solicited reviews that appear with any one product, it also means buyers will have a more accurate idea of how popular an item really is. After all, we tend to assume that a product with more reviews is better.

As sellers, we also keep an eye on reviews and assume that a higher number of positive reviews means a lower number of returns on that item. So it’s important to us that this number be accurate.

Amazon said in its announcement that it has ideas for how to continue to make Vine even more useful and will update with more details as they go.

The only issue the announcement did not address was what will happen to listings that have bunches of solicited reviews. We have already seen some sellers who have lost reviews on their products that were received by solicited reviews.  Some sellers have reported that theirs are still on the listings.

In the end, this change is a good one that we very much welcome! It’s also good news after other recent updates - like product and brand restrictions - that had a lot of sellers worried. Here’s one we can celebrate!

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What should you do now?

1. Check any listings you have created and make sure they are fully optimized!
2. Grab our Profitable Products Pages course so you can understand the main elements of listings and how to fully make your listings top notch.
3. Share this post with your friends who need to be aware of this change.
4. Leave a comment letting us know how you feel about this new change.

(SOURCE)

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Everything sells, eventually: My most insane Amazon FBA experiment yet

By Peter Valley

The results of my totally insane cassette-single experiment.

(An earlier version of this story appeared in my book Blindspot Profits. This is the updated and expanded story.)

It’s true: Everything sells on Amazon, eventually. And I’ve proven it.

There’s a lot of talk about “what sells” on Amazon. My contribution to the conversation usually starts and ends with one line:

“Everything sells…. Eventually.”

Not everything. But close enough.

No matter how weird, obsolete, or pointless a used media item, there’s someone on Amazon weird enough to buy it – and hungry enough to pay for it no matter what it costs.

Failing to understand this means you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. And even though I say “everything sells” a lot, I don’t think I really internalized it until the experiment I’m about to recount.

Let’s take this to its extreme….

The insane experiment

One day I decided to see how far I could take this. And by “this,” I mean listing things on Amazon that any reasonable seller would assume no one would ever, ever buy.

I decided to make a really bad investment in some really obsolete media, and see what happened.

It’s been a year since launching this experiment, and I’m here to report the results. And it involves cassettes.

If you don’t remember cassette singles, that’s exactly why this experiment was doomed to fail

Remember cassette singles? Also known as “cassingles.” They were usually two songs, one on each side, in a paper slipcover. Their reign was roughly from the late 1980s to the early-1990s.

These offer literally nothing that is not found on other formats, except for possibly unique artwork. They offer absolutely no value, and no reason for anyone to buy them.

No unique content, least-popular format. It all raises the question as to if, in this century, anyone would ever purchase a vintage cassette single.

I decided to find out.

Sourcing cheap, pointless, obsolete media to resell on Amazon

One day on eBay I saw a listing for 385 cassette singles, mostly from the early 1990s. I jumped on it, and got the whole lot for $36 postage paid. Now, I could really test my theory that people will buy anything on Amazon…

The box arrived and I started going through all 385 of them with my scanner. Most of them had product pages on Amazon. If they didn’t, I threw them in the discard pile. I had too little hope for any of these selling to spend time setting up product pages.

Anything that I couldn’t list for at least $6 also went in the discard pile. That eliminated the vast majority of the lot. When it was over, I had 72 cassette singles I deemed worth listing.

I shipped them in to Amazon, and waited.

The results

And 18 months later (now), I tallied up the results. Here they are:

Total listed on Amazon: 72
Total sold: 11
Total Amazon payout: $57.75
Total investment: $36
Total net profit: $21.75

For several hours work, that’s pretty abysmal. But it isn’t the whole story.

First, the lessons…

Notice that over 15% of the lot sold. As much as I tell myself anything will sell, I actually had close to zero hope of even one of these cassette single selling. Not one. I just knew I had to find out for myself. Over 15% of them selling over the 18 months was a big confidence boost.

It’s true: Anything sells.

Two, we can learn a lot from what did sell. Of the 11, all of them were artists that were household names. As in, the most mainstream of the mainstream (Madonna, etc). These are artists that have tons of rabid fans who need to own everything they ever put out on every format. So it makes sense.

The majority of the singles I listed were not A-list artists. It was a lot of weird dance music from artists I’d never heard of. In the future, I would jump on investing in a collection like this again if it were all mainstream artists. Anything out of print from them appears to sell. This is valuable information to know, and I wouldn’t have learned it had I not run a test with the most undesirable items on the recorded music spectrum.

Epilogue

Aside from the lessons, there was one more thing that took this experiment out of “abysmal failure” status.

There were over 300 cassettes I didn’t send in. I put them back up on eBay, and actually received $8 more than I paid for them.

Total net profit: $65. And some important lessons.

Endnote:

If you want over 100 pages on weird, used items (like cassettes) that every other seller overlooks, I have a whole book about this: It’s called Blindspot Profits.

Basically it’s the top 20 things you’ll find in the second-hand market that 1) Every other seller misses, and 2) Can be sold on Amazon for big profits.

Check it out here.

(SOURCE)

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