When to give up on a private label product - ASK JUNGLE SCOUT EP #4.1

Ask Jungle Scout is a weekly show where we answer YOUR top questions about selling on Amazon, FBA and the private label business!


This week's questions:

0:15 How many sales should you look for when trying to identify a niche in the UK instead of the US? Does 3000 sales within the first 10 results still apply?

2:30 How do you prevent seeing an inflated sales number in Jungle Scout?

4:30 Should you ever give up on a product, and if so, when ?

What's the max no of Amazon sellers you'd compete with? - ASK JUNGLE SCO...

Ask Jungle Scout is a weekly show where we answer YOUR top questions about selling on Amazon, FBA and the private label business!


This week's questions:

1) Should I get samples from china before negotiating price or vice versa?

2) Do you prefer UPC or EAN codes for UK?

3) What would be the maximum number of sellers you would compete with?

4) I think that we got burn with our money. we may order on Alibaba for over $2,000 dollars. And it was on January 24 that's the day that they got the money. 

It's been over 2 weeks and nothing happens. The supplier say to us that the have a 10 days holiday. What can I do with this situation? 

5a) Can I establish more then one brand to sell on but use the same Amazon seller central account? 

5b) How do you go about doing patent research on a product your interested in selling without the use of an attorney? 

How do you bundle products on Amazon? - ASK JUNGLE SCOUT EP #2

Jungle Scout answers the following questions:

1) If you're sending goods from China to US, when and how you should you pay duties tax?

2) How do you bundle products using overseas suppliers?

3) Is it a must to get a trademark now for our product?

4) Any general tips for fellow Aussie sellers starting up? Best strategies?

How do we get product reviews on Amazon now? - ASK JUNGLE SCOUT EP #1

Jungle Scout answer YOUR top questions about selling on Amazon, FBA and the private label business!

3 Powerful Email Templates for Amazon Sellers

Check the lates video from Jungle Scout!

Amazon Affiliates Vs Amazon Sellers: The Benefits Of Both Worlds

By Greg Mercer

Whether it’s through the ever popular FBA or other means, using Amazon’s platform to sell products can be very lucrative. Many people who once focused on Amazon affiliate sites have moved over to the other side of the platform, and focus instead on FBA.

There are a lot of obvious differences between the two business models, and each has its fair share of pros and cons. One thing that I’ve seen very few people talking about, and something that I consider to be untapped, is the areas where Amazon sellers and associates can overlap.

Today’s post is going to talk about the synergy that exists between being an Amazon associate and being a seller. How both parties could leverage this to boost their knowledge of the market, work towards getting higher seller rankings, and ultimately make more money; because that’s always the end goal.

You’ll be able to take action on some of the things in this post almost immediately, but for those more willing to play the long game, there are a few other strategies I will outline as well.

First up, let’s look at how Jungle Scout has changed the research I do as an Amazon affiliate. This tool is very much designed for sellers, but what a lot of people don’t realize is that it can be used for product research that will hugely benefit affiliates as well.

Even Shopify store owners could get a lot of use out of Jungle Scout, but that’s a story for another day…

How Jungle Scout Helps Amazon Affiliates Make More Money

Back in 2013, long before Jungle Scout was around, I built an Amazon site in the luxury watch niche. Over time, I ranked the site for what I thought were some pretty lucrative search terms. Things like, “Best Rolex” and “Rolex Submariner Review”. The search volume wasn’t really that high, but when a watch sells for five figures, even 1 or 2 sales a month is going to get you a nice paycheck.

THE ORIGINAL ROLEX SUBMARINER, MODELLED BY SEAN CONNERY IN GOLDFINGER

I knew that there weren’t going to be a whole lot of people buying Rolexes on Amazon, but I figured there must be some, and again, I only wanted to capture a handful of monthly sales.

Fast forward to 2016, and I think that site has only ever scored 1 Rolex affiliate commission, and a couple of other thousand dollar watches on top of that. I couldn’t figure out whether it was because my content wasn’t high-end enough, because I needed to put my site visitors through an auto-responder, or something else.

Jungle Scout gave me the answer. There just aren’t any buyers picking up Rolexes on Amazon:

IGNORE ENTRY NUMBER 4, WHICH ISN’T A ROLEX.

