Easy is always relative, but when it comes to searching for that next great product to sell on Amazon there are certainly strategies and tools that can help. As with most things it begins with understanding your goals.

• Are you a brand owner? If you’re selling a certain type of product, you may already have an idea of what you want next in your catalog. Most likely you at least know where to start looking.

• Are you a new Amazon seller? If so you probably have a vision of what your product line would include, or the category you want to sell in. You may even already have an idea of the product you want to sell -- which helps -- yet, even then, you’ve got multiple criteria to consider in order to find the best opportunity.

• Do you lack a particular brand-theme or image? Are you just looking to sell whatever hot product you can find? If that’s the case then the field for you is wide-open, however, you’ll still want to select products with the highest potential.

In each of these cases, similar principles of research and discovery apply.

Quest For The Holy Grail

There are millions upon millions of products being sold on Amazon across multiple marketplaces and, believe it or not, millions of sellers selling them.

How do you find your Grail?

Well, for starters, if you’re like most of those Amazon sellers you’re looking for more than just one Grail. Successful Amazon businesses sell multiple successful products. And they do that by being able to find those with the absolute best odds of being a hit.

How do they do it?

Usually not without help. With so many options and so much competition, there are many bits of data to analyze, and many criteria to consider.  To find your next hot product to sell you need to evaluate your choices against the competition for things like:

• Price
• BSR (Best Seller Rank) for the product in its category
• Number of daily and monthly sales
• Monthly revenue
• Where the product ranks for certain search terms
• How many reviews the product has
• Average star rating

And more.

An effective Grail Quest, therefore -- like most things -- is achieved with the proper resources, most importantly the proper tools.

Tools For The Quest

Throughout the history of civilization and even before, we’ve crafted and used tools to give us a leg up on our environment. Tools are critical for saving time, and in fact, quite often tools are necessary for a thing to even be possible. Product research can be done without a tool, but the comparative times required are also overwhelming. Days versus minutes, in some cases.

For that reason, there are tools out there designed for this exact purpose. To help make this daunting task easy. Again, easy is relative, but it feels fair to say ‘easy’ when, with the right tool, so much is done automatically and near instantly.

ManageByStats offers one of these tools, MBS Retriever, an app that runs in Google Chrome as an extension. Retriever provides an easy way to validate your product ideas on Amazon, decide if a potential product is worth the investment, and accomplish the huge volume of research needed to select a product in relatively little time.

Let’s assume you’ve selected a tool to help with your research. What matters next is your approach.

Tackling The Quest

The questions above on goals have a lot to do with your approach. How do you look at your brand? Do you have a brand?

Brand-building versus simply going after what’s hot, or something to sell, are each slightly different strategies, and often bring with them a different approach -- especially when looking for the next big thing to sell on Amazon.

At ManageByStats we’re an advocate of creating a brand with substance and meaning. That’s the approach we encourage our users to take. A recognized, emotionally connected, influencing brand that resonates with your customers -- a strategy we believe goes a long way toward so many aspects of a successful enterprise.

In fact, if you want to see a guy at this stage of the game, check out the second episode of our series, How to Hunt a Whale in the Amazon. Our test subject is at the point of deciding what product to sell on Amazon, he’s using MBS Retriever, and the fun is only just beginning.

With the right approach, the right tools, and a good research strategy, product selection becomes a straightforward, dare we say fun activity, which in turn leads to often spectacular results.

We hope you’re at least having a little fun with your own brand, and your own adventure selling on Amazon.

Here’s to your success.