Amazon Product Research: 3 Best Tips For Beginners

The Amazon Product Research Masterbook: Three Tips for New Sellers from an Amazon Expert

Hey there! Welcome to another one of my blogs about Amazon Product Research, where I have something very useful for sellers of all levels. 

In this article, I'm going to share three Amazon FBA product research tips for beginners that will also help advanced sellers. 

I am sure after reading this article, you'll be able to find better products to sell on Amazon. 

And if you are already selling, you'll be able to get more sales with them and, hopefully, save some money on them. That sounds pretty cool,  right? So let's dive straight into it!

I am Vova Even, and I have been actively selling on Amazon since 2016. In all these years selling on Amazon, I have developed expertise in using different mediums to make my business successful, and now I review them for my audience. 

In fact, I have been sharing reviews, tips, and tricks regarding Amazon FBA on YouTube and Udemy since 2018 and have helped many people achieve their dream lives by securing success on Amazon. 

Before I start my Amazon Product Research Tips for Beginners blog, I wanted to let you all know that I also have a video version of this blog. You can watch it right here if you want to save some time:

Tip #1: Review Velocity

So, the first tip I have for you is to look at the Review Velocity of products.

Don’t know what Review Velocity is? No worries. I will tell you what review velocity is, and I will also show you how and where to find it.

Review Velocity is the speed at which a particular product is getting reviews on Amazon. 

For example, there’s a product, say, a baby crib tent, and it is getting 30 reviews per month while making 500 sales per month. And on the other hand, if an egg poacher or kitchen scissors product gets five reviews per month while doing 500 sales, that will mean the baby crib tent has a high review velocity as compared to the other products. 

The seller of the baby crib tent is doing something better in order to extract more reviews, and more reviews are always good for the product because it gives solid social proof, more clicks on our listings, and even more sales. 

Now, how and where do we find the review velocity?

Here’s what I do to find the review velocity.

I use the Helium 10 Chrome Extension. 

You can download the Helium 10 Chrome extension for FREE.

I even have an in-depth tutorial on Helium 10 review velocity.

I also have discounts for you for Helium 10 so you can check that out as well, and a free trial.

You can tap on the picture below to see more details.

VOVA10 = 10% OFF every month.

VOVA6M20 = 20% OFF for your first 6 months.

Anyway, once you download the Helium 10 Chrome Extension, it's going to appear in the right upper corner of your Chrome browser. Here’s how it going to look:

By the way, it will only get highlighted when you are on Amazon. So when you want to find the review velocity of specific products, search them on Amazon and click on the extension.

If you want to learn how to use all the parts of the Helium 10 extension, please kindly refer to my detailed blog post.

Once it's opened on an Amazon search page, there are going to be different options, and you are supposed to click on Xray, which is the main part of the Chrome extension. 

It's going to load all the data from this page and might take a few seconds.

Once it finishes loading, you will see the products with different parameters i.e., revenue, sales graph, FBA fees, etc. 

If you want a comprehensive video tutorial about the Helium 10 Chrome extension, I have a 50-minute step-by-step, in-depth tutorial right here: 

Inside Xray, you can find review velocity on the far right side.  

There it is, review velocity. So, as you can see in the screengrab above, the first-ranked product has got a review velocity of 331 with 666 sales. 

That is very impressive because it's nearly 50% of the review velocity that this seller is getting. That’s what I usually do – I compare the review velocity to the overall sales of the product. 

As a seller, you will want to see the number of sales and the number of reviews each product gets. To lighten the stuff on the screen, I go to the filters and tick mark sales, and review velocity so that only these stats appear on the screen.

Sometimes, sponsored products will appear on the screen, but you can remove them as they are not getting ranked organically. That means they are using PPC, and any product, even from the 100th page, can appear on the first page.

Now, you might get surprised at seeing a product having a 50% review velocity and react like, “Whoa, that's very high review velocity!”. Which will not be surprising because it truly is high. 

But apart from getting amazed, you have to learn what special they are doing in order to get more reviews. 

So, the first suggestion that I have for you is to look at the ones that have the highest review velocity, and then buy from them. Place an order, and see how the seller follows up for the review. 

All experienced sellers ask for a review after you make a purchase from them. See in what way the company asks for the review. Be part of their funnel process, which is basically following their messages after your purchase.

Usually, what happens is sellers put an insert card or brochure inside the package when you open it, the card greets you with, “hey, thank you for buying from us. Scan here to go and get our lifetime warranty for free, or get a product for free” or something like that. 

There are different tactics like this that make customers feel obliged to provide reviews. Once you learn some tactics, you can also be creative in your approach and apply some tricks to make buyers provide you with reviews.

That’s one thing you can do. The second thing is while you're looking for a product, you can find a niche that actually has low review velocity, but still gets high sales. 

This is an advantage for you if you know how to get reviews.

By the way, I've talked beforehand about insert cards and how to get reviews by using them. I'm leaving a video here that shows you how to actually get reviews through insert cards. 

So, let’s summarize the first suggestion: see who’s getting rapid reviews, buy from them, and see what special they are doing. 

