hey everyone I'm Greg berer the founder and CEO of jungle Scout I've been selling on Amazon for over 10 years and if I had to start all over today I'm going to be discussing exactly how I would go about finding that perfect first product and making my first ,000 on Amazon now if you remember nothing else I want you to walk away with these two things avoid at all costs finding a product that does not have good demand so we want products that people are already searching for and purchasing on Amazon and number two do not sell products with low profit margins so we'll be discussing how to find those fabulous products that have great profit margins there are tens of millions of products that sell well on Amazon and we need to search through those and sort through those to find those perfect products for you in this video I'm going to be discussing how I go about finding those products what to look for what to avoid and give you all the tips tricks and hacks that you need to find that great product for you throughout this video we're going to be using jungle Scout out to help us find that perfect product it's a really powerful tool because it gives you all of the data and insights to understand exactly what's happening on Amazon you can figure out what customers are searching for what they're purchasing what products are selling well which ones aren't how much money you can make from it and really get a deep analysis of what's working well and what's not and uncover those hidden gems on Amazon that's what we're going to be finding today I often get asked the question is it a good time to sell on Amazon and the answer to that is yes it's still a fabulous opportunity selling products on Amazon at the end of the day this is where consumers are shopping the vast majority of e-commerce sales are still happening on Amazon and you want to be selling your products where the Shoppers are at with that being said each year and as time goes by the tips and tactics and tricks that are working do change and that's what we're going to be talking about in this video of how you can find a fabulous opportunity for 2024 are there more sellers on Amazon yes there are but there are also more consumers purchasing goods and the cool thing about jungle Scout is over the years we continue to adapt it and make it better so that you have that Competitive Edge to figure out where these good opportunities are today I'm going to be going over a few parts of jungle Scout but we're going to start with two of my favorite tools inside of the product the product database and the opportunity finder the product database takes all of Amazon's products and lets you search through using a whole bunch of different pieces of criteria to find an awesome product the opportunity finder actually looks at niches or opportunities at a whole so it takes groups of products together and it rates them for things like how much demand or how much competition or seasonality there is and we'll be going over some details of that so the product database has taken all the products on Amazon they've put them in this jungle Scout database that makes it easy to search and sort through them based off the characteristics that we're looking for let's start by talking about the categories now you can sell in any of these categories if you would like but a few tips that I have for you is one try to find a product that's relatively simple products that are more complex or more complicated or more likely to have issues with them and just in general are a larger headache for you on top of that it's kind of nice to sell inside of a category that you at least know a little bit about shortly I'm going to talk about finding products that we can improve on and if you're at least Vaguely Familiar with these types of products that's typically easier to do so I'm going to go ahead and start by choosing a few of these categories but I'm not necessarily saying that these are the best ones or the ones that you should be looking in there are opportunities in all these different categories as far as the filters over on the right hand side I'm going to start with a few different things one is I'm going to choose only standard product tier sized essentially what that means is this product can about fit inside of a shoe box oversized items have a lot more complexities with them there are lower storage limits they are more expensive as far as Amazon fees are concerned and in general there's going to be more headaches for you so for your first product I would really recommend choosing a standard tier size after that I'm going to click on the good Roi filter what this is doing is it's saying products that are at least 20 bucks and after Amazon takes their fees there's at least $15 left over for you at the beginning I talked about making sure to find a product that has good profit margins with it so you do not want to be selling a product that sells for like 20 bucks and only $5 is left over after Amazon fees so we want to make sure there's a healthy gross margin after Amazon fees and that's what the net revenue represents before I search the last thing I want to do is make sure that there's healthy demand for these products so you can do this with units sold so I'm going to say only show me the products that sell at least 100 units per month and this is a great Baseline for someone who's just starting out so let's go ahead and search and see what pops up all of the products shown below are Amazon products that now meet the criteria that I put in here so they're relatively small sell for at least 20 bucks there's at least $15 left over after Amazon fees and the ones shown sell at least 100 units every month as I start looking through this for ideas there's a few things that I keep my eye out for one I want something pretty simple so not too many moving Parts ideally no electronics really just the simpler the better the other thing that I person personally really like is products that are kind of strange what you'll find is the cool and sexy products typically have a lot more Sellers and the ones that are kind of weird or strange are typically a lot less competitive and have better margins with them so I'm seeing some screws on here to me that kind of passes the weird test those are not necessarily a cool or sexy thing to be selling I'm seeing some other cool ideas on here like make your own beeswax candle kit to me that's that's kind of strange different hardware and fittings plumbing parts cabinet poles those could all be potentially good ideas things like light bulbs to me that's not simple enough and it's too likely that there could be issues with it or there's just going to be more headaches associated with it I'm seeing other things like a doggy dare trash can lock to me that passes the weird test and it's not a cool or sexy product that probably has a lot of competition with it so now you can start to get a sense of all the different product ideas that the product database is showing me in a few minutes I'll go into more depth on how I decide which of these product ideas are good but for now I'm just going for quantity of different product ideas as you're coming up with all these different product ideas the way that I like to keep track of them is by clicking on these three little dots and then add products to product tracker and what this will do is this will create a group inside of the product track over here which is just a great way to collect all your different product ideas for the next example I'm going to talk about how I find products that are good opportunities to improve on the product and really if I had to choose just one way to go about finding a product in 2024 I think this would be my preferred route what I'm going to do here is I'm going to find products that are selling well even though they get relatively bad reviews I'm then going to show you how to use a really cool tool inside of jungle Scout to figure out why it's getting bad reviews and what you can do to make improvements on it to do this I'm going to click on the poor products filter and the modification I'm going to make here is to say only show me products that have at least 50 reviews and the max star rating over here is 3.6 so what this is telling me is this product sells for at least 20 bucks it sells at least 100 units per month it has at least 50 reviews but all those reviews combined have 3.6 stars or less so that's a pretty bad rating on Amazon and what this is telling us is customers really want this type of product even though it doesn't get very good reviews that means that these are great opportunities for you to figure out what's wrong with them make improvements to it and sell something better than what the competitors are selling so I'll go ahead and search so now the product database is showing me all the products that meet my criteria and these are products that a lot of people are buying even though they're getting bad reviews so let's use this installation tube as an example so this is insulation that you put over your pipes probably outside selling 122 units per month even though it has 3.6 Stars what this is telling me is people want this even though it's getting bad reviews so if you were to make this product better you could likely outsell this competitor and sell more of them to figure out how to make it better what we can do is use a really cool product inside of jungle Scout called review analysis pce in your as let review analysis do its magic and what's Happening Here is AI is actually reading all the reviews on this Amazon listing and then giving you a summary of what it found included in this are cool things like the common negative comments and even how to improve this product so what this is telling me is an improvement could be by making the self-adhesive tape better making it longer and offering better packaging so that it doesn't get smashed when in transit it's also really cool because the review analysis can tell me how it compares to other similar products in the market which is amazing as well as how to beat this product if I wanted to sell it so this is a really really powerful way to get AI to do a whole bunch of reading and summarizing for you instead of you spending hours and hours trying to read through every single review let's take a look at another example this product right here it looks like it's a pallet Buster tool so I guess a tool you use to break up shipping pallets and if I search for it inside of AI review analysis I can do the same thing look at the negative comments how to improve it how it compares to similar products and what I see in here is that customers are really looking for something that uses stronger and more durable materials and it even gives examples of how we could do that or what type of materials that we could use so this would be something that would be pretty easy to find a supplier for and then talk to them about hey can we use these different materials that are more durable or higher quality because that's obviously what customers are looking for I spoke earlier about how we make sure there's good demand for products and when you look at products inside of jungle Scout's product database it's just showing you how well that single product sells now that is a good indicator for how much demand there is but before moving forward