If the best Rolex is getting only a dozen sales per month across the entire Amazon platform, even if I ranked number 1 in Google for every single Rolex Submariner keyword, I’d struggle to fluke a sale. No wonder the commissions this site was picking up where so sparse.

With this insight, I was able to really dig into the watches that do sell on Amazon. Thanks to the data from Jungle Scout and Amazon’s best seller list, I was able to start finding watches that were moving very well. This site now picks up daily sales and has seen something like 500% increase in money earned.

Ok, so it’s focusing on far less expensive watches, but without Jungle Scout I never would have had access to this data. It’s definitely changed how I do my product research for affiliate sites, especially the ones I research and build for other people. It’s a tool that every affiliate should be utilizing.

Between 70 and 100 people every month commission my company to build them an Amazon affiliate site, and Jungle Scout helps us make sure we pick winning products most of the time.

Next up, let’s look at the other side of the aforementioned coin.

How Affiliate Sites Can Benefit Amazon Sellers

There are actually multiple ways that Amazon sellers could use affiliate sites to their advantage. These methods all rely on either the seller owning their own site, or on them reaching out to an existing site owner. A smart way to do it would be to consider both.

1.) Get New Product Ideas

You already have great methods for getting Amazon data thanks to Jungle Scout and other known research methods, but did you ever think to consider the data affiliates get?

I used to own a shaving site that promoted razors, brushes, and soaps. I got dozens of commissions per day. What I ALSO got though, were commissions on razor stands, shaving bowls, strops, blades, and pretty much every other product you could think of.

Some of the same products kept earning me commissions again and again, even though I’d never directly promoted them. If I had launched an FBA style product in this niche, I would have had instant access to dozens of product ideas, and would also have known which brands or “types” of products were selling the most.

Sure, you can get this data by looking at Best Seller Rank (BSR) or other things on Amazon itself. But what I found was that it wasn’t always the products with the higher BSR that were selling the most, and it definitely wasn’t always the product types with the highest BSR.

Besides, it’s really useful to be able to log in to your dashboard and get an instant overview of what is, and what isn’t selling well. Additionally, you get a good insight into “pairings” and what items typically get bought together.

In Q4 2015, that site had sales data for over 1,600 products. Thinking of scaling horizontally in your niche? This data will definitely give you insights.

How To Get Your Hands On This Data

There are two real ways of getting your hands on this data:

1.) Reach out to successful affiliates in your niche (you can find them easily enough) and ask them. I wouldn’t just straight out ask them like that, but you should be able to befriend them. Explain that you’re looking to expand in your niche, and ask if they can give you some insights.

2.) Build and rank your own affiliate site. This is definitely going to be a long-term play, because it’s going to take you up to 12 months to really get a lot of sales data. But there are other advantages to having your own site that you we will go into below.

Again, you could always do both.

2.) Increase Your BSR

I shouldn’t need to explain the advantages of increasing your BSR, but did you think about how affiliate sites can contribute to this?

Again, you can do this by either reaching out to existing affiliates, or by having your own site. The basic concept is that you can use affiliate sites to send traffic directly to your product listings. You could write/commission reviews of your products to place on your own site or an affiliate’s site, or you could ask them to feature your product in “best of” posts.

You’re not exactly asking them to go and leave a bunch of 5 star reviews on Amazon’s platform, so this isn’t a breach of their terms (until they change their mind again).

Not only is this extra traffic going to give you a boost in sales revenue, it’s also going to lead to an increased ranking on Amazon’s platform, which in turn leads to more sales. It’s a double win.

It also means that your sales aren’t 100% reliant on Amazon’s platform as well, so let’s call it a triple win.

3.) Diversify Your Sales

I’m not suggesting you go all out and launch your own eCommerce store to sell directly from (though that is of course an option), but having a site you control that can send traffic to your product listings is only a good thing.

At the very worst case, you’re diversifying your traffic streams, and in the best case you are giving yourself a huge advantage over your competitors.

It does also give you a fair amount of risk mitigation as well. If something ever DID go wrong with your Amazon listings or even your account, you’d have the option to go it alone and sell on your own site to the audience you’d have built up over time.

Quick Win Strategies And Long Term Plays

What I’ve outlined in this post gives you a couple of different strategies, some of them are more quick win, while others are definitely more long term.

