Product research! Can you dig it!?

This is the LONGEST, most INTENSIVE, and most IMPORTANT part of your whole business!

So don't breeze over this! It's takes some deep digging to find that moneymaker!

Your market research phase should take AT LEAST 3 weeks. There are many good opportunities out there, but we are looking for a GREAT opportunity. Keep searching for a few weeks, and make your list of AT LEAST 30 product opportunities with the numbers. I recommend that you DON'T GET EXCITED about ANY one product until you have crunched the numbers on at least 30 products. Because you may have found a good opportunity, but you never know - you could find something even better.

"Creating demand is hard. Filling demand is easier. Find your customer, then create a product for them." - Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek

Resources: Product Research Sheet Template -https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dCNAh9UOmK... (download it as .xls then import to google sheets)

How do you find hot products to sell?

• Remember we are looking for products that are ALREADY SELLING well on Amazon. We are just after a little piece of the action by creating our own version of a Hot-Selling item, and making it a little bit better or unique to stand out.

• Amazon has a page where they list all the best-selling items in each category. This is where we find hot items to sell.
  • Google 'Amazon Best Sellers' or go to https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers/zgbs

• Go through the categories, sub-categories, sub-sub-categories and so on, all the way down, through the top 100 in each one, and look for products that interest you that fit the at-a-glance criteria ($19-$49 price range & small)
  • Start with the categories and sub-categories that interest you
    • Products you have used before / purchased before / things you would buy yourself.

• Categories to avoid: (says ASM )
  • Clothing
  • Entertainment collectibles
  • Gift Cards
  • Industrial & Scientific
  • Jewelry
  • Shoes, Handbags & Sunglasses
  • Sports Collectibles
  • Grocery & Food
  • Toys & Games
  • Watches
  • Books, Movies, Media, Software, Apps
  • Collectible coins
  • Supplements - not recommended for your first product. Must be sourced from the US.

COMBING THRU BESTSELLERS

• When you see a product that fits the basic criteria and looks interesting
  • Open a new window and search Amazon for that product - whatever the obvious search term is
  • Scan over the first page to get an idea of the level of competitiveness by gauging the # of reviews.
    • Are there several players with over 1000 reviews?
      • If so, this product may be too competitive.
      • If there are less than 3, are there a bunch over 700? We're just seeing if there's room to catch up to some of the successful players.
    • If it looks too competitive at first glance, we move on.
  • If it doesn't look too competitive, we look into the sales numbers by using the Unicorn Smasher Extention for Chrome.
    
    • Get it at unicornsmasher.com and install it
  • When on the keyword search page, e.g. the product term is in the search bar with results displayed
    • click the Unicorn Smasher extension button in your browser window, it will display a bunch of numbers
    
• Click Revenue or Est. Sales so it ranks all the first page products by total revenue or Estimated Monthly Sales from highest to lowest
  • From there you can gauge how many 'successful' players there are: doing 300+ sales per month (10 a day)
  • Look at the # of reviews of the 300+ sales players
    • Picture yourself at 100 reviews - will you be successful?
    • If all successful players have more than 100 reviews, then it would be harder to catch them to get up to that successful 10+ sales/day level.
    • If there are some 300+ sales players with less than 100 reviews, then perhaps there could be a chance for a new player to surpass them in sales by getting 100 reviews quickly - this is what we will do by giving away 100 units for a dollar to Facebook review groups (we'll cover that later).
  • Fill in your spreadsheet with all the key figures in the template
    • We are just trying to gauge if there is room for a new player (you) to have over 300 sales per month with around 100 reviews.
    • The other checkpoints in the spreadsheet are just benchmarks to see the overall volume of a product - the most important part is seeing if there is potential to sell 10/day (300/mo)
  • After you have a general idea if there's room to get in there or not... MOVE ON!
    • Make a few notes in the spreadsheet e.g. avoid/maybe/good/come back/ or color code based on how you feel the level of opportunity is... and MOVE ON.
    • Don't spend too much time analyzing any one product... more than 15-20 mins... Get the overall idea of the product opportunity then MOVE ON! You want to do this 30 times or more!

Go back to the bestsellers page and do the next product!