with a product what I like to do is go over to Amazon itself search for what you think is the keyword that best describes it and then I really like to use the jungle Scout Chrome extension to just see how well all the products on that first page are selling so if I look at the different products here it looks like most of these are selling between 1200 units per month which for something of this price point is actually pretty good demand I would say that's a nice sweet spot and that there's plenty of demand for it so customers are definitely looking for and shopping and buying this product but it's also not something that sells like tens of thousands of units per month because those are typically going to be more competitive the preset filters inside of the product database are f fabulous way to get started understanding how you can use this feature inside a jungle Scout so for example items with bad marketing what this does is it sets the listing quality score at a maximum of six so what you can do is you can find products that are selling well let's say like 500 units per month even though they have a bad listing and that would be a good indicator again that there is high demand for this type of product and there's an opportunity here for you because you can make a better listing than what this seller has another tip I'd like to share with you is as we're thinking about products that have good margins one of the things that can really increase your Amazon fees quickly is the weight of the product so I recommend when you're looking for your first product to choose something that's standard siiz product here but then also has a maximum weight of 2 3 4 lb that's ideal over something that's much heavier than that let's talk about the opportunity finder this is a really powerful way to look at groups of products or niches on Amazon so similar to the product database there's a bunch of different filters here you can choose your categories but then over on the right hand side now we can do really cool things like how much seasonality this type of product has you can of course look at how well it sells so meeting that demand criteria that I talked about earlier and some other powerful things that I'm going to talk about for the first example I'm going to say only show me products that sell at least let's say 200 units per month on average and the minimum price per unit is $20 I'm going to set my seasonality to at maximum medium and hopefully this removes a lot of those products that are only selling well around Christmas time let's start with this search these are all the niches or opportunities on Amazon that meet that criteria so let's start by looking at this one journal for adults when I click into view this is really powerful I can start by looking at what types of products are these okay I get an idea they're different journals for adults but what's cool is over the past 2 years I can look at on average how well do these products sell so they sell really well they've sold more in Q4 but even before that they were selling at least about 1,000 units per month on top of that I can see how the average price of these products have trended they're mostly between $16 and $24 for a period of time it was a little bit more than that and then I can also see though how well the search volume is so how many people are searching for this keyword Journal for adults over time and then I love to see the seasonality because what you'll find is certain products will Peak during a certain time of the year those are typically more challenging especially for beginners because it makes your inventory planning Inventory management more difficult if you sell like half of your sales in one or two months out of the year as I'm scanning through all these different opportunities I'm looking for products that seem like they're kind of weird that they are something that people would be searching for besides a specific brand name and something that's relatively simple so let's look into this book pouches the niche score is an 8 out of 10 the niche score takes into account how much demand there is for this product how competitive it is as well as how much seasonalities associated with it so these book pouches are things that you store your books in people probably use them for their textbooks if we look at how seasonal they are there is the most Demand right before school starts but as we can see they actually sell pretty well all year long and I see that same Trend when I look at how many units have been selling over time I also see that it looks like this is overall trending up like in the past 6 months or so book pouches have been selling better than what they were the year before that the average price has been going down over time but it's still at a healthy price point 20 to $40 is and this is a pretty simple product and a little bit weird or obscure both of which I like since this meets most of my criteria what I'm going to do is I'm going to choose a few of these products and go ahead and add them to my product tracker into my 2024 product ideas so the opportunity finder is a great way to come up with these different opportunity or different Niche ideas my favorite filters to use are the average monthly unit sold when we're looking at something that has healthy demand I would recommend 200 300 units per month something around there that means about 10 units per day average monthly price is important to be looking for products that I would say minimum $20 253 would even be better than that below that it's going to be difficult to get good gross margins and then the search Trends are really nice to use because you can find what types of niches or opportunities are trending up or at minimum flat you ideally don't want something that's kind of a dying n or dying opportunity the competition slider is really cool because essentially you can get a sense of how competitive it's going to be based off things like how many sellers there are how good their listings are how many Search terms there are things like that so I would recommend trying to find something that's not very high competition at minimum high but ideally medium or below that you can play around with these different filters in these different categories to start to find different opportunities that are good for you if you start to hone in on something that you like I would encourage you to type it into the include keywords and what that's going to do is it's going to find adjacent opportunities that include Search terms like that I encourage you to play around with these different filters do different searches inside of different categories to start to find something that meets his criteria of having good Demand with it passes kind of this weird test is something that's not too big and not too heavy and has a minimum price point of at least $20 25 or 30 would be better than that once you've done that add these products into your product tracker so you can keep track of all these different ideas that you have after that we're going to go one step deeper to get a sense of how much it's going to cost to Source these products and that's really important for figuring out what your margins are going to be as I mentioned earlier in the video if you remember nothing else remember that we're looking for something that has good demand and also has plenty a margin for you so that you can make sure that this is a profitable product so I'm in my product tracker I've added added these different products that we found in this demo into my 2024 product idea group and I'll show you how I go about finding a general idea of what it's going to cost to get these products manufactured we'll just take this top example the book pouch and the best way to get a general sense of how much a product is going to cost is on Alibaba in Alibaba I'm just going to type book pouch and I start to see some products that are similar to what we were looking at on Amazon and just scrolling through through this it looks like most of these book pouches are maybe a dollar on the lower end2 $3 on the upper end so from that you can get a pretty good sense of what it's going to cost let's call it $2 per book pouch now depending on what the material is and if you make modifications to it and things like that this can differ but it is important to just get a general sense of what something like this is going to cost so that we can start to do some profitability or margin calculations the easiest way to calculate your profit profitability is inside the Chrome extension so what I'm going to do is I'm going to search for these book pouches on Amazon and then I can go in here and let's take a look at let's take a look at this one that sells for $24 and sells about 600 per month if I click on the net profit it brings up this little calculator and if I put in here you know let's call it $3 and then calculate profit this is how much money I would make after I've paid for the goods and Amazon has taken out all their fees now this doesn't include things like advertising or shipping the product from China into Amazon so I also want to take those into account now I'm pretty familiar with shipping stuff from China something like this we could probably add an extra couple dollars to to account for shipping so let's say our overall product cost is going to be $5 this particular item would still give us a healthy profit now as I look at the Chrome extension there are quite a few that are less expensive than this so I would want to do a deeper analysis to figure out why this person is able to sell theirs for more than others I could use jungle Scouts review analysis tool to do that or I could just start to look through some of these now at a lower price point like this one that sells for 15 if I look at the net profit calculator and let's say $5 for total landed cost this is still going to give me a decent amount of profit about five bucks before my Amazon advertising but as you can see there's much less margin on that than what one of these higher priced ones are as you're thinking about overall profitability of your product the two largest expenses that you're going to have by far are the cost of the goods and shipping them into Amazon and then on top of that Amazon's advertising it's hard to give exact figures on what it's going to cost for Amazon advertising but as I'm thinking about profitability or margin for my products I'd like to use the value of 20% of the sales price for my estimated advertising budget so for this one for example the product price is let's call it $24 so the advertising would be $480 or we can call it five bucks so if I land this product for $5 into Amazon $5 for advertising that would leave me $7 of profit for this product which $7 on a $24 product that's actually a really healthy profit margin let's call it 30 or 40% profit margin so something like that I would be comfortable with if you're doing these profit calculations and you're only left with a do or $2 or $3 or something like that I would encourage you to find something that's more profitable or be looking at which sellers are able to sell their products for a premium and what attributes are similar with those different products and be looking at what you can do to be able to charge a higher premium for the products that you're selling