Welcome back to the private label product launch, where we will walk through every detail of launching a product to sell on Amazon using Fulfillment by Amazon. If you missed last week’s opening session, we walked through the ideal criteria for private label product and came up with a list of potential products. You can catch up on the blog recap or the YouTube replay of the whole webinar.
Here is the full video replay of the live webinar that we recorded:
In short, we used a few techniques to identify products on Amazon that met the following characteristics:
The products that we came up with that fell within this criteria:
Greg’s Pro Tip on Shipping: if you are launching your first private label product (and the purpose of this private label case study), air shipping is a must. Shipping by boat will require more time (30 days as opposed to 3-7 days by air), more paperwork, and logistical planning. The amount saved in shipping by sea is not worth the lost time in getting a product listed and actively selling. Until you have an idea of how the product actually sells, and can forecast and plan ahead, it is highly recommended to have your products sent by air. We will cover this in more detail as we encounter these decisions. Until then, make sure you don’t have your inventory (and cash) sitting idle crossing the Pacific Ocean if you can help it!
So let’s dig into these products a bit more and figure out what the pros and cons of each are.
The Good:
Here is the Jungle Scout data for an Amazon search of “training fins”:
The Bad:
Overall Assessment:
Overall this looks like a good product—enough sales, distributed across 10 or more sellers, and not overly competitive based on the number of reviews. There are a few points of uncertainty that need to be examined further: how seasonal is the product? Can it be manufactured at a price that would yield a profit? Is it worth the inventory challenges of having different sizes and colors for one product?
Greg’s Pro Tip: How do you know if a product has inflated numbers due to a promotion or giveaway?After determining that a product looks attractive on first glance, you should track sales activity on a daily basis to get a better understanding of how the product actually sells. For our products, we tracked them over a week to gather daily inventory, daily sales, and daily BSR. Large spikes and fluctuations would indicate that a promotion or giveaway has been inflating the numbers that initially made the product look attractive for private label. You can see for the training fins below, there is some fluctuation in the BSR between 5,000 and 12,000, and not a consistent sales trend over this short time span of 7 days.
Products with low review counts can see especially large spikes in rank during a giveaway. The ideal graph for tracked data would be consistent sales and rank figures. It is important to note what the scale is on the graph of tracked data—a change of a few thousand for BSR is normal, though fluctuations between 2,000 and 50,000 indicates a promotion.
And the actual sales data collected from 10/16/15-10/21/15:
The Good:
Greg’s Pro Tip: If there are various styles for a given key word, then filter the Jungle Scout results by the Sales column to see which styles sell the best.
Take one step further to clean up the results by removing any products that are outside of our ideal criteria, like the items that are $8. You can do this by simply using the Jungle Scout Filter, and set the price minimum to $20. The higher priced items likely offer a better margin for each item sold.
And the results with a filter to only view the higher priced items:
The Bad:
Overall Assessment:
This looks like a very promising product, despite being an oversized product with a bit of seasonality. One possible red flag may be any regulations addressing importing wood or bamboo, or FDA or regulations regarding the sticks as cooking utensils touching food. This is something that we will have to investigate before we decide to commit to selling marshmallow sticks.
The Good:
The Bad:
And a film canister listing after we've been tracking it for a week:
The Good:
Two audience hypotheses was a back-to-school spike in demand to use the canisters for science project rocket ships, or alternatively to use as containers for medicinal cannabis. Regardless sales have been improving and becoming more consistent. A look at the sales data from CamelCamelCamel will reveal a significantly improved Best Seller Rank and less volatile fluctuation.
Greg’s Pro Tip: You can always get more in depth historical sales data from CamelCamelCamel. Simply drop in the ASIN or product URL. Historical data for film canisters on CamelCamelCamel show some spikes, likely where they ran out of inventory:
The Bad:
The Assessment:
This is a product with growing demand and good potential as a private label product. At a brief first glance, it may be a challenge to source this from a manufacturer who is also not selling on Amazon, but it is worthwhile to look into further. A solid private label product overall.
It looks like the figures we analyzed last week were artificially inflated, where we were seeing 10-15 sale per day, now it is 2-4 per day. The Jungle Scout data shows a more normalized sales estimate without promotions to inflate the BSR to be better than it is regularly. There is also some competition from other sellers, not all of whom are meeting our goal of 10 units sold per day. In short, we will not pursue squat pads any further at this point.
After running through the pros and cons of these products, which would you choose? Why? Well, one of the most fun parts of running a live webinar is engaging with the live audience, and here is how everyone voted:
The next step will be selecting a product, finding a manufacturer, getting sample products, and choosing a manufacturer.
Because there are potential red flags with our two most promising products (the bamboo marshmellow sticks may have import regulations as a wooden product and the canisters may be hard to source cheaply), we will hedge our bets and pursue both simultaneously. Is there really a regulation against importing bamboo from overseas? Uncertain at this point, our research— or an audience member 😉 — will have to answer that…
We will share our interactions with the factories and the email templates we use to reach out. In our next webinar, we will share the progress we’ve made and how the conversations played out. Which product do you think we should pursue as our private label product? Please share your comments and insights below in the comments section, we want to hear from you! Until next time, Scouts.
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