My recommendation would be to do both. For the quick wins, start building relationships with other affiliate sites. I’m not talking about going straight for the huge WireCutter type sites, but instead seeking out the smaller affiliate sites. The ones that rank well, get decent traffic, yet aren’t run by a huge team.

Start relationship building with these people and see if you can get some product features or guest posts. Maybe you can even pick their brain for new product ideas or improvements too.

At the same time, get your own affiliate site started and get it ranking in Google. If your brand is something that you will be selling for a long time and you are invested in, then it makes sense to play the long game here and spend the months in getting your site to rank in Google.

Need help?

There are people who can help you do this (such as us). The possibilities once you have your own affiliate site ranking are huge, and you can scale in many different directions from there, in a very leveraged fashion.

If you are giving serious thought to starting an affiliate site to supplement your business, then get in touch with me and my team will get you started.

(SOURCE)

Amazon Repricers: 5 Reasons Price Automation is Vital for Seller Success

If there is one commonality that I find Amazon shoppers have in common, it is a penchant for finding great products at a good price. We have become conditioned to expect that when we purchase an item on Amazon, it is competitively priced. Part of the reason that we are seeing these competitive prices is due to Amazon repricers.

Repricers are a very helpful tool for Amazon sellers. To learn more about Price Automation and its application to successful selling, we have asked Erik Mathes of AppEagle to share 5 Reasons Why Price Automation is vital for Seller Success. Here’s Erik:

Being an Amazon seller can be an incredibly rewarding career, but it requires a great deal of effort and strategy. Between sourcing great products, managing your inventory and listings, and dealing with a multitude of other responsibilities, it’s challenging work. That’s where Amazon repricers and their ability to strategically manage price automation come into play.

The Benefits of Amazon Repricers

When sellers automate certain parts of their businesses, they unleash brand new possibilities of what can be achieved.

Amazon repricers have become an absolutely vital automation tool for successful sellers in today’s world. Between their powerful capabilities and ease-of-use, these price automation platforms free up countless hours and help sellers streamline profitable sales.

While old-fashioned sellers complain about having to adapt and learn new skills, the smartest sellers are embracing this newfound power.

That’s because they can now use software to manage a variety of tasks that formerly could only be done by continuously performing tedious research, calculations, and manual data entry.

Why You Should Embrace The Power of Automation

If you’re an Amazon seller and have yet to try Amazon repricers, here are a handful of reasons you may want to experience the power of price automation to fuel your business’ growth.

1. Amazon repricers spare Amazon sellers from constantly performing tedious tasks manually

The basic function of an Amazon repricer is to automate the price changes of your listings. If you didn’t use a repricer, you’d have to manually change your prices in Seller Central each time you wanted to do this. You’d also have to constantly monitor the prices of your competitors’ listings to know how to optimally reprice your listings.

Clearly, with so much competition on Amazon, this gets tedious and consumes a massive amount of time. In fact, manual repricing is impossible to keep up with when you consider how much competition is growing on Amazon each day.

The beauty of high-quality Amazon repricers is that they take over these labor-intensive tasks for you. That means you’re no longer required to spend hours glued to your computer analyzing competitors’ prices and then changing yours. One. At. A. Time.

The beauty of high-quality Amazon repricers is that they take over labor-intensive tasks for you.

Using a repricer to keep on top of this means that you can relax safe in the knowledge that your products have a competitive edge. Most importantly, you can watch the results as more people hit the all important add to cart button and buy your products.

2. Price automation is more efficient, effective, and economical than human labor

Because manual repricing is so tedious, it can quickly and easily lead to burnout for even the best price strategists.

Not to mention you can’t expect someone (especially yourself) to stay up all night making price changes. And, the cost of paying someone (or a team) of experts to manage your prices would be enormous. And that’s just for a typical 40-hour work week.

On the other hand, with quality Amazon repricers, the price changes never stop:

• An automated repricer constantly monitors your competitors’ prices, so you never have to slog through their listings one by one.
• It also updates your prices as fast as Amazon allows, which is multiple times an hour.

Try finding humans who can work this efficiently and effectively, and your quest will be as never-ending as manual repricing.

3. Amazon repricers reduce the probability of human error

Having to constantly crunch numbers and enter data is just part of the game when you use manual repricing. It’s a process that leaves us error-prone humans vulnerable to mistakes. And when it comes to selling on Amazon, mistakes can be very costly.