as you're thinking about what is the right amount of margin or what margin are you going to be looking for I encourage people to be looking at margins that is essentially a 100% Roi on the landed cost of the goods so if I'm purchasing this product for $5 or It costs $5 to get it into Amazon so it's like the purchase price of the the goods plus shipping into Amazon is $5 I'd like to aim for $5 of profit after I've also subtracted out Amazon fees so for this one I said there would be $7 left over after I take into account the cost of the goods and getting them into Amazon Plus the advertising so $7 return on purchasing the product for $5 that's over 100% so for me that's a healthy profit margin to have and that's what I would encourage you to shoot for as you're looking for your first product so that's how I run my process for finding products to sell I'm looking for products that have good demand associated with them are going to be profitable and this is the process that that I like to use for coming up with all those different ideas don't get frustrated if it takes a little bit of time finding the perfect product opportunity for you it usually takes hours of searching through the product database to find that perfect product looking through the opportunity finder looking on alib Baba to get a rough sense of how much these are going to be selling for and as you're getting started I encourage you to look for more ideas as opposed to less so it' be great if you filled up your product tracker with like dozens and dozens of different ideas and then you're searching through each of those I would really encourage you to use the new review analysis to understand what customers like and what they don't like about these products and then be thinking of ideas of how you can make your product better than any of the competitors out there selling on Amazon continues to be a really amazing opportunity for creating your own business I want to give you a real life example these are are jungle Creations puppy PE pads we started selling this product a couple years ago you can actually find find it on Amazon right now but I wanted to share the real life numbers of this particular product with you to get a sense of what this actually looks like in real life so in the first 3 months we lost about $7,000 when we were selling this product now this is common because as you're getting those initial sales running extra advertising to make more sales and get more reviews from it it's typical for people to lose a little bit of money those first few months the next few months though we were actually able to recoup our initial investment and start to make some profitability and then if we look at the first year in total we actually made about $24,000 throughout that entire period so we launched this product about 2 years ago and it continues to do well and has continued to do well since then it works out to be making us about 20 to $25,000 per year in profit from this one individual product so as you can imagine if you were launching multiple products this can turn into a pretty significant business for a lot of people but don't worry about that too much right now if you're just trying to get started what's most important is you find that first product you learn how the entire process works you order it you get it into Amazon and go from there there's always more and more that you can be doing on Amazon and more that you can be learning about but if you're watching this today and looking to just get started I would really encourage you to just be focusing on finding what product you want to sell getting it ordered and getting it into Amazon during that period when they're manufacturing it that's a great time to learn all about creating listings and doing advertising and all those types of things but what I've found is for people who try to learn all that before they even order their first product it's like too much or too overwhelming and you need to get some small wins along the way so focus on finding that perfect product for you getting it ordered getting it into Amazon and those are the most important first steps for starting on this journey we're also going to be doing a live Q&A session right after this so go ahead and put the questions you have into the chat box and we'll answer them thank you 3 2 1 dick and I going to be be here to answer any of the questions that you might have so the question is from Rose on how much do you guys charge for a full course for Amazon FBA um so just at the end there you saw Greg um promote the freedom Builder boot camp course that we offer which you can find a link to that in the link in the video description below and we are running a deal right now up until the end of January that you can save a lot of money on that deal so um we offer a lot of free training right here on YouTube if you don't want to you know uh make that yet um to buy jungle Scout or to buy Freedom Builder boot camp so you can check out our latest how to sell an Amazon video it's our first video on the channel it's like the channel trailer video that's like a 2hour long full tutorial or um or and or you can check out the freedom Builder boot camp course that is taught by Greg himself again with the link in the description below um cool yeah there was a another question here that came in earlier um the question said there struggling finding profitable products uh in India so if this is you um I wanted to show you real quick here um within jungle Scout our product database tool you can actually find products in India or in other countries so a lot of times in our videos you know we use where we are living the United States as the example and we use these filters to find products um but you can see there's these other marketplaces here so if I wanted to find products for India I can actually set my criteria here and search through all the products that are being sold on the India Marketplace um so this is one of the best ways to find like you mentioned profitable products in the India Marketplace or you can still use us data to help you find popular products a lot of times people will use the United States data um to to really figure out what products they want to launch in other marketplaces um but yeah hopefully that answers your questions and you're hopefully able to use jungle Scout in any Market that you're selling on cool cool all right let's see uh there's a question here from Michelle how do I get items to Amazon um so typically I mean you can get products we'll start with like where they get made there are a lot of places that you can get products manufactured um it's very common to get products made in China is there a lot of manufacturing that goes on there and so let's say that you're selling in the US you have a few options of how to get your product shipped from uh we're going to use China as an example into the US you can hire what's called a freight for which is essentially a shipping logistics company that handles all of that process for you there's a number of things that go on in the background like um handling customs duties and lots of paperwork and things that honestly I don't even know um how a lot of that all works but that's because the freight for you hire them and then they look after that process for you so uh we actually have a number of videos that kind of like talk through what to look for in a freight forwarder and a little bit more detail on how that works but essentially that's like your main option would be to hire a freight for company MH uh another option is often you can speak to your supplier and they might have relation relationship with their own Freight forwarders and you can get your supplier to organize the shipping with uh their Freight forers and then they sort of uh kind of organize or shepher the the shipment coming over to the US there are still a few steps that you need to do so even if you use a freight F you do need to uh uh create a shipment plan within cell Central uh but we have videos on how you go about that it's a fair straightforward process you're essentially just telling Amazon how much you're sending in and which product Etc um but yeah I can understand if you're brand new to this it it might seem very overwhelming and scaring like how would I get this product from another country into the US uh but if you follow uh the Steps step by step it it is pretty it is fairly straightforward and again we do have great resources on our YouTube channel which you can check out to get familiar with that process the best resource I'd recommend is if you go to our Channel there's a video called how to sell on Amazon um it's a comprehensive 2our video that covers all the steps so that's a really great crash course on how to sell on Amazon if you're interested and it's free on our Channel absolutely here's a good question that came in earlier as well so the question says I made 1K in Revenue in my first month selling on Amazon it's awesome however I haven't been profitable yet due to PPC spend which is very common any advice for a novice with a low budget on how to optimize and manage PPC so this is a great question because as you saw at the tail end of Greg's presentation um when we launched the washable pads for dogs we had about a three-month period where we were unprofitable and a big reason why that was was because advertising uh you know we operated with a very low price points to get customers interested in buying our products to incentivize them and then on top of that low price point which was really breaking even already we were spending a lot of money on ads just to try to cut the line and get our product to be right in front of C customers when they're shopping um and because we had lower revews at the time um you know it was unprofitable we were definitely getting some clicks through our listing but a lot of people weren't seeing the reviews that they needed to confirm their purchase um so they would not buy that product and buy a competitor's product so that means we were losing a lot of money on PBC so what did we do we just stuck it out we continued spending money we continued losing money for about 3 months this is is totally going to be different for every any different product launch um so 3 months is not just like what what everybody's going to experience it's what we experienced and then after that point we slow down our spending which means we cut back on our bids so we went from like for example $3 per click uh to like $2 per click we also cut down the number of keywords after learning which keywords are really profitable which ones aren't um and then we just contined that process of just optimizing our keyword bids and then our campaign spend as well so I would say that my like piece of advice if you're just starting out like this is your month one or two or three even um just let it go try to get your first couple reviews so that your listing in conversion rate increases pretty significantly and then you can start to scale back your spend um as the months go on but hopefully sounds like you're off to a good start you got $1,000 in Revenue your first month that's pretty awesome hopefully you're getting some reviews from that yeah there's there's a a lesson here that I think is really important to emphasize and um I know Greg talks about it a little