7 Ways To Find Unique Products To Sell
Product research is an essential part of the e-commerce process. Find the right product, and you could be rewarded with lots of sales. Get it wrong and you’ll gain some hard-learned experience!
Gone are the days of picking a popular product like a yoga mat, sticking your logo on it and selling loads online. With the increase of sellers on marketplaces like Amazon & eBay, the smart money is now in spotting an opportunity within a specific niche.
There are various tools that you can use to find profitable products with heaps of opportunity…
So in this article, we’ll share 7 tools to help you find products that you can sell online.
Before we launch into how to find hot selling products – we’ll share the 6 things to look out for & always keep in mind while during your product research. These are:
- Demand: There should be enough people wanting your product and already buying on Amazon. A minimum of 100 units per month is a good starting point.
- Some competition, but not too much: Check out the number of other sellers with similar products. If there are multiple brands who all have lots of reviews, it’s a sign that it will be difficult to compete against these big sellers.
- Size: Keep in mind that small & light products will be cheaper with shipping & handling fees. By contrast, oversized products will not only cost more for you to export from China but they come with their own restrictions and can attract higher FBA & storage fees.
- Product simplicity: Try to find products that don’t require multiple parts. There will be fewer things to go wrong in production, transit, & storage.
- Products without restrictions or specific requirements: Some products come with certain safety restrictions (i.e. toys, cosmetics, lithium batteries) so you might like to avoid these.
- Products with low seasonality: Avoiding products that are only popular around holidays like Christmas, Easter, and Halloween will mean that you will be able to sell all year.
So now you know what you’re looking out for – here are 7 tools that you can use to find unique products to sell online.
1. Amazon Best Sellers Pages
The Amazon best sellers pages can give you a ton of information to help you spot the latest trends and most popular items.
These pages are updated every hour based on the number of sales. You might like to bookmark this page and check it out regularly to stay on top of the trends.
Here are some simple steps for you to follow:
- Head over to the bestseller pages (Links: US / UK)
- Click on a category which interests you
- Look out for products which have:
- Rating: under 4 stars
- Reviews: the less reviews, the better. Read other peoples’ reviews and see if any give away any opportunities that you can do to improve the product and/or create an additional USP.
- Title: is it keyword-packed?
- Bullet points: Are they detailed? Do they include the benefits?
- The BSR (Best Seller Ranking): A low ranking here – closer to 0 – means that a product is selling well.
- Questions: do these offer any clues for how you can improve the product?
We recommend collating all the information into one Excel or Google sheets so you can then return to your shortlist of products, and see which has the most opportunity for you.
Once you have shortlisted your products, make a note of the main keywords so you can research further (i.e. competitors and prices on Chinese portals)
Checking both Amazon.com & Amazon.co.uk can be helpful to give you ideas because what might be popular in the US may not have transitioned over to the UK yet.
2. Amazon Popularity & Performance Ranking
As well as Amazon’s Best Sellers Pages, Amazon provide plenty of other useful pages that can give you ideas on what’s trending;
- Movers & Shakers: These products have the biggest growth in the last 24hr period. They show products with potential but it’s a good idea to track these over time, to ensure that the spike in sales will be consistent.
- Most Wished For: This category includes the products that have been added to the most wish lists. It’s a great category to see what buyers want but have not purchased yet.
- Most Gifted: Popular products ordered as gifts
- Hot New Releases: Best selling new & future releases
Keeping an eye on all these pages might give you some ideas with what people want and where potential products are.
3. Jungle Scout
Jungle Scout is an app which works alongside Amazon, to tell you which products are the most popular.
First things first- we are in no way affiliated with Jungle Scout. We just think it’s awesome.
Jungle Scout assesses the rate of sale of each product on Amazon and therefore tells you the estimated revenue made on each product per month.
There are 3 tools on Jungle Scout: 1 free & 2 paid.
Let’s start with the free tool, the Sales Estimator.
The Sales Estimator tells you roughly how many sales are made per month. You’ll need to already have a product in mind, but it’s helpful to validate an idea.