One missed decimal place or extra numeral can take you from profitability to losses in no time.

On the flip side, an automated Amazon repricer handles much of the number-crunching for you once you set it up. All you need to do is determine the minimum prices at which you’d like to list each SKU (based on your costs) to earn you a healthy profit for your efforts. After that, complex calculations can be left to the software, and your prices will fluctuate according to rules that you control.

Reducing the chance of human error that comes with manual repricing is good enough rationale to shift to automated repricing. With all of the other added benefits, it’s an obvious choice!

All you need to do is determine the minimum prices at which you’d like to list each SKU (based on your costs) to earn you a healthy profit for your efforts.

4. Automation helps you achieve optimal work-life balance

What’s the reason you work? Chances are, it’s not because your job is the most pleasurable part of your life.

If that’s the case with most people, then why do so many Amazon sellers let work take over their lives?

The reason has a lot to do with these sellers not knowing there are better ways to handle their workloads. So, they end up missing out on large chunks of time they could otherwise spend having a fun, joyful life.

BEING AN AMAZON SELLER IS ALSO ABOUT LEADING A JOYFUL LIFE, WITH A HAPPY BALANCE

Sellers who continue to avoid repricers routinely lose out on sales to their savvier competitors who’ve embraced price automation technology. Worse yet, the sellers who don’t use Amazon repricers work exponentially harder to keep up with the sellers who do. And they get no consolation prize for their struggle.

On the other side, you find sellers like Rob Anderson who enjoy the luxuries that automated Amazon repricing affords them. Anderson doubled his sales in a matter of months with Amazon repricing. He’s also freed up countless hours that he used to spend monitoring competitors and manually adjusting prices.

With that newfound free time, Anderson’s had time to create his ideal balance between work and life. He’s had time to take numerous business trips to source unique, profitable products. He’s also had time to take vacations, something every Amazon seller should do, at least occasionally.

For Rob, there’s nothing more satisfying than discovering he’s made a boatload of sales while out surfing in Costa Rica. And he has his automated Amazon repricer to thank for that freedom.

5. Amazon repricers shift opportunity cost in the favor of Amazon sellers

“Opportunity cost” is defined as “the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen.”

That means if you choose to work on Task #1, you won’t be able to spend the time used on Task #1 to work on Task #2, which has the chance of being more rewarding. The cost of working on Task #1 is that you’ll lose out on being able to work on something else with a potentially (or certainly) higher ROI.

People neglect to consider opportunity cost all the time.

Just think about the Amazon sellers who continue to manually reprice when they know automated repricing is a better option. An automated repricer could do the same work better and in much less time than it takes to perform it manually.

And when sellers don’t have to spend hours on manual repricing, they can instead spend those hours on other high-ROI tasks that can’t be automated and require human labor, such as:

● Product research
● Smart sourcing
● Creating strategic Amazon product bundles, and
● Adding a human element to their Amazon business (handwritten thank you notes, etc.)

All of the above cannot be outsourced to automation software (yet), and each one adds an element to your Amazon business that will help it grow.

Conclusion

It’s clear that Amazon repricers can open up a world of new possibilities and opportunities for sellers with automation.

Now that you know how price automation can help you grow your Amazon business, the only thing left to do is experience the power of automated Amazon repricing yourself.

My company, Appeagle, currently offers a free 14-day trial of our automated repricer. So, if you’re curious about what Amazon repricing can do for your business, take our software for a test spin.

Whatever Amazon repricing platform you wind up choosing, you’ll become a better seller for embracing technology and avoiding tedious manual work.

(SOURCE)

Selling Private Label Products on Amazon – 5 Tips To Beat The Competition

By Jake Cain

Although it feels like Spencer has been running an Amazon FBA business for a long time, he really just got started about a year and a half ago.

While that’s a relatively short period of time, I’ve been fortunate to go along for the ride and help move the business forward.

In the process of going from $0 to $60K per month in sales, we’ve tried a combination of both customized and private label products.

Today I want to breakdown some of the things we’ve learned about private label products specifically, and give you 5 tips to be successful in selling them on Amazon.

Defining a Private Label Product

Let me start by defining Private labeling, specifically in the context of reselling on Amazon. Private labeling a product means that you work with a manufacturer and buy a generic product that you can make your own by adding your own branding/logo to that product.