bit towards the end of his presentation where he shared the the kind of first year journey of our washable pee pads that we sell here at jungle Scout but the the lesson is that it's it's very common or it's with this type of business uh it's it's highly unlikely that you're going to be profitable from day one the most the most common uh scenario and journey is it's going to take you and I don't like to put numbers behind it because it it is different depending on your product and so forth but could be anywhere from like 3 6 n months before your UH before your product becomes profitable and I want to let anyone know um that is considering getting into the the business like it you kind of need to have that expectation and understand that because if you go in thinking that you're going to be profitable from day one uh it's probably going to be tough or you're probably going to get sort of Blindsided when you realize that that's not how this business typically works you know as uh Greg showed in in the the diagram uh with our product we you know continued to lose money yeah for that first three months um and it wasn't until after that that our per unit uh our per unit profitability or we we became profitable but even then um after that first 3 months even though we were making profit uh each sale we still had to make up the like7 8,000 that we' spent or lost uh prior to that so then it took another few months in order to recoup that and then it was like 9 to 12 months before we finally like as a business we'll say became profitable uh and that's like a fairly typical Journey so definitely keep that in mind is that um yeah when you first start out you're probably going to be losing money or at least breaking even like I think breaking even is like a great goal to begin with um but then as you you know grow in sales and particularly reviews you're going to be able to um spend less money on on PPC and and eventually turn a profit let's see here a lot of good questions um oh yeah you're in the queue let's see here's a good question that I assume a lot of new sellers will have is how much investment do I need to start this is a good question because it totally depends on your set of circumstances how much money you have what your business model is are you going to do private label Drop Shipping wholesale Arbitrage um or also um what are your expectations like in your first year or two and what I mean by that is similar to what you said there's a method or strategy where you kind of go all out and you spend a lot of money to get a lot of inventory in because that allows you to stay in stock for a long time to to just keep selling and never have to run out of stock but that's very expensive what you could do though on the on the other hand is buy a low amount of inventory which allows you to test the market but it also just allows you to start with less funds so maybe you only have $1,000 and you put 800 of that towards inventory and the other 200 go towards maybe some startup cost like some software you're using or um really anything like even product photography um but you spend that money just on like a trial order of inventory now you will be out of stock for some time and you will have to keep reordering and keep going out of stock but that's totally fine and it's a great way of launching a product um ideally you have more money you don't go out of stock but it's not the end of the world going out of stock especially when you're launching a a brand new product um there's not going to be a million customers waiting for your product to come back in stock so I would say whatever you have available ideally around $1,000 I think most people are more comfortable launching into $3 to $5,000 range but just depends on again all those uh little factors that I mentioned as well as um your product cost so if you want to sell a product that's going to cost you $20 per unit from your supplier uh you're going to need a little bit more more money than if your product cost just $5 um so I would say if you're low on funds try to find a lower cost product um something maybe under $10 and then also don't be afraid to go out of stock and just order a trial order um in the first couple of months or even the first year let's frame this another way Jake how much would you what would be the minimum that you would want to get started today I think I it's such a again that's like all those factors but if I were to answer I would say like $33,000 because I can I would spend like a thousand of those on product photography I like I'm so bullish on photography like i' would rather spend more money on my photography than my first of inventory and then I'd spend the other $2,000 in inventory or if for some reason images and Video cost $22,000 I would spend $2,000 there and then $1,000 on my inventory so yeah under 3,000 that would be comfortable okay yeah I'd be personally more comfortable closer to to $5,000 but uh for me it would be sort of like I I think probably 3,000 would be the minimum if it was going to take me if it was going to take me like months to get the extra 2,000 then I probably wouldn't wait but if I could spend I don't know however long another month or something another few weeks and and get to 5,000 I think for me I would be more comfortable with that um just having a little bit more inventory up front and uh less chance of running out of stock but yeah there's there's definitely a lot of factors like you you know pointed out cool cool cool cool great questions guys um oh here's an interesting one uh from sunrose what words of encouragement would you give to folks who are hesitant to start selling on Amazon before answering that I'm going to have a a follow-up question I'd love to to hear from you what makes you hesitant to sell on Amazon I think I can answer that uh a little more clearly so I'll keep an eye on the chat um yeah let me know like why you're feeling hesitant if if this is you know you feeling hesitant or some reasons why why you might be or people might be um and I can speak to that so I'll come back to that one and anybody feel free to let us know CU I this is going to be yeah I think that's a a great question because like um actually it sort of ties in there was another question here from uh D Dey do I need to buy courses to succeed on Amazon FBA and the answer is no there's so much great free education out there even on our Channel I mentioned this how to sell an Amazon video it's like a 2hour crash course that has a lot of details in it not every single thing otherwise it would go on a lot longer but there is more than enough information out there to get started uh and so I I don't think a lack of education is the reason why people struggle to get started it's more these other I don't know what you call it like subtle things around I don't know the the the fears and doubts and the hesitations that people might have for various reasons or whatever your specific circumstances are um and I think that's probably like a really interesting thing to talk about or try to address is like what are those doubts and fears that are holding people back from from getting started and trying to like help people address those um so yeah I'm really really interested to to hear the answer to this question I'm going to bring up a a question here that um I I've SE quite a few times in different ways in in this chat here and the question is um how can I sell in the United States from another country and how will I get paid so this is a very popular question we get about you know how can I sell an XC country from X country um and really the answer is as long as there is a Marketplace or let me say that this way you can sell from anywhere to anywhere so you can live in Pakistan you can live in India you can live anywhere and sell in the United States um now there are some more like detailed like tutorials on exactly how to set up things like your bank account or your business address but really you can create a business in your country and sell on any Marketplace Amazon actually encourages you to do that they want sellers to expand their marketplaces now if you're trying to sell in your Marketplace that's even easier um but sometimes if you're just going to you know live in another country and sell in another country um there's the only really like obstacles that you have is just making sure that you're like compliant with the taxes um and you're submitting a few forms um but other than that Amazon makes it really easy and they actually encourage you to send your inventory to different marketplaces so um I don't think we have any like video content on that that's recent we might have on our jungle Scout blog if you just go to junglescout.com and and search for that type of content or anywhere on Google and YouTube will be helpful um but it's relatively easy and it shouldn't be a blocker to getting started selling on Amazon if you're in a different country than the US and you want to sell there yeah my biggest challenge uh when I first started selling on the US Marketplace from Australia was the currency uh because all my money was in Australian dollars but obviously selling in US Dollars and purchasing in US dollars so my biggest challenge at the time was keeping my money in US dollars because it wasn't a efficient you could get like I could have gotten Amazon to pay me out to an Australian bank account and it would convert let's say 1,000 us into $1,500 Australian dollars whatever their exchange rate is but then when I exchange that back to US dollars in order to purchase more inventory in that double um exchange I would lose money so if it was $1,000 initially it might end up only being $900 so um I found that the biggest challenge was like keeping them my money in US Dollars and probably a lot of you would know if you're outside the US it's hard to get a US dollar bank account if you're not um in in the US um and but but the good news is that there's a lot of great Solutions out there uh a couple of companies that do this is called wise and another one's payeer and so they're uh essentially kind of like I don't know Global Banks or these Financial companies that allow you to set up Us doll bank accounts from pretty much anywhere in the world and so that you can receive money in there and then you can pay suppliers and you can keep all of your expenses in Us doll or I mean actually even if you're selling in other marketplaces you can set up different currencies and you can keep your money in the currency of uh whatever Marketplace that you're selling in and they typically offer things like debit cards as well so that you can also use that to pay for subscriptions and things um so I found that was my biggest challenge getting started outside of the US and there's a you know really great solutions for it it's a good question I saw there was a few or answer there was a lot of questions about how to use credit cards in different countries so pay near and wise were two that Lenny recommended yeah um I saw there was a question there saying I don't have a credit card but I want to start Amazon FBA what can I do in this situation I haven't set up like a new account in years and years and years but I actually just have a debit card on file I don't know whether like if you would to try to do that today whether it wouldn't