How to Find Profitable Products to Sell on Amazon

Whether you’re an individual looking to start selling on Amazon or an established company, the search for new, profitable products to sell on the marketplace is always relevant. For new sellers or companies, it’s a necessity—without products, running an e-commerce business is difficult. For established companies, it’s often about complementing existing product lines or launching new brands within the company.

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When Amazon is your main market, or at least an important one, selecting the right product is something you should analyze carefully. Amazon is its own ecosystem, and certain products simply perform better for various reasons—perhaps due to competition, customer base, the Amazon platform itself, sales costs, or other factors. If you want to dominate the market, you must understand and analyze the products you want to sell.

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In a previous blog post, I covered how to conduct a market analysis to see if products sell well and how the competition looks. But if you’re looking to find new products to sell on Amazon, there’s a different approach you can take. Instead of analyzing products you’ve already chosen, you can analyze the market first and then select the best products accordingly. You can choose products that your research indicates will generate the most sales and profit while facing low competition.

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Don’t Forget Your Brand

Before I delve into how to find products that sell well on Amazon, I want you to first reflect on your overall strategy. If you already have a brand, and if that’s the brand you’ll be selling on Amazon, it’s important to focus on your brand’s customers. I’ll soon show you different tools that make it incredibly easy to find products with enormous potential and low competition. When you find such products, it’s easy to feel like “I must sell that kind of product.” But you must stay true to your brand and its target audience. If your brand is centered around football, you can’t suddenly start selling garden shovels.

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Although I’ve seen many sellers do this successfully for a while, they rarely manage to maintain brand credibility or build something bigger in the long run. When more competitors enter the market, these sellers soon fade away. Moreover, there’s intrinsic value in focusing on complementary products, or at least products that the same customer group is interested in. When a customer buys one of your products, they’re more likely to purchase several other products as well.

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This is something you need to consider whether you’re running a brand-new company or an established brand. So when selecting products, especially if you’re new, try to think about what other products you could sell under the same brand. The more great products you can sell under the same brand and to the same target audience, the better.

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What Products Do You Want to Sell?

Finding profitable products to sell largely depends on what type of product you’re looking for. Much of this can be read about in the blog post on market analysis, so read more there for a thorough overview. However, I still want to mention some of the key criteria here.

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A basic criterion is that the product should be profitable to sell. In other words, there must be margins. There should also be existing sales on Amazon—there should be similar products on Amazon that are selling well. If there’s a market for the product on Amazon, it likely means there’s also an interest in the product you’re planning to launch in the future.

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The market must also have depth. What do I mean by that? Well, there must be several similar products and sellers doing well. This is evidence that not just a few players dominate the entire market, but that it’s more open, and you can compete there in the future as well. Additionally, it’s important to look at the competition. How well are competitors doing, how many reviews do they have, how good are their images, and is there any opportunity for a new product?

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What Products Can You Sell?

For a brand-new seller with a lower budget, it can be challenging to create an entirely new and unique product. It often involves buying products that are already being produced today and then putting your own logo and design on them. But for companies that have come a bit further, it can also be worth looking into what existing products lack. What are customers complaining about? If you can fix these issues and launch a better product, it creates a competitive advantage that can be worth the effort many times over in the long run.

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One last thing I want to mention is the purchase price. To be able to sell products, you need inventory, and it’s not cheap to purchase products, package them, and then ship them. Often, producers also have quite large minimum order quantities. So, if you’re a new company or just a very fast-growing company, this can sometimes be a problem. The more expensive the products, the bigger the problem usually becomes. So, if you’re in that situation, I strongly advise against selling products that are too expensive. Look at the purchase prices and the quantities you need to order before choosing a product.

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How Do You Find the Perfect Product?

Let me first define “the perfect product.” No product will ever be perfect. There are less good, good, and great products. But none will be perfect, and that’s okay. You have to accept that and move forward with the products that are great (more or less perfect).

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So how do you find these products? One way is, of course, to brainstorm from your head, browse Amazon, look at other e-commerce sites, physical stores, etc. Write down all the products and then conduct a market analysis. The products that look promising you can further investigate to see what producers are available, and production prices. It’s not exactly a high-tech solution, but it actually works really well, especially when you already have a brand and know what kind of products you’re looking for. This is indeed a good strategy, even if it takes some time. But I also want to tip you off to another faster method.

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All the major Amazon tools today have software where you can fill in your different criteria (product price, sales volumes, etc.). The tools then filter through all of Amazon’s products and show you the ones that meet your requirements. Of course, you’ll still need to do some more research afterwards, but it’s definitely a strategy that can speed up the process and, above all, give you products you might never have thought of before. Both Jungle Scout and Helium10 have such tools, and there are a ton of other similar tools. Jungle Scout’s tool is called Product Database, and I’ve used it many times myself.

