This Wednesday all Americans get out their favorite red, white, and blue socks, fire up the grills, and look up to the skies for fireworks. That’s right! It’s American Independence Day aka the 4th of July. Doing a quick glance around the ol ‘net, I saw that there was lots of cool products for sale to celebrate my Nation’s birth. And just like any good Amazon seller, I said to myself, “Hey! These would make some great Amazon FBA product ideas!”
So I went over to Uncommon Goods and brought up a list of grilling gifts. You can check out their list here: Find Unique Grilling Gifts | Uncommon Goods.
Somewhat! But the cool thing about people who love to grill–especially Americans!–is that they think about it year round. So not only is this stuff great during the summer and the 4th of July, but it also makes great presents for birthdays and holidays through out the year. In fact, check out this Keepa graph for the last 365 days for this $35.99 grill set I found on Amazon:
As you can see, the best-seller ranking for this product stays well above 2,000 for most of the year. The only time it dipped was in late December and late July of 2017. Probably because they ran out of stock!
And what does a 2,000 BSR in Home/Kitchen mean in terms of product sales? According to Jungle Scout’s Free Estimator tool, that’s 2,280 units per month!
Seasonsal schmeasonal!
Remember: While I do my best to arm you with the data you need to make good product decisions, there’s always the potential that the product may not work out. This material is meant for educational and entertainment purposes. Always do your own research.
Okay, so we’ve got a box here with decent sales, a decent price, and pretty low reviews. That all seems good, right?
My big fear, though, is that this sucker is going to be expensive to ship. A big thing about shipping stuff from overseas is that it’s more about the volume than the price. And these boxes are pretty large. The one pictured has dimensions of 18″ on one side. The standard palette can only hold 1 cubic meter. I’m guessing that you can probably only get about 34 of these onto a palette comfortably. I live in the landlocked state of Oklahoma where a palette DDU runs me roughly $1200. So that means my product’s cost is going to be $35.22 right from jump street, unless I order an entire shipping container of these.
With an average price of $33.77, there’s just no way that I can profit selling this product.
Verdict: Too costly to ship. Avoid!
Notice how I had to remove a few items from the list. There were grills, charcoal pans, and other random stuff in the search. Probably a sign that this is a relatively new product idea, or one that doesn’t get done often. That could be good or bad.
Checking in on Alibaba, these things are cheaaaap. I found one set that’s $1.00 – $2.00 for 1,000 units. Trouble again, though, is the volume of these items. With 300 units in sales per month, we’re going to need a lot to start. I’m guessing we can probably get 1,000 units onto 2 pallets. That’ll put our cost at about $4,000, or $4 per unit.
Let’s break it down. If we sell these for $24.95 (~30% more than the average price is what I like to shoot for) and our Amazon referral fees and FBA fees are $8.00 and our costs are $3.90, that leaves us with $12 to split between ads and profit.
I plugged in the top seller into Keyword Scout and came back with some decent results for keywords in terms of search volume. Only trouble is that most of these keywords were coming up more than $1.00 for exact matches. Could get pricey with ads. And since we don’t have a lot of margin to work with to begin with, it’s tough.
Verdict: high ad costs and shipping costs make this product hard to sell competitively.
There’s a reason this is a 5 on the opportunity score. Frankly, it should probably be less. To make matters worse, they aren’t cheap on Alibaba either.
Verdict: Low sales, high price, way too many red flags.
Finally, a good product opportunity! The research metrics are where we want. Plus, it looks like they’re going for $2 – $4 on Alibaba. Not as cheap as I want it, but still not bad. However, I’m confident we can probably either air drop them or load them all onto one pallet for only another $1.00 per unit. So our costs will probably fall somewhere around $4 per unit.
I’d price it around $24.95 (and make sure to put it in a nice box, too), which means Amazon will take about $6.75 in their fees. Subtracting cost of goods, that leaves us with $14.20 to work with for ads.
My only trepidation is that ads might end up being costly. Keyword Scout‘s showing ad costs for $1-$2 for most of the key phrases. Still, the term “grill brush” comes up with 1,593 different keywords for us to use. Using the 2.5 Rule, there’s 60+ exact match keywords that cost less than $0.62 and over 250 for broad match. I think we could get ACoS under 25%. That leaves us with about $8 per unit in profit, for $2,208 per month.
Verdict: This product has the potential to earn $2,208 per month in profit on an initial product investment of roughly $4,000. Definitely worth considering!
This is a tricky product. It’s got a lot of good things going for it such as its low competition and that it’s lightweight. What worries me, though, is that this one has a little more seasonal edge than the other products I wrote about. Plus, it has only a few sellers doing the majority of the sales.
Checking on Alibaba, we can buy these for around $3 each. Plus MOQs are pretty low, so you can get into 500 units of this product for probably less than $2,000.
Breaking it down, at $24.95, fees will run us about $6.75. That leaves us with $14.20. So that leaves ads and profit. Unfortunately, checking Keyword Scout, there’s just not a whole lot of great keywords for this product. That tells me that demand is very low, and that the sellers who are making sales on Amazon aren’t doing it with Amazon traffic, but probably bringing their own in.
Verdict: avoid this product. It’s fool’s gold.
Hope you enjoyed this list of product ideas. I know last time I said I was going to do some Williams Sonoma Mexican Dining options, but I guess I forgot the 4th was coming up! Whoops! So I’ll try to get to that one next week.
If you have any questions about these products or my sourcing style, please drop a message in the comments below. Or, you can email me at [email protected]
And if you need more product ideas, be sure to grab our list of 10,000 bestselling products on Amazon.
See you soon!