allow you to I know I know I think it always says like oh you need a credit card but I don't I've never put a credit card on my account but I don't know if if it would actually stop you today or whether you could just put in a I would say just try with a debit card because it I know it worked for me but that was a long time ago I think if it does require it now then like you said if you're out of the country why isn't pay here do they offer credit cards I don't believe unless it's more recent I don't believe they offer credit cards it's more like a debit card for your bank account or yeah I'm sure there's definitely um overseas outside the United States companies that you can work with or if you want to get one set up in the United States like Chase and Amex are two really good companies um that will give you amazing cash back so when you do actually spend in Amazon like whether it's through ads or whatever maybe just your $40 account membership plan uh you'll get some cash back on that which is great for things like flights and anything else I would just like figure out a way around it so what I mean by that is like if you're struggling to get say a business uh credit card for example set up I would just put down a personal credit card just to kind of get your account set up and get started right that now obviously it's not the most ideal situation it's better to kind of have a separate bank account credit card and have all of your financials for your business completely separate but I wouldn't let that get in the way of getting started so if that means using a personal credit card just to like fulfill that requirement um I would do that and keep in mind that once you start selling and uh basically making sales uh pretty much everything all all the charges that you get from Amazon will come from that balance so it might really just be probably just like the first month or two where your Cardon file might get charged and then after that everything will just come out of the balance of all the sales that you make um I think you'd have to I think you can nominate separately where you want your PPC advertising charges to come from um but yeah again once you start making sales that can all come out of that and so it won't really ever charge your card on file that's more just to kind of get your account set up sort of thing so yeah that's kind of my you two cents by the way I saw Rose who asked a question earlier about um words of encouragement for new sellers h she uh messaged back saying um I'd be hesitant as I've never done I never sold on Amazon uh and then the also the process of shipping from another country to the US I totally agree with that like the that's actually what held me back for years was how I could find products to to sell um I can look at data to tell me which ones are good and bad but how the heck do I actually reach out to suppliers how do I work with people that can ship my product and how do I do all that duties tariffs it was like frightening and so kind of is but more I'm more comfortable with it now as I've done it more and more so if that's a blocker the whole like shipping or just never done it before I would say to cure both of those or to get past both of those you just got to do it um and a lot of times like Lenny mentioned earlier you're going to be working with a freight forwarder or the supplier will have their own Freight forwarding companies that they work with to handle all the logistics you just got to sign a few things you got to go through some paperwork um and then you got to get different quotes from different Freight forwarders to like make sure you're getting the best price but you actually don't need to do that much I think that's like a a misconception is that you have to be there every step of the way um whereas really a freight for it will handle most of it for you so they're the ones that make it possible and easy for you to actually get your products from you know China to the United States um it's still like this like huge unknown when you're first getting started um but I wouldn't let that deter you or slow you down from starting because just the more you do it the more repetitions uh the more comfortable you'll get and the more you'll just understand it um and feel way more confident um going forward so hopefully that's not a blocker for you in like a year from now and you can kind of get past that I I'll I'll expand on that you said like the the best way to to get over that is just to do it and I'm going to add I'll say the best way just to do it once you really only need to do it that one time and then you're like oh okay I I kind of get it now and just doing it that first time you're then going to feel more comfortable afterwards and then as a beginner to make it even simple um you said you know get a few cres you don't even need to do that it is as simple as uh reaching out to your supplier and saying how much will it cost me to send it from you know send it into the US to this ZIP code that's you just ask that question they'll come back and they'll say it's $2,000 and they'll say like here's how to pay or or whatever you pay them the money and then they organize it that's pretty like that is as simple as it as it can be um like it can be that simple um I'd say just kind of get through that first process or that first time and then yeah after that you certainly can get multiple quotes and try to like make it a little bit cheaper and there's always like ways to improve but if you've got some hesitancy around it it's uh it is actually pretty straightforward just to get that first time happening um yeah I I think actually I think there's like two people in the the chat there um that have the the name Ros in them I think sunrose is the one that uh initially asked the question and uh the answer here is money and fear of failure um and I I I think that makes total sense that uh probably like the the the two biggest reasons that people would hesitate around um getting started so money yes it it is super scary when you're first starting out sending 2,000 3,000 $5,000 off in Into The Ether and not knowing whether this is a scam or whether that money is going to come back um I think um you know if you're using a site like Alibaba they've got a lot of checks in place so that you can sort of validate that the the supply you're working with is legitimate there's like reviews they do you know they check those companies so you can at least feel comforted that the company that you're working with okay this is a legitimate company um as far as what else as far as money goes I would say it's it's very unlikely that you're going to lose all of your money if you were to spend $3,000 on your first uh first shipment and let's say that that product is a quote unquote a fail um and it doesn't sell as well as you want it or it doesn't sell it's unlikely you're going to lose all $3,000 if you were struggling to sell that product you could always then just drop the price significantly below everyone else turn on some PPC and I would say probably the worst case scenario is like maybe losing half of your money I know that's still not great but that's like a really worst case scenario it's enough then to buy more inventory yeah and then to increase your margins as you keep going or to keep repeating it until you're able to increase your margins yeah you're not like I think sometimes that's confusing even to me sometimes when we say it like when we say we lost like $3,000 in our first first month we didn't like just go from 3,000 to zero we like went from like what like 6,000 to 3,000 or something where we lost some money but we we made enough money back in Revenue to buy the next out of inventory so it's not like a total loss you won't go from you know your inventory is an asset so that's what we were using to basically get back in Revenue to buy our next round of inventory yeah I I guess like I'm I'm taking the perspective of like absolute worst case scenario where you've spent we're going to go with $3,000 and you've decided this isn't working want to get out this this whole business is for me so I'm not buying more inventory I'm saying that like even in that absolute worst case scenario which is pretty extreme I don't think this would be super likely unless you just really didn't use any data or do any product research or whatever which again like we we we do our best to like help you not get into that scenario but even in that scenario you'd be able to like liquidate like most of that money back so in the worst worst worst case scenario you wouldn't lose all $3,000 I'd say you'd at least get back like 2,000 25,000 you'd be able to like recoup a good amount of your money so I don't know if that gives you any sort of peace of mind that like you're not it's unlikely you're going to lose all the money that you invest in um that being said I would recom I would highly recommend going into this business um putting in money that you're willing to lose I know that sounds a little bit contradictory but like I wouldn't go in with just like your life savings or like I don't know your child's college fund or something but like um you know go in um and be like okay if the the absolute worst was to happen I did lose all this money I'd be okay um I would never recommend using like your last dollars um to to get started so that's probably what I'd say about money fear of failure I think we all we all all experience this and it's I don't know it's a tough one but it's sort of like just a matter of just like going through the process being as informed and educated as you can uh and yeah even even if again you sort of like fail and your your first product fails and you reinvest that money into another product you learn so much from that that journey I know that when I first started selling on Amazon I learned so much about the process but I also learned so much just about like Business and Entrepreneurship in general and so you know even if I never sold on Amazon again I learned so much from the journey that I would uh or will apply to um other business ventures and things that I do in the future so there's more to it than just um the the financial aspect you you you go through a lot of growth um from going through the process so um yeah be brave have a little bit of courage and I assure you that you're going to grow a lot from The Experience awesome cool well great this is actually very similar this question that I wanted to answer by Laura um asks can you go over again how to calculate Roi return on investment um how do we calculate how much goes into advertising and shipping so um this is so important if you're thinking about if you're your fail your I'm sorry your fear is failure um basically knowing what you're getting into is the best way to get around that so what I mean by that is understanding your Roi your expected Ro Roi when you launch and then in your most ideal state which is like 6 months to a year from now when you know your price is higher you have more reviews so you're organically converting better um so to calculate your Roi um the best thing I would recommend is to follow our how to sell an Amazon video guide and there's a section in there that shows you exactly how to utilize a sheet that we have a completely free sheet it's our profit calculator sheet in fact