If you find a product that you think looks popular, input the BSR info from the listing into the Jungle Scout website:
The other two tools in Jungle Scout are:
The Web App
This allows you to search Amazon’s catalog based on certain criteria. For example, products that cost under £20, in a certain category, with low reviews and sales of 200+ per month.
You can shortlist any products and monitor them in a tracker, which helps you assess how they perform over time.
The Chrome Extension
The Chrome Extension is a tool that gives you an estimated number of sales and revenue from any product or seller on Amazon each month. It’s a great way to give you a forecast of how popular a product is, and it also gives you an “Opportunity Score” by looking at the level of competition vs level of demand.
The below video will outline its features although it has recently been updated to now include an Opportunity Score with the pro version.
These are both paid tools; the Web App requires a monthly or annual payment, and the Chrome Extension is just a one-off payment. However, if you’re not sure whether you think they are worth buying, you can try them free for 14 days. Just make sure you email to cancel within your first 2 weeks of purchase, and you will get a refund with no questions asked. It’s a great way to test the tools out for free.
[For a step-by-step guide on how to use these Jungle Scout tools, click here]
4. Reddit & Snoopsnoo to find niches
Some people say ‘the weirder, the better’ when you’re looking for products to sell. This may sound bonkers, but it means that you can try to rank highly for specific keywords and there’s more chance you’ll stand out amongst the crowd.
Reddit & Snoopsnoo work together, and you can use them to identify niches.
If you’re not aware of Reddit, it is a community of forums which is otherwise known as the ‘frontpage of the internet’. This basically means that there is content on everything here. If there’s an interest, chances are- there’s an audience and some content in Reddit about it.
Tips to use Reddit are:
- Head to Reddit
- Search for topics that interest you
- Trawl through forums (or “subreddits”) to work out what people are looking for
Once you have found a few some subreddits that seem to be popular, then use Snoopsnoo to analyze the popularity of the forums and assess the opportunity for potential niches.
[For a step-by-step guide on how to use Reddit & Snoopsnoo, click here]
5. Facebook to spot trends or niches
Facebook is an excellent resource to find products that are trending.
A few places that we look to spark some ideas are:
- GI Gadgets: look out for posts which have high engagement
- Fatherly
- Kitchen Hacks (if you’re considering kitchen products)
- Sponsored ads can also spark some ideas as it shows what other sellers are doing
If you see any ads on Facebook with high engagement (1k+ comments and 10k+ shares) – you can see there is potential interest in the product.
You might like to then use tools like Jungle Scout or Keepa to check the opportunity on any of these new trending products.
6. Watchcount
Watchcount.com is a fantastic, free tool to see what products are being watched on eBay and where the interest is. Although it is affiliated to eBay, it gives you an overview of what products are popular and what’s currently trending.
It updates daily and is a great place to start finding profitable products to sell online.
Again, it’s a great tool to use to give you inspiration. We’d recommend using Jungle Scout after you have some ideas to then validate the potential products.
[For a step-by-step guide on how to use Watchcount, click here]
7. Aliexpress & DHGate
The Chinese wholesaler portals Aliexpress & DHGate are often a good to place to find trending products.
The “Flash Deals” and “Editor Picks” pages often highlight the products that suppliers are promoting. These products that are popular are on-trend, and you can then research further when you check “transaction history” on each of the individual products.
For example, if you can see that a product has a lot of recent purchases and a good rating, it’s a sign that it’s popular and most likely a good product, too.
So it’s worth spending some time scrolling through these sites to see what products are selling well. They will also give you an idea of costs too, where you can then contact the suppliers to see what are the best prices you can get.
So there you have it! 8 tools that we use to help us find new products to sell online.
You won’t need to use all of these tools but we’d recommend using a mix to help give you a wide perspective. Hopefully, amongst these 8 tools, you will find a diamond of a product which will bring you a profitable e-commerce business.
Once you’ve shortlisted your possible products, you can then move onto the product sourcing stage. That’s where you’ll find out the cost of the product, and work out your calculations and profit.
Don’t forget, product research often takes time. It’s easy to see some statistics on Jungle Scout and make a spontaneous decision, but it’s worth tracking potential products over time to ensure sales will be consistent and there is longevity in the opportunity.
So good luck in your search!
