While I’m hardly an Iron Chef, I do enjoy cooking. And one thing I love cooking is Mexican cuisine. Living just south of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in Norman, there’s plenty of inspiration for these wonderful dishes. So recently, when I was scanning the Williams Sonoma website looking for Amazon FBA product ideas, I came across this listing for Mexican Cooking Essentials: Mexican Cooking Essentials | Williams Sonoma. And as usual, when I see cool products the first thing I always think to myself is…
“Hey! These would make some great Amazon FBA product ideas!”
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, let’s add this all up.
First, demand isn’t crazy on this, but it’s not terrible either. With 126 average sales per month, we don’t want to go crazy on a first order.
The Chrome Extension shows us the dimensions are about 10″ x 10″ x 6″. That means we can probably comfortably fit 200 units on a pallet according to this calculator: OnPallet’s Online Pallet Calculator.
And since we can only get 200 units (maybe 250 if we stretch) onto a pallet, we might want to try to keep that first order to 400 units to start. So right away, we have roughly $2,000 in shipping costs, or $5 per unit. Alibaba shows us we can buy these for about $3.50 each at lower order quantities. So now we’re at $8.50 per unit.
At $24.95 we’re going to lose $8.61 in Amazon fees right away. Then take out the cost of goods and leaves us with $7.84 between profit and ads. Taking a quick look at Keyword Scout, ads for “tortilla warmer” are a little pricey. And we can’t really use the 2.5 rule here, because that would make our ad costs almost 100% of that. To keep enough room for even $3.00 in profit margin (12%??? ew!) we’d have to get CPC at $0.48 per click. There’s some options to work with… but not a lot.
Verdict: Very competitive and expensive to ship. Avoid!
Low sales, but competition isn’t terrible and the average price is awesome. Can we make money with this?
First thing’s first, I wanted to check on the cost. ’cause shipping is probably going to run us about $1000 for 150-200 units of these. Looking at Alibaba, costs are shaking out around $5-$6 per unit. So that’s going to put our landed cost at $10. Woof! BUT… don’t forget that we can sell these in the high thirties range.
If we price it at $39.95, FBA is going to suck up about $13.50 in fees. And then we’re going to lose another $10 to costs. But that still gives us $16.50 to work with. Using the 2.5 rule, our ACoS target is about $10 and CPC target is $1.00. And that’s also awesome. Looking at Keyword Scout, top keywords are CHEAP… $0.50 for “molcajete” and “mortar and pestle” is $0.90 (that’s a 30,500 monthly search term). Get your conversions up to 10%, and you could see $11.50 in profit per sale. That’s $816.50 in profit per month. Not super great, but still not bad, especially considering the margin.
The ONLY thing that would back me off from this product is that the Alibaba minimum order quantities are kinda high. Looks like the lowest we can do is 500 units. So we’re looking at probably $5,500ish on a first order. If we make $816.50 per month for 12 months, that’s only a return-on-investment of 278%.
Verdict: Not a terrible product… but could be costly on the front end and ROI isn’t terrific.
Yeah, this is one of the Amazon FBA product ideas that seems good at first.
But the thing that really turns me off is the super duper low average price point. $10.95? GUH-ross! That means after Amazon takes out their fees, we’re going to get stuck with less than $7.
Taking a look on Keyword Scout, the search term “avocado pitter” doesn’t get a ton of searches. The next best thing is “avocado tool” which has a decent, but not great, search volume of roughly 3,000 per month. And then, CPC is a staggering $0.78 per month. That’ll eat up the left over $7 in a jiff.
Feel like I’m forgetting something… OH YEAH. Cost of goods!
You can probably air freight about 500 of these for roughly $400-$500. And the costs I’m seeing on Alibaba are about $0.75-$1.00 each. So landed we’re looking at about $2.00 per unit. The only plus side is you can get 500 for about $1,000. So there’s that.
It’s possible to make money with this product. But you’ll be pulling out your hair for months just to make a $1 in net profit a piece.
Verdict: low price means hardly any room for profit. But if you market it right, you might be able to make some money back with it.
A lot of new sellers fall into this trap. They see high sales and a lightweight product and they think that they’ve hit gold. Trouble is, there’s a TON of competition on this product.
We first get a glimpse of it when we turn on the Chrome Extension (before I removed the 100+ review products, this was a opportunity 4 product). Keyword Scout further confirms this, putting click costs at $1 or more. So with just ads, you’re looking at spending $10 to get on the front page.
And this is a product that sells for, at most, $16.99. Amazon’s taking $5.50 of that, so we aren’t left with much for cost of goods. Alibaba’s got the nicer ones at $2-$3, and with shipping, you’re probably in the $4-$5 range.
The only way to succeed here is through massive, massive keyword targeted giveaways. But that’s probably 300-400 units you’ll have to giveaway to even see the front page in organic ranking. So you’re talking $10,000 worth of products to start with. On a product, that even if you somehow avoid ads, probably won’t make much more than that in your first year.
Verdict: hard pass! Super duper competitive niche. You’ll lose your butt trying to compete.
Help me, tortilla press! You’re my only hope. So far on this list, the only thing worth getting excited about is the molcajete mortar-pestle, but even that is kind of on the pricey side. So hopefully this one can help us out.
This thing is massive. And heavy. Looking at OnPallet’s calculator, you can only get about 120 of these on a pallet. UGH. We need to have at least 450 of these, so you’re looking at almost 4 pallets. That’s going to run you probably $3,000 – $5,000 in shipping costs depending on where it’s going. Alibaba’s selling these for about $5-$6 each, and I did find some that will do lower MOQs, so that’s good. But still… that’s $14 in landed costs! That’s going to run you almost $7,000 to get started with this product.
We’ve got the $50 price point, so that’s going to give us some room. Amazon’s going to take almost $20 out of that price first, and then we’re throwing another $14 at product costs. That leaves us with $16 for profit and ads.
So what’s Keyword Scout say? $1 per click for “tortilla press” with roughly 240 giveaways to butt our way in to the organic ranking. Not bad, but not great. That means we’re stuck with only $6 in profit on a $50 item.
Verdict: your investment is better spent on smaller products that can give you better return-on-investment.
Hope you enjoyed this list of Amazon FBA product ideas. Not a ton of winners this week, but they can’t always be winners. If you’ve got any questions or have a suggestion for the next 5 products I break down, leave a message in the comments below or drop me a message 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!
NEXT: Magic: the Gathering Accessories (yeah, I’m a big ol’ nerd)