I can show you how to get there um so it's essentially an Excel spreadsheet that you can use to find um what your profits are going to be on Amazon so with the link in the description below will take you to this page where we have our deals um for the New Year's um but if you come over here to resources you'll see the profit calculator here under free tools and you just basically would fill in your information click get calculator and then we'll email you a template which is again an Excel spreadsheet that you enter all of your cost information so when you reach out to suppliers they'll tell you hey here's your unit cost and also here's that cost of shipping it uh per unit basically and then you're going to input all of your numbers you're also going to look at your Amazon FBA fees which we show you how to do in that video so I'd recommend like opening up two screens one watching the video and then two with your with your product um and the sheet on the other side and just go through that sheet fill it out the only two really the only thing you might not know right away is advertising and as Greg mentioned in the video you you could use like a rough rule of thumb which is like 20% uh I think was at like your sales price um or you could just add a couple dollars like I like to just add like five six seven 8 doll just to be conservative but you won't truly know that number until you start advertising and also in the beginning that number is going to be so much higher than it will be like a year from now when you're more profitable and you're you're listing is stronger so what I would say is to go into this business knowing your numbers knowing what to expect um and that way you're going to be more confident when you do launch your product you're not just like going into the dark um with with your product you're like I hope it's profitable you'll know what it's going to look like um in every scenario like I mentioned in product launch phase and then later down the line yeah um yeah that's a a really great resource also um also I'd encourage you to go back and uh watch the the replay of today and go back into Greg's presentation where he does the breakdown using the FBA calculator within jungle Scout as well that's another um very simplified way that you can kind of calculate your Roi at different price points and I think that's really important as well it's like you let's say you calculate you always want to calculate how much profit would I make at the same price or at the price that I intend to sell so if uh everyone else is selling around about $30 and you think like yeah I could sell my product for for $30 or maybe everyone else is about 28 and maybe you've got a more premium product and like yeah I think I could sell at $30 you want to calculate your profit margins at $30 but what we also talk about is figure out what is the lowest price that you could sell at and break even and so you you keep experimenting and go okay how much profit would I get at $25 or 24 22 and you might come down and realize like oh okay I could sell at $20 and I would just recoup my money back and break even and that um actually kind of ties into the the earlier question that um if we always recommend you figure out your break even price it's like okay everyone else sells at 30 but I know in a worst case scenario I could drop my price to $20 and then most likely sell all my inventory and get my money back so that also kind of gives you peace of mind so there are certainly things you can do in this product research phase just to um kind of have some redundancies or like a backup plan in place to kind of give you peace of mind that you can recoup your money and then Laur just answer your question back yes so 20% of the sales price of the unit so like if you priced it at $30 on Amazon 20% of that would be $6 so that's what you'd factor in as a loose general rule of thumb um when just like trying to calculate your Roi cool cool cool great questions okay um I saw a question earlier from um can't remember who is from now but uh asking like you know what like J Scout like membership or or subscription plan should I join uh link below has two separate offers it has for the suite and the professional plan and the professional plan comes with freedom Builder boot camp so if you want that extra guidance from Greg that professional plan is going to be awesome because you get that training with it and you also get like an insane amount of data that um is is tiered a little bit from the the sweet plan so uh in professional plan you'll get like two years of historical data on like keywords and and probably research um you'll get be able to track more asens the suite uh which is more affordable it doesn't come with the freedom Builder boot camp course is what you is what most people need it's it doesn't have like unlimited numbers um in terms of like you can't go back two years but you can go back one year U you can get basically everything you need to launch a product on Amazon so I would look at the suite in the Pro Plan if you want the freedom Builder boot camp course and two years of historical data I would choose that one or if you're okay with one years or one year of historical data um and basically unlimited you know use of the tool then sweet plan is just as fine as well cool here's an interesting question from Kim is it reasonable to launch an extremely seasonal product early in the year and build up reviews for when purchasing month comes around um the short answer is yes that's that is a a strategy um as I think Greg mentioned uh briefly in in his presentation it is more tricky though to sell seasonal products because you know you um um you need a lot of inventory for just like a period of time during the year and then you're not needing it otherwise so yeah if you are wanting to sell seasonal products it's probably a good idea to start selling that product earlier and hopefully you can still get a few sales but uh essentially try to sell a few months earlier or something so that you can start to build up reviews so that when that season hits you've got a few reviews in place and people are more likely to buy from you um but again yeah the the challenge with seasonal products is then getting the the inventory forecasting right uh I mean like jungle Scout can help you uh a great deal by looking at other products and seeing like oh okay in the months of November December last year like these other products did on average 800 sales a month or 700 or or whatever um but yeah the the hard thing for you selling a seasonal product is kind of getting that amount right cuz you know you don't want to have too little stock and then um yeah not be able to maximize that period but then you don't want to order too much stock and then you're left over with all of this inventory that you can't sell for another year so um there are challenges certainly with seasonal products um but there's also opportunity there if you're willing to take on that that extra risk wanted to clear up um something because I've seen a few comments on this but like if you already have jungle Scout um and you want to take advantage of the deal you can just reach out to support um either within your jungle Scout tool like the question icon at the bottom right hand side you can reach out and contact support or head over to um the jungle Scout website to get the support email to take advantage of the deal or to add Freedom Builder boot camp I've seen that question here a you so you can still take advantage of the deal and use fbb or get fbb if you're an existing member already um yeah then there was a question here I wanted to get to it was to clarify um our strategy about um so the question is like if bootstrapping how can not being profitable which is what we did in the beginning um make a sustainable model or strategy um and would it make the second half of this question is would it make more sense to do fbm first where we fulfill our own products instead of sending into FBA so to clarify that we are we were willing to go in the red a little bit um fast because we wanted to just turn that corner as fast as possible so it's it is sustainable if you're starting out unprofitable because in our eyes like once we got to like a hundred reviews or so like maybe 50 reviews um now our listing is going to be converting a lot better and then once we get to that point 50 or 100 reviews we can just slow everything down and then start becoming more profitable so for us it was like a race to those those reviews um so it is sustainable being unprofitable in the beginning with that mentality um yeah I mean there's another way you could like kind of it and rather than saying like we're being unprofitable you could actually flip that and say we've got in our case like a $7,000 marketing budget to like help us launch and so it's an investment into um you know launching a product essentially and after spending that amount of time or amount of money um you know we come out the other end with a a profitable product and you kind of you you know you have those sort of like startup expenses and marketing costs for any business or or product so that's like maybe another way to look at it is like not necessarily like being unprofitable but more so you've got like a budget put aside or like a certain amount of money that needs to be dedicated or spent on helping you launch effectively exactly cool but yeah I I guess I don't know I'm trying to think any other ways to like add value to that question right um because I you know I realized we we're using the word unprofitable and the fact that we weren't profitable to begin with but in all of Greg's presentation the main point was you don't want to sell um and you know a product that isn't profitable um and those are two different things yes uh you you need to have a product that has a strong profit margin built in so you want um yeah at least 100% Roi ideally and like a healthy 20 plus% ideally profit margin um and that might translate to at least four five $6 plus uh profit per unit so you that is absolutely vital you don't want to keep selling a product if it's only getting you a dollar or two $3 back per unit uh because that doesn't give you enough margin if anything H like any unexpected expens in your business or even without that it's just going to take you a really really really really long time to grow that business cuz you're not getting much profit back in order to like reinvest into another product um so you do need a strong profit per unit but also at the same time just realize that perhaps for the first few months you might need to sacrifice that profit and sell at a break even just to get those first reviews I don't know if that like was just repeating the same thing or if that helped well another visualization that I've always thought of is so put put yourself in a perfect world like a year from now after you launch your product your prices at $30 and that's like the perfect case scenario because everyone in the market is selling at $30 so you're in a good position there price point wise when I give like you know Lenny's a customer and I give him this product I want to get back at least you know 30 or 100% Roi or 30% net margin so I want to make sure my margins are good when I give him this product organically at my ideal price