For example, you may find a manufacturer that makes safety scissors. After determining that safety scissors sell well on Amazon and you can make a profit, you work with that manufacturer and come up with a name for your brand of safety scissors and perhaps provide customized packaging designs for them to use. They manufacturer the same generic scissors they already make, but they label it with your branding so you can sell it as your own, new product.

It’s Not All Roses

I didn’t come up with this list of 5 tips solely from our successes.

In fact, we’ve had some private label products that really haven’t worked out well at all. Unfortunately, some of what I’ll share is stuff we learned the hard way.

The good news is, by taking action and trying some different strategies we’ve learned more about what works in private labeling and have now launched a few private label products that look quite promising.

Without further ado, let’s dive in:

1. Scout the Competition

Amazon is a super competitive place to sell, and as more people jump on the Amazon FBA bandwagon it naturally becomes tougher to find low competition products to sell.

While we sell products that have plenty of competition, we usually only enter those markets with a somewhat unique, customized product. When it comes to private labeling, we’ve been burned by trying to simply sell a product that is virtually identical to dozens or even hundreds of other products already selling on Amazon.

Here’s an example of a product that it seems everyone and their brother has already private labeled – Plastic Meat Claws:

While there is some variety in colors and materials, if you click through the first few pages of results on Amazon you’ll see many that look just like these 3 sets in the picture above.

To take a deeper look at this product’s potential I turn to the tool we use to analyze the competition – Jungle Scout Pro.

In particular, I use their browser add-on to quickly take a look at estimated sales and profit numbers for the Amazon search results. Here’s what page 1 looks like for “Meat Claws:”

On the surface it’s a tempting product because the top sellers are selling very well – over $41,000 in estimated revenue to the most popular product in the last 30 days. 

However, when you get to the bottom of page 1 and particularly outside of the top 10 results the numbers are much more pedestrian:

From there, I go back to Amazon and click through several pages of results so I can take a look at photos and just get a feel for how deep the competition goes. Sure enough, I’m at page 3 of the results for meat claws and still see listings like this:

Why I Wouldn’t Private Label Meat Claws:

The first product we private labeled for Amazon had a profile very similar to this. We thought that because some of the products on page 1 had less than 100 reviews that we could quickly get to page 1 as well by giving away some discounted products to reviewers on AMZTracker. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way and we were left with slow moving inventory that we’d be happy to break even on.

Looking back at products like these meat claws, here’s why I’d avoid private labeling it if I could press the reset button and make the decision all over again:

Product Depth

There are so many plastic meat claws already on Amazon, selling via FBA with Prime Shipping. Even if you change the color of the product, you really don’t have any benefit to buying your product vs. the long list of others already for sale.

To be clear, if I felt like I could innovate and make a new version of meat claws that gives me a functional advantage it could be an excellent market to go into – but only doing a private label would be challenging.

What’s worse is that once you get to page 2, the sales numbers aren’t very impressive. So I know that unless I can crack page 1, I probably won’t sell many meat claws.

The Data is Confusing 

If you’re like me, when you get excited about an idea you tend to put on rose-colored glasses and only see the positives. You become blind to evidence that suggests that maybe you should move on to another idea.

In this case, I like the fact that I see reviews on page 1 with under 100 reviews because I could probably use AMZTracker to get that many reviews within a month or 2 of launching.

However, I also see listings like this down on page 2 with 1,200+ excellent reviews, a competitive price, and pro quality photos:

To me, that’s a red flag.

They can’t be making much profit at $8.99, and if we did what it takes to get over 1,000 reviews and still not make it to page 1 of the search results, we’d be in serious trouble.

So when I see multiple pages of the product with listings from people who seem like they have done everything right and they still aren’t ranking and selling well, that worries me.

Lack of Margin

The first set of plastic meat claws in the organic search sell for $5.99 with Prime shipping. If you know anything about the fees associated with Prime, you’d almost have to get the products manufactured for free to make any profit on those sales.

As you look down the list, many others are $10 and under, which means to compete I’d probably be left with $1 – $3 per sale in profit which just isn’t worth the risk and effort it would take to try to compete with a set of private labeled meat claws.

So… What Should I Look For?

I’ve given you several reasons why we personally wouldn’t touch a set of private labeled plastic meat claws, but what does a good private label opportunity look like?

