How To Find A Profitable Product To Sell On FBA

Finally pulling the trigger and ordering a bunch of inventory to ship off to Amazon can be scary, at the best of times. How do you know for sure that what you’ve ordered is actually going to perform, and sell out on FBA?

Do you know for certain that you have looked over every possible aspect of the niche, making sure that you haven’t missed some subtle clue about whether or not you’ll actually be able to sell everything?

In the beginning, a lot of newbies jump gung ho into ordering their inventory, and sometimes miss those few subtle clues that could have alerted them to bigger potential problems down the line.

In this guide, I’m going to walk you through the entire process of finding and sourcing a product that you know will not only sell once it’s listed on Amazon, but that it is going to sell well and actually turn a profit for you.

This step-by-step outline will help you pick up on the subtle clues that are usually hard to spot for beginners, and get you on the path to earning a consistent income each month.

How Do You Choose A Product To Sell?

When it comes to choosing a profitable product, there are two different paths that you can take to see success, depending on how big of a starting budget you have to work with.

While path #1 can lead you to serious money down the road, it’s always advised that beginners start small, and work their way up into building out an inventory that covers an overall “niche”. Let me explain the difference.

When you’re choosing a niche, you may think of selling everything related to the bathroom. Items such as towels, towel holders, sink and shower caddies, drawer organizers, fog resistant mirrors, and on, and on -- everything that you would typically find in someone’s bathroom.

As a beginner, this is going to cause you to lose a lot of money while you’re testing various products, to see which one is going to sell the best. While all of the products may fall into our checklist for what makes a good product to sell on FBA, having so many different options is going to limit the amount of time and resources you can spend on each one to get them to start selling well.

That means, choosing a single product is going to be the best route to take, whether you are just looking to build up a small side income, or you are looking to become the next FBA millionaire. Focusing on a single product line allows you to devote your entire effort to seeing it into profitability, before venturing out into the next line.

Note - if you're thinking about selecting a product from health, beauty or grocery categories, make sure you read our in-depth guide on how to get ungated. 

So what actually makes a good product to sell on Amazon?

Here’s a basic list to help get you started.

To help you understand exactly what we’re talking about, let’s break down that list one, by one.

Area #1 - Average product sale price between $10 and $50.

To determine the viability of a product, you have to know how much profit you’re going to make before you place an order through your supplier. In our experience, products with a price tag in the range of $10 to $50 have the best chances for selling at a high volume, due to impulse buying.

At this price range, the customer isn’t going to spend hours, upon hours doing research to find the best product. As long as they think yours is a good fit, they’re going to purchase it without really thinking twice about the decision.

Think about it for a second. When you buy a large item, like a TV, you’re going to spend quite a bit of time comparing different models, making sure that the TV you’re about to purchase is actually the model that’s going to do what you’re looking for, and last for a long time, right? When was the last time you did that amount of research on a product that cost you $25?

Another big reason that products in this price range sell so well is because they are usually fairly basic in nature. There aren’t a lot of moving parts that are easily broken, and that’s good for the long term viability of your business.

Finally, products that cost less to produce give you a lower barrier to entry than more expensive products, meaning that you can quickly scale up the amount of inventory you’re buying once you find a winner, and decide to pour more funding into the campaign.

Let’s take a look at two different examples, to show you what we mean.

This example shows you why picking a product within the $10 to $50 range is the best choice to make, because it’s going to be a lot cheaper to get started, and a lot cheaper to scale once you’re making sales. For beginners who don’t have large budgets to spend on their initial inventory, this makes it easy to get going.

Choosing a product in the pricing range that’s affordable to get started is critical to seeing success once you’re ready to ship it off to Amazon.

Area #2 - Lightweight products, under 5 pounds at least.

In the best situation, your product would be as light as paper, and cost nearly nothing to ship. However, that’s not always the case when it comes to selling products on FBA.

As a general rule, as the size of your product goes up, the weight of your product goes up, too. When the size and weight both increase, the amount you’re going to pay for shipping will dramatically increase -- lowering your overall profit margins.

When it comes to figuring out the shipping weight, you need to know the total weight of the box that Amazon is going to be shipping, and includes the weight of the item, the packaging and slips, and the weight of the box itself.

Until you’ve chosen the products that you’re going to sell, it’s almost impossible to get an exact weight for each of the packages. That means, you’re going to have to do a bit of digging on Amazon to find out what other sellers are listing their product shipping weights at.

To help give you an idea, let’s take a look at a product that sells well already -- men’s wallets. Take a look at the picture below, paying attention to the “Shipping Weight:”. You can see that shipping a wallet is only 4 ounces -- or incredibly affordable.

Knowing how heavy a product is going to be is vital because it lets you know how expensive the shipping costs are going to be to get products from your supplier in China to Amazon’s warehouses. When you keep your shipping costs down, it’s easy to increase your profit margins.

Amazon also charges you fees based on how heavy the product is. For starters, you’ll be charged around $2 for packages up to 2 pounds. For every pound after that, your shipping rate is going to increase an extra 39 cents.

That means, if your product weighs 10 pounds, your handling fees are going to cost $5.12. Along with handling fees, you can also reduce a wide range of other fees by keeping your overall package size and weight down. To see more, check out Amazon's FBA fee schedule by clicking here.

At the end of the day, the lighter you can keep your products, the better your profit margins are going to be, because you’re not going to be wasting money on excessive shipping and handling charges.

Area #3 - Similar products have a 5,000 BSR or higher rating in the main category.

Pinpointing a surefire method for figuring out how often certain products sell on Amazon is fairly hard to do. One of the best metrics you can follow is the “Best Seller Ranking” or BSR.

Amazon’s BSR tells you how well a product is performing inside of it’s specific category. For instance, if a product as a Best Seller Ranking of 10,000, it is going to sell a lot less often than a product that has a Best Seller Ranking of 500. A lower BSR is always better, especially when it is inside of a large category.

Figuring out the BSR will help you determine if a product is going to sell well, and often. The last thing you want to do is choose a product that’s only going to sell a few units a day when you make it to the top spots in your category.

There are a couple other ways to determine the marketing demand for the products you’re wanting to sell, but the Best Seller Ranking is, by far, the quickest and easiest way to get your data straight from the horse’s mouth.

When it comes to choosing the product you’re going to start sourcing, you want to make sure that the first 3-5 products inside of the category have a Best Seller Ranking of at least 5,000 or better. The more products that have a BSR of 5,000 or lower, the better your chances of making a large amount of sales will be.

Having a low ranking shows you that you’re going to be able to move a ton of product if you’re able to get into the same position that the existing products already hold.

Let’s go over the example that we us