Sometimes they're going to call you, leave you texts, or follow-up emails that are very nice. Sometimes, they also use black hat techniques, or there are hundreds of other tactics that you can actually use to get reviews from customers.

By the way, I’ve mentioned the Helium 10 set of tools, if you want to educate yourself further on this tool, I have a full tutorial of all the parts of Helium 10.

Time for tip number two! 

Tip #2: Lower the Size of the Products

What do I mean by lowering size? Let me explain. 

Amazon has specific charges for different sizes of the products that sellers sell via FBA. 

Now, the bigger the size of the product, the higher the fees will be. That’s why I suggest you start selling with a lower size of products. 

It will save you money, time, and energy as well as unnecessary trouble of taking care of bigger-size products.

And for those who are already dealing in large-size products, try to bring the size to be smaller to save hundreds of bucks. 

I will tell you how it’s done.

You can use Helium 10 Chrome Extension for this.

Alternatively, you can use the Jungle Scout Chrome extension for this as well.

Search products on Amazon and open the extension in a similar way we did previously.

Once all the stats appear on the screen, scroll to the right, and there you will see the size Amazon chooses for each product based on its dimensions. 

Now, as I mentioned above, Amazon doesn’t only choose the size tier of products, it also charges a particular fee based on dimensions. 

Let me show you how big of a difference in the fee each size makes. I am opening two of the products shown in the screenshot, one is of small oversize, and the other is of large standard size, to help you know the difference. 

After that, go to the product page and open Helium 10 Chrome Extension. From the other options in the extension, click on Profitability Calculator. 

Here's also a full detailed tutorial of the Profitability Calculator with Carrie Miller from Helium 10.

This calculator allows you to understand the profitability of the product from different aspects.

It tells you which product category it is and how much fees they are paying.

Now let me first show you the fee that large standard-size products pay on Amazon:

You can see the size and the FBA fee this seller pays to Amazon because of his product’s size.

The fee is $5.98. Now let's go to the other one, which was a small oversized product, and see how much fee it is paying:

See the difference! This seller is paying $10.94 per sale because of his oversized product. 

There is a difference of $5, which, by no means, is a smaller difference. Do some calculations, and you will know much you can save just by lowering the size of your product.  

In this context, what you can do is choose a product that is large or oversized. As demonstrated earlier, the large-sized products will incur costs that you can yourself from. 

However, in case you have already chosen one with a bigger size, please see if you can lower it, and make it small without compromising your quality.

If you want more cool tips for product research on Amazon, please refer to my Amazon FBA product research playlist of YouTube tutorials.

It has over 50 videos for you!

And that way, tip #2 ends here. Here comes the last tip!

Tip #3: Take Motivation from Promising Products 

In the tips above, I mentioned researching products from various niches that are already available on Amazon for a long time. 

We explored these products from different angles. But what if we want to see how new products are performing in some niches?

I especially recommend this to the new sellers if they have already launched their product or are still pondering about it, they should first run through the new sellers in the niche, which will perhaps be their competitors as well. 

This will give you a prior idea of what you are competing with and whether there is any need to run a strong, competitive campaign to win the competition and earn more sales or whether you can go smoothly. 

So, how do we find new products? Well, you don’t need Helium 10 Chrome Extension for this. 

Simply open any product of the category/niche in which you want to search for new products. When the product page is fully loaded, scroll down to the product information section.

There, you will see a separate section named Additional Information, containing ASIN, Customer Reviews, and Best Sellers Rank. In the Best Sellers Rank, you will have clickable links to the subcategory and the main category of the product. 

Here, you will need to click on the main category link, which will lead to the bestsellers page of that category. 

Once there, scroll down a little and you will see New Releases besides Most Wished For and Gift Ideas. Click on New Releases and a new page will open where you will be able to see all the newly released products in that category. 

After that, you can see how the new products are performing and why. 

For instance, if any new product has got several good reviews with a 5-star rating, you can dive into it and see the seller’s strategy. 

Maybe they have built a strong listing with attractive copy and relevant and highly-searched keywords, or perhaps they are using enamoring images that are forcing customers to buy the product. 

Whatever the reason might be, it will fill you with ideas to market your product in a better way and help you boost your sales!

Final Words

The success of Amazon is basically a combination of different factors and well-thought-out strategies. Honestly speaking, starting selling on Amazon is no uphill task if you are really passionate enough to learn ways to master the art. 

Once you start understanding how things work, all you need is to play creatively with all the tools available for Amazon FBA to grow as a seller and live your dreams. With tip-based articles like this one on my Amazon selling and sales blog, I always strive to help Amazon sellers perfect their business and increase profitability. 

Although this article ends here, you don’t have to stop learning about FBA.

Explore my blog, or simply head to my Udemy courses for more interactive learning, or use my YouTube channel.

See you in the next blog!

Yours, 

Vova :) 

P.S. - I’ve mentioned the Helium 10 extension in this blog post, as well as the Jungle Scout extension. Well, I have other Amazon FBA extensions that I’ve reviewed in this post. Enjoy!

P.S.S. - Here are even more tips for Amazon product research you should know.