Honestly, giving you a fool-proof formula of how to pick a winning private label product just isn’t possible.

That said, the biggest difference in the private label products we’re making money on and the ones that flopped is the depth of the competition.

While it takes some more digging, I’ve started to set my focus on finding smaller niche products. Those could be in any category, but I’m talking about products where the top selling item maybe sells $5,000 – $10,000 per month according to Jungle Scout.

We’re ok filling up a product portfolio with a bunch of “base hits” that might sell a few thousand dollars per month and not being concerned with going after a home run that does huge numbers.

(Home runs are great, but base hits are easier.)

It seems that when the top selling product boasts big time numbers like the $40K+ sales on a $10 set of meat claws, competitors pop-up all over the place trying to get a piece of that success.

While some may find it, the vast majority of them get lost in an ocean of products that look the same and are left to compete by cutting prices and profits.

So while your private label product may have a few competing products that are the same, I like to see some irrelevant results showing up on the bottom of page 1 or on page 2.

For example, if I had searched “meat claws” and by the time I get to page 2 there are no more meat claws to be found and I’m only seeing related products like grill covers, grill gloves, etc. that would be a good sign for me.

2. Focus on High Margin Products

I mentioned that one reason I wouldn’t try to private label plastic meat claws is because my competitors are already priced so low. We try to focus on products where we can make at least a 40% profit margin after Amazon takes their FBA fees, but the more the better.

This is probably a personal preference, but I feel better about a 40% margin on a more expensive product and would like even bigger margins when doing a small dollar product – just because it still takes time to launch and maintain that product, so making $2 profit on at item that sells for $8 just isn’t that exciting and you’ve got to really do a bunch of volume to make decent money.

So if a product costs $10 to buy, we want to end up with at least $16.67 in revenue after Amazon has deducted their commission and fulfillment fee. OmniCalculator breaks down gross profit margin this way:

1. find out your COGS (cost of goods sold). For example $30.
2. find our your revenue (how much you sell these goods for, for example $50).
3. calculate the gross profit by subtracting costs from revenue. $50 - $30 = $20
4. divide gross profit by revenue: $20 / $50 = 0.4.
5. express it as percentages: 0.4 * 100 = 40%.

If you’d like to check the numbers on a product you’re considering, check out their calculator below:

Let’s look at an example of how you can check your margins on Amazon products before you spend any money on inventory.

Maybe I decide to private label a set of slate coasters just like this:

I’ll assume the sales numbers and competition all fit the guidelines I laid out earlier, and that we can get on AliExpress and order sets of coasters just like this for $2, including shipping to my house.

The next thing I’d do is go to the Amazon FBA calculator and get an idea of what the FBA fees will be when I sell my product. Even though I don’t have my own product on Amazon, I can get the ASIN number from the product listing from this set of slate coasters and put that into the FBA calculator. This works because my product will be nearly identical in size, weight, etc. which means my fees will be about the same as theirs.

In the calculator, I put in an expected retail price of $14.99 for my coasters in the “Amazon Fulfillment” column and hit the “calculate” button:

After Amazon takes their share, I’ll actually see $8.72 of revenue be placed into my seller account.

Now, I’d go back and put that into the OmniCalculator embedded above and see that my margin is about 77%, which is excellent.

After bouncing back and forth between both calculators, I figure out that I could take my retail price all the way down to $8.99 and be left with $3.33, which is a 40% margin in this case.

So, if I evaluated the competition and felt like I could reasonably fetch $15 per set, plus felt very strongly that in a worst case scenario I could easily sell them at $8.99 and make a little bit of money – I’d go for it.

3. Take Better Pictures

I won’t spend much time here because the headline pretty much says it all, but product photos that look professionally done can make a HUGE difference in whether or not people click on your listing and buy your product.

Another nice thing to look for when scouting for private label ideas is competing products who aren’t taking full advantage of their photos. Maybe they only have one photo instead of 6 or 7 from different angles, or maybe the photos they have are done with poor lighting.

If that’s the case, when and if your product ranks next to theirs in the search results, having top notch photos will be a real competitive advantage.

I don’t think you need a full set of professional equipment to get the job done, but if you have a newer smartphone you can use a portable lighting studio like the one below to take excellent photos.

4. Create a Bundle

At some point in the near future, I’ll be writing a similar post to this and explaining why I prefer selling more customized, unique products on Amazon instead of simply private labeling.