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Filtering Correctly

There are many different ways for you to filter products and find those that suit you, your needs, and your conditions. Here are some examples of different filters you can use.

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Example 1 (FBM)

If you can find products that are sold via FBM but still sell very well, you might have a really good product. If you can get the product into FBA, you already have a competitive advantage to grab a portion of the market. Filter for FBM and Min Revenue to do this. You can, of course, add more filters.

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Example 2 (poor rating)

If a competitor is selling well despite having poor reviews and ratings, it means there’s an opening for competitors. If you sell a better product, you should reasonably be able to compete and take a share of the market. Therefore, filter for Min Revenue and Max Rating. For example, set Max Rating to 3.7, and you’ll get all the products that sell over the amount you set for Min Revenue, despite having a maximum of 3.7 in Rating.

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Example 3 (margins)

By using the Net filter, you can filter for price after Amazon’s FBA fees have been deducted. This can give you a first filter to secure margins, even though you’ll need to further investigate production prices. By filtering Min Net and simultaneously filtering Max Price, you’ll get all the products that earn you your filtered Min Net while selling for your set Max Price.

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You can filter in many ways, making it very easy for you as a seller to find the type of product you actually want to sell. You can filter different markets, categories, start dates for sales, product weight, number of reviews, etc.

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If you’re struggling to know where to start, I suggest the following filters, but then test around yourself! This will give you products that haven’t had time to accumulate too many reviews, aren’t too cheap or too expensive, and sell for at least $3000 a month. Filter into the market you want to start selling in.

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Suggested Filters:

Min Price = $18
Max Price = $40
Min Net = $14
Min Revenue = $3000
Max Reviews = 150

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Create a list and write down all the products you find that seem promising. If you use Excel or similar, you can also write down the various data you’ve found (sales, ratings, etc.). You’ll need to gather more information on production prices, competition, and more, so make sure to keep everything easily accessible and organized.

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Dive Deep into the Market

Once you’ve found promising products, you need to verify the various criteria I went through in the market analysis post. You need to take a deep look at the market, competition, etc. Just because you’ve found a football that sells well and has poor ratings doesn’t mean the market is the same. It only means you’ve found a product that looks promising. But when you launch your own product, you won’t just be competing with that one, but with all similar products.

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So, dive deep into the market, check everything we’ve gone through before, and take notes. As soon as a product for some reason doesn’t seem promising anymore, you can cross it off and stop wasting time. Instead, continue with the remaining products.

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It may turn out that none of the fantastic products you found were promising. In that case, you’re either being too strict with the criteria, or it’s just the way it is. It’s not uncommon. Then go back to your Product Database tool and keep searching. And search. It may seem tedious now, but I promise you it’s 1000 times harder to try to move forward with a bad product and launch it.

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Calculate Margins

Once you’ve identified one or more good products, it’s time to look at production and margins. Through Product Database, Jungle Scout has estimated Amazon’s costs. This is a good estimate and sufficient for now, but you need to get the exact costs. Before doing that, you should check approximate production prices. Where do you do that? It depends on where you plan to produce the products, but most people turn to Alibaba.

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Alibaba is a marketplace, just like Amazon, but it’s geared towards production and business orders. Here, you can quickly search for the product you plan to sell, and you’ll see loads of results pop up. Pictures, prices, quantities, etc. Many products have their prices listed, and you can quickly make a rough calculation. However, I recommend contacting the producers now and asking about prices. Specify your needs (packaging, shipping, etc.), and ask them to get back to you with an estimated cost. Later on, you can probably negotiate this cost down, but right now, you just want to get a rough cost to calculate future margins.

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Choose a Product to Sell

Once you’ve calculated the margins, it’s time to decide whether you want to move forward with any of the products you’ve identified and calculated margins for or not. If the margins don’t look good, just go back to your research or consider if you can increase the selling price. Your margins don’t need to be great from the start, but it must be your goal for the future. Perhaps you can launch your product with a lower price and later launch variants of products with higher margins. Multipacks, different sizes, new designs, or similar. Try to be creative. But don’t launch a product with poor margins and think, “It’ll work out.” Have a plan and stick to it.

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Summary – Finding Profitable Products to Sell on Amazon

You now have a walkthrough of how to go about finding profitable products to sell on Amazon. Always keep your brand in mind. What do you stand for, and what products do you want to reach out with to be credible to customers and make a profit? The perfect product, as I said, doesn’t exist, but you can find great products by scanning the Amazon market and seeing what’s out there. Do a market analysis and then further investigate producers, product prices, and margins. There are also software tools that can help you with this and speed up the process of choosing a product.

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I hope it’s now clearer how to find products that are profitable for you and your company to sell on Amazon.