point point but in the beginning I'm not going to be at my ideal price point because I need to convince people to buy my product that has like hardly any reviews and also I'm going to be spending a lot on ads so in that time that's like your launch phase it's great to be profitable but that's not what I'm at least initially calculating I'm calculating the ideal world that I'm going to get to at some point and making sure I'm profitable there and so I think that's like really what Greg is talking about when you hand your product to somebody are you getting back a good profit now there's going to be times where you have to spend money on handing that product to somebody and you still want to be profitable there um but really it's just like to simplify it make sure you're profitable when you hand the product to somebody like you're getting back a good amount of money in return um but in the beginning it's not going to be that profitable yeah actually I'd recommend people check out there's a video on our channel uh it's like our first year in review which it it basically breaks down what Greg covered briefly there in his presentation it breaks down our entire first year of selling and I think that will give you a much better understanding of or a deeper understanding of like what that first year could look like that this was just our experience but yeah basically like when we first started selling this product we were selling it at $20 I think it was about $20 which was Break Even we weren't making any profit on it um everyone else was selling closer to $30 um and so we priced at $20 and then that helped us get a flood of sales despite the fact that we didn't have any reviews if we would have tried selling at $30 to begin with we would have got no sales or basically no sales we wouldn't have built any reviews and our product would still probably not be doing well but we made a sacrifice for the um you know during the first year sold without any profit and then by the time our first year came around um we you know put our price back up to $30 um I don't know what it is now but we've even like sold it at 32 34 even 3 and now weit but it was only because we made that sacrifice at the beginning and I think we calculating our profits on $ 32.99 which is where everybody was selling at yeah so like that was that was our North Star but we knew we would be selling at like $20 initially um also I just like linked two videos that Lenny was referring to one was a live video um that we had a Q&A with and one was like a produced video without the Q&A um check out both those videos that will walk through what Lan just mentioned on our first year launching the product or latest product product um really good question actually from Heaven's Ascension here uh how does finding a product that can be improved work and this is a huge thing that like we're you know looking at now with launching a new product on Amazon is you want to find products that you can differentiate and bring to the market that's better than what's already on the market sometimes this is a design change but ideally it's actually something more functional like you're making the product actually better for somebody um so to find those types of products um just look at what products are already on the market and you can use jungle Scouts review analysis tool so it's under the tool tab um in your jungle Scout account um and basically you'll plug in in Asin for any product on Amazon and much like what chat gbt can do it's going to show you what customers are saying about that product it's going to show you all the positive things they like about it so make sure you keep doing those with your product but it's also going to show you all the negative stuff they don't like about it and then it's going to interpret all that data um with like hundreds of reviews to look at and say how can you improve the product what can you do differently to beat this specific product and essentially it's just looking at the negative reviews and just trying to make the inverse of that happen so um I would just look at products that you're thinking about selling plug them into a tool like the um review analysis tool in Jungle Scout and then see what people are saying they don't like about it take those feedback to your supplier and then you have to get that improved that's like your Northstar for launching this product and then once that happens make sure you're promoting that correctly with your marketing so put those changes in your in your images in your title in your bullet points basically like if the product's too thin everyone's like I hate these thin products make yours triple the size and then your second photo is like us versus competitors and it's showing how big yours is compared to one of your competitors um so that's what I would do is just do review analysis for products on Amazon awesome uh question here from Dustin can you explain more about barcoding I know where to get and what barcode to get but my confusion is do I need to barcode each unit all right I'm going to pause and take a second here cuz explaining barcodes is always super super tricky we do have um well actually it's part of our how to sell on Amazon video which we released a couple of months ago um and you can go into the the the description there and you can see the specific chapter about all about barcoding uh so I'll I'll try to explain it simply here but I'd recommend going to that one it's got like a lot of great visuals but yes you do need to put a barcode on each unit when you send your product into Amazon each one of your units needs to have an FN skew barcode on the product and this is a barcode that Amazon gives you for your product so I saw that you had this one here we have a an FN SCU barcode right here so if we send in 1,000 units of this of this uh product they every single one needs to have this barcode the barcode is the same there's just one barcode per product um but however many units you send in it needs to have that barcode if I sent in two different products like this I was selling this bottle of Topo Cho then this would need to have its own barcode um but every unit would have the same barcode hopefully that makes sense but let me know if it doesn't I'm just adding the video to the chat as well and then I see sometimes like the hyperlink isn't there so I just added the title of the video that you can type into our our jungle Scout's YouTube channel if that's an easier way of finding the video that he's referring to cool question here from Laura uh also what are your thoughts regarding selling powders and supplements so basically that's not something that I have much experience with or personally much interest in I know there's a lot of money to make in that industry and I've seen like stories from a lot of people that have started their own um you know supplements Brands and and that kind of thing um it's a very very competitive often Cutthroat kind of industry um because there's so much money there um personally it's just not something I'm interested in I I think it's it's uh it can be extremely lucrative but again it also comes with a lot of challenges and a lot of competition as well um so I would say if you're just a beginner I wouldn't recommend it if you're just looking to sell something on Amazon I would probably only recommend it if you were really passionate about creating a supplement or something that um is different to what's on the market and you are willing to kind of like take on the the extra challenges um getting it you know I don't know FDA approved or kind of like going through any additional loopholes and um having to you probably also need like a lot of money as well it's probably like very Capital intensive so yeah I don't have a lot of experience with it it's not something that I'm interested in but um it could be worth you doing research on if it is something that you're passionate about definitely okay all right so we've answered a lot of these um there's a question here hi can we get the list of Distributors from Jungle Scout for wholesale for us and Canada uh so Hol is not something that I've got much experience with but what I was going to suggest was we do have a video on wholesale and I believe that there's like some recommendations within that video on uh finding Distributors yeah it's our latest wholesale video we have a few on the channel so if you just go to our our Channel and type in Wholesale in the search bar should be our latest video that yeah walks through the different way types of suppliers you know there's the brand yeah there's different agencies or Distributors online Distributors so check out that video um yeah good recommendation for that um question here about when are you making like full detailed videos about keywords so um wanted to answer this one because similar to the last few things I've said but like if you go to our Channel you type in keywords we have a bunch of really good content just like hyperfocused on that topic um but we also have like that topic keywords nested into our bigger videos like how to sell on Amazon um so yeah I highly recommend just checking out our Channel and then using those keywords um to search for the content you're looking for cool let's see okay so there's a question here from adal saying speaking of the number of sellers why doesn't why uh why doesn't it match to the number of sellers when browsing for a listing on Amazon even on the product research it's somehow confusing number of sellers don't line up uh I'm trying to think how to answer this because I know sometimes people sometimes get mixed up between the number of Sellers and I suppose that's maybe more like when we're talking about competition levels um I suppose like the easy answer if you're using say the product database and it says that there's like three sellers on a listing and go to Amazon and it's different uh what i' recommend you do within like the product database if you scroll all the way to the right it'll tell you when that data was last updated and you've got the option there to refresh so usually most of our products get updated every day or every week um depending on how uh the the volume of sales so it generally gets updated fairly regularly but if you click on the refresh button that will update it um immediately and it should match exactly what you see on Amazon so yeah keep that in mind you've got that refresh button and you can and it tells you the actual date that uh from when that that data came so hopefully that helps good question about suppliers so what are some good tips on sourcing a reputable manufacturer outside of using Alibaba so if you didn't want to use Alibaba for some reason like maybe you don't want to your manufacturer to be located in China maybe you want like you know lower import duties or whatever the reason is um there are a few websites that you can use like thomasnet which is good for us-based suppliers it's a different UI a different way of contacting suppliers but it's available um there's I know I think it's called India Mart where I actually used it once to find some suppliers from India and there's a lot of basically like websites like that that are specific to a a country like Afghanistan might have its own Alibaba essentially now it's not as powerful or as um UI friendly