One of the obvious reasons is because you have some unique benefits and selling features that other products don’t.

In the private label world, it’s difficult to find a product on Alibaba or some other marketplace that a manufacturer is already making, and nobody is selling it on Amazon.

I’m not saying it’s impossible – but you can pretty much expect that when you private label, you’ll be competing against other sellers who are offering nearly the same exact thing you are.

One way to end up with a more unique product when doing private labeling is to create bundles.

Bundles are simply a set of individual products that are related to each other in some way that you package together as a single item. Going back to a barbecue related example, you’ll notice that when you search “barbecue gloves” on Amazon, you’ll see some suggested searches for things like “barbecue gloves claw” and “barbecue gloves and accessories:”

These kinds of search suggestions are an indication that people are actually looking to buy these products together – like a set of barbecue gloves and meat claws.

In this case, it looks like that particular idea has been done many times – but there are plenty of other bundles you could create and really add value for customers while standing out from the competition.

An excellent way to discover bundle ideas is to look at Amazon’s “Frequently Bought Together” section when you are on a product page. I clicked on one of first yoga mats I saw and it showed that this mat is frequently purchased with a set of yoga blocks:

We’ve actually created a bundle using this same approach that has just launched and is showing some promise for success.

Both of the items in our bundle are readily available to be purchased separately, but at this point we’re the only people selling a set of these 2 popular products together – so when people search for a set, they find our product.

Fortunately, our manufacturer already made both of the products so we just had to create some custom packaging and didn’t need to make any changes or customizations to the products themselves.

Buy Small Quantities

One thing I’ve learned when sourcing goods overseas (China, in our case) is that virtually everything is negotiable. So even if they say that the MOQ (minimum order quantity) is 1,000 units, you may well be able to talk them down to a trial order of 500, 300, or even 100 – particularly when you are doing a private label product that needs no customization.

Even if you are convinced that your private label product is a winner, I’d highly recommend that you start with as small of an order as you can to prove the concept and make sure it sells.

It’s a terrible feeling to order 1,000 units and then find that nobody is buying them, and now you have to worry about long term storage fees and just trying to minimize your losses.

Even if an order of 100 units means that you won’t make as much margin because the units cost more per item, it’s still a safer play because you can always come back and order 1,000 more once you’ve proven that you can sell 100 of them at a good price.

One idea I learned from Steve Chou’s podcast was to use AliExpress to buy really small quantities of private label products, even less than 100 units. On Aliexpress you are mostly dealing with wholesalers, not manufacturers. So they buy the meat claws for $1 and sell them to you for $2, but the good news is you can just buy 5 meat claws instead of 500.

From there you can create your Amazon listing, and then launch the product using Amazon’s sponsored listings to get some eyeballs on your product.

If it checks all the boxes we discussed earlier of margin, low competition, etc. then you can reasonably expect to break even, at worst on your small investment. At best, you might find that with minimal effort you start getting some sales and discover that the product has potential to be a real winner.

My favorite part about this strategy is that if you find a winner, you can eventually start working directly with the manufacturer (instead of an AliExpress wholesaler) and get better pricing, custom packaging, and even make changes to improve the product based on feedback. Since you’ve already got a listing for the product, you can simply update the photos, product details, etc. of that listing which probably already has reviews and ranks for some keywords on Amazon.

We’ve gone through this exact process ourselves and have found what seems to be a winning product. We started out by ordering 33 units for about $2 each and now we’re talking to manufacturers directly to make an even better version of this product that we’ll sell at a higher price, plus we’ll actually pay less for our inventory by working directly with the manufacturer.

Overall, I’m a big fan of using small batch private labeling to test out ideas that you can turn into more unique, custom products if they start to sell.

If you’d like more on this strategy in general, I’d highly recommend checking out Steve Chou’s interview with Will Tjernlund.

Wrap-up

Honestly, the vast majority of our success on Amazon FBA has come from selling unique, customized products – not private labeling. That said, we’ve turned a little bit of a corner when it comes to private labeling and those products are starting to add to our diverse mix of Amazon FBA products.

Hopefully you can learn from some of our early mistakes and more recent successes and skip straight to the success part in your own FBA business!

Stay tuned for next week when I plan to share more details on how we come up with ideas for more unique, custom products to sell on Amazon.

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