Want The Best Items to Sell on Amazon? You NEED To Avoid These 3 Huge Product Selection Mistakes

Guide Contents:

1st Mistake – Fragile Products
2nd Mistake – Complicated Products
3rd Mistake – Competitive Products
Using The Product Finder Tool
Comparing Competitiveness
Avoid Products With a Significant Amount of Reviews

Hey there, my name is Rich Henderson and I am the co-creator and chief mentor for the The Amazing Selling Machine Program. In this short video I’m going to cover three common product selection mistakes that new sellers make, that you absolutely need to avoid, especially with your first product.

1st Mistake – Fragile Products

The first is selecting a product that is fragile and can break easily. This is not so much about when the customers uses it, but more about what happens before it reaches ’em. The fastest way to a low review rating and killing sales is to have complaints about a product arriving that is broken, or damaged in some other way. You need to bear in mind that products of this type are probably going to come from overseas, so this increases the chance a product can be damaged. This is because it can be damaged on the long trip to the U.S., where it is more likely to be in a box, on a palette, in a container, on a ship.

So the opportunity for damage to a fragile item can be quite high. Then, if it makes it safely to Amazon, it has to be shipped to the customer in a box where, if the packaging is not perfect, it can also be damaged. The drivers are not exactly renowned for being incredibly careful. Now you can offset this by making sure you have exceptional packaging, with plenty of protection. But this can be expensive, so you need to make sure it does not cut into your profit margin.

2nd Mistake – Complicated Products

The second mistake, is selecting a complicated product. For instance, one that has a lot of moving parts. So, potentially more things to go wrong. Once you have built up a brand following, this type of product is easier. But for a first product, when your customers have no idea who you are, it can lead to a lot of bad reviews from customers who are not sure how it works, or have had issues with it. For your first product, it’s incredibly important to keep it as simple as possible.

3rd Mistake – Competitive Products

Now the third mistake is choosing a product which is too competitive. This is normally caused by sellers just looking at sales volume, and revenues, and not considering competition. Let’s take a quick look at an example using our product selection tool.

Using The Product Finder Tool

So I’ve jumped over to Amazon so I can show you what a really competitive product looks like, and the kind of products you should avoid, simply because of competition. So the example I’m gonna use is the iPhone 11 case. And then once I’ve loaded the search page, I’m gonna open the MBS Retriever tool. Now the MBS Retriever, you can get a free version of this, called Profit Miner, and you can find out all about that at AmazingSellingMachine.com.

But here we go, as you can see the tool gives us everything we need, it shows us all in one place, every product that’s on the search page and I can go and extract more pages if I want. But for this example, I’m simply not going to need to do that. Now it gives us the category, the rank, the monthly sales, the revenue, the reviews, the rating, and though it’s at the average rating of their reviews and the weight. But for this example, all I need to look at is reviews.

Now, don’t get me wrong, this is an exceptional product in terms of revenue. You can see if I run down through a few of these, we’ve got 122,000 dollars a month. 142,000 dollars a month, 230,000 dollars a month, and so on. So it’s obviously making a lot of money, and it shows there’s a lot of depth to this product. But only in terms of revenue. Because the other thing you always need to take into account is the competition.

Comparing Competitiveness

Now the easiest way to see competition is by looking at reviews. Because to compete with any product on this page you need to get close to the reviews that they have. And if we look at these products, we’ve got 4,280 reviews. This one’s got almost 14,000 reviews. This one’s got almost 15,000 reviews. But okay, that’s just the top three. But if you look down here, these are all in the multiple thousands.

All the way down to this one, which is basically the number 16 spot, and even that has got 889 reviews. And the revenue for that one interestingly, is quite low, it’s only at 23,000, but then the next three are all well above 1,000 reviews. So, while this is an extreme example, you do need to bear in mind whenever you’re looking at a product to sell on Amazon, that you need to look at competition.

It’s worth bearing in mind that when you sell a product from scratch you’re starting with zero reviews. And it’s no longer the case that you can go and buy 1,000 reviews, if you try and do something like that then you’re going to get banned by Amazon. So you have to do it gradually. Now review rates range between 1% and 5%.

Even if we only want to compete with this one at 1,100 reviews, you can see how many sales you would need to make to get to that number of reviews. So, whenever you’re looking at a product opportunity always make sure you look at competition. It’s very easy just to get sucked in by the numbers and yes, this product has huge numbers. There’s multiple products in the hundreds of thousands and a lot in the late 80’s and 90’s.

So there’s a lot of money involved. But there’s also a lot of competition. I’ve been doing this business for seven years and this is not a product I would go after. Because even though I’ve got the experience to go after competitive products, I choose not to because it’s much easier to go after a product that has lower competition, even if it has lower revenue.

Avoid Products With a Significant Amount of Reviews

So hopefully that points out to you why competition is important, and why you need to stay away from products that have a significant amount of reviews. Now, products that are too competitive can be avoided by using our product selection criteria, which we have continually updated over the last seven years to make sure it still leads to the best possible products with high enough sales volume, and yet low enough competition.

You can find the criteria in our free training at AmazingSellingMachine.com. You can also get free access to the product selection tool you saw me using. Lastly, if you want to get notified when we upload new videos to our channel, just click on the big red subscribe button above this video and YouTube will let you know when we add new videos and training. But that’s it for this video, take care.