as Alibaba is but another good tip for finding suppliers if you have a jungle Scout account is using the jungle Scout supplier database so we have videos on this but we also have it included in our how to sell Amazon video that we're referencing a lot in this video um but you can search for suppliers um a number of different ways you can use keywords like you would on Alibaba you can actually use an Asin so this is one of my favorite ways to find what suppliers my competitors are using um and so you just type in an Asin into the supplier database search and sometimes it will not come up because not every supplier um and manufacturer is on the public records that we're accessing but that is a really great way to find suppliers without using Alibaba um and again just a lot of Google searches so if you type in you know you're looking for water bottles for some reason um you can type in water bottle suppliers or water bottle manufacturers in India on and you can do that in Google and a lot of times you'll see different websites or even like companies located there but Google will be your best friend as well if you don't want to use Alibaba uh all right there's a a question here Greg merer used to uh tell about criteria for product research does he have updated criteria to be used now in 2024 lots of love to Greg Mercer uh yeah well I suppose like he covers a lot of his main criteria in the presentation earlier so I'd encourage you to go back and review that um but we have also released a I guess like our product research checklist which people can check out as well and you can wait I was going to say find that on our website or is that not quite ready oh actually no we're going to link to it in in the description as well if we haven't already yeah maybe check back in the video description here yeah so we're going to add it to the the description um of this video um check back a little bit later today and we'll have that link added to the description where you can yeah basically get a PDF that's going to have all the criteria on one page basically a product research cheat sheet so uh yeah definitely come back and check that one out uh Laura followed up about the supplements question I'm really passionate but what if these specific supplements only have a few C and I think you also said uh maybe like three sellers so okay I guess you're talking about wholesaling like selling an existing supplement versus like starting your own um yeah I don't know if I've I if I've got any more additional thoughts um if you are looking to wholesale existing supplements I think only three sellers on a product is maybe like a fairly positive thing right like um if you ask yeah wholesaling something it's like maybe only three sellers on there is like a fairly good sign would you say yeah it's funny because we had uh Brian Connelly who works at jungle Scout he does wholesale he actually had a different opinion on that he actually like would find the products with like 10 sellers because that means the product's hot um he he basically just said it's very very hard to find those types of products with like three sellers on it that are also selling very high amounts of volume so if you found that that's great um if you're doing product research and you're using jungle Scout for that I wouldn't like limit your number of sellers in like the maximum sellers field that we have in product database um but yeah I mean if you can find an as that if you're wholesaling that has only three Sellers and it's got high volume then that's great um the lower the better but don't be afraid of like you know selling a product that has 12 sellers on it um just because it's doing well there's going to be a lot of interest in those types of products yeah so it sounds like you might have found like a great product if it's so yeah you can see that it's got a lot of uh does a lot of sales per month and if you can you know purchase that product at like a good price and and make a profit then um sounds like a a great opportunity when I answered earlier I was more thinking about like starting your own supplement brand um but yeah if you're looking more at like wholesaling a product I I think that you know I don't see any issue with that if if the numbers make sense and you can still make a profit um it sounds like yeah only three sellers is ideal so yeah I'd say go for it um that's awesome and if there's 100 units a month which it looks like um you know that high volume is very you know subjective we like to say 300 a month but if there only three sellers but I mean it's like you know when we say like 300 as well we typically talking about products that might be selling like $ 20 to $30 right um so it's kind of like that's similar to if you were selling something that's like 6080 uh dollars um you might only need1 100 50 sales per month to get the same amount of like revenue and profit so yeah um and really if if you're storing your own inventory you don't have any storage cost like it's just sitting in your house then that's completely fine it's when you start sending it to Amazon and then you're paying for it if it sits there unsold that it becomes an unprofitable Venture so yeah if you're holding on to your own inventory um I think 100 units a month or anything lower would even be fine cool all right we uh we yeah coming up on the a here so we'll take a couple more questions before we wrap it up today uh let's see let's see oh I'm trying uh let's see how does FBA restock work on Amazon's end after selling out but still having products in the Amazon warehouse I'm just trying to under I don't know if I quite UND D if this if it means like you you know like you the only inventory that's still in Amazon after you sold out is like from customer returns that you can't resell um if that's what this is referring to you can liquidate it through Amazon so Amazon will basically like buy it from you from like insanely low cost but at least it's something um or you can just send it back to you or somewhere else you can send it to your supplier if they're okay with receiving that inventory yeah is it like liquidate dispose or send back to you you could dispose too they can get rid of it if you don't want to deal the shipping cost yeah but yeah I I guess that makes sense cuz I think that after you've sold out and your listing no longer has any units available the only yeah I think really the only option or the only remaining inventory would be things that have been returned unless sometimes like uh sometimes Amazon will move your inventory between different fulfillment centers and sometimes sometimes that might make it available like maybe you've got 150 units that's in transit and I think in your listing uh you'll see it marked as like reserved um but I don't know I don't know if that would typically make your listing inactive I think normally you could probably still people could still purchase that inventory it just might have a slightly longer uh shipping time but yeah so I think I think you covered it yeah [Music] okay all right so oh yeah a full question from Laura so should I do um I think you're probably saying fbm not FBA uh like fulfilled by Merchant versus FBA um what would be my thoughts there I mean personally I'm I'm a fan of of FBA cuz it's very hands off you send it in Amazon does all the Fulfillment I like things easy and so I don't want to be shipping things out myself um and very generally speaking like I'll start out and say there are reasons and scenarios where I think it does make sense to do fbm but generally I've found like that when you do the calculations of how much it would cost to fulfill yourself that to me it it's doesn't seem the the numbers don't seem to make sense where it's like oh actually um not making any more or I'm not saving anymore or potentially even spending more money to fulfill it myself than just getting Amazon to do it um and then losing out on the benefits of FBA such as having the prime badge on your listing a lot of Prime members or like a lot of people will only shop um or you know predominantly shop products that are prime meaning they can get you know two-day shipping and they can get it quickly um so yeah I don't know I might be a little bit biased but I personally prefer FBA um because it's a lot easier and generally I think I I don't know if you will always like save money with fbn there might be some scenarios uh but the the only catch with FBA is what you mentioned earlier I think if you have a lot of inventory that is just sitting there you can end up paying uh quite a bit in like monthly and long-term storage fees if you're not moving the inventory so as long as you can keep your inventory moving and not have it sit there for too long then I would probably recommend FBA yeah I agree yeah yeah cool um let's see question here should I go for Amazon KDP or Amazon on wholesale FBA uh I'm a beginner looking for a long-term business um really the decision's up to you I'd say we actually have videos on both we've got a a video on how to do Amazon KDP and we also have um a few videos on wholesale as well we uh so I'd recommend like checking out our Channel and like learning about both of those uh you know KDP you can pretty much start up with almost no um upfront costs at all um wholesale the advantages are you generally need less Capital than you do need for private label I I would say when you say long-term business my opinion is that private label is the best business model long-term which is essentially where you own you have your own brand versus something like wholesale where you're selling someone else's products they might terminate that agreement at some point or you know there's not as much profit margin because you're you know there's like a a a midan involved um you'll get the most profits um and the most advantages from private label in the long term but utilizing other models like wholesale or KDP um is like a great way like great lower cost options to get started making money um and then you can transition to private labor or actually even do both I know there's like a lot of people that they have some wholesale products but then they've over time built out their line of private label as well and they do both so there's nothing wrong with that but yeah I'd encourage you to to watch our content on KDP and wholesale and um yeah see which kind of catches your eye more definitely all right uh so we have hit over the the hour here for the the live Q&A um so we're going to wrap it up here today thank you so much for all of your questions uh it's been a real pleasure answering them hopefully we've given you some value in the answers that we've given if so give us a big thumbs up down on the video we'd greatly appreciate it uh and if you're looking for more content on getting started on Amazon or really any of the topics that we've like talked about today I'd also encourage you to hit the Subscribe Button as well as we put out regular content we're also planning to do a lot more of these live q&as um so that we can answer what you're wanting um you know answer the questions that you specifically want answered so definitely subscribe so you get notified about any videos or live streams that we have coming up uh otherwise thank you so much for joining and we'll see you all in the next video take care
