Amazon Product Failure Part 5

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Liran Hirschkorn joins us to open up about his Amazon product failure and give us the lessons that he learned.

His product was baby moccasins – for under 1 year olds and he had two variations – 6m and 12m sizes

How did you select this product?

Was doing wholesale at the time of his Amazon product failure
Was at a trade show and saw this lady with a booth and the baby moccasins
When she talked through pricing with Liran it didn’t make enough margin to make it worthwhile
She then told him he could make them himself from China
Being new to Private Label, Liran didn’t really factor in that there was a lot of competition
Not just competition but very low priced competition like $9.99
Liran was buying them for $6 trying to make a better quality product
He was selling at $16-$17 and it just didn’t take off at that price

A common mistake in amazon produst failure is to think you’ll charge more than everybody else because you have better quality
The market doesn’t care or want to pay more for the product

Opportunity cost of not doing another product that Liran could have done during that time
Lost the time value of the money, when he could have been doing something else with that money
Had to drop the price on Amazon and liquidate the product
Lost money on the product but recovered some of his initial purchase
Another mistake was he Launched with an initial design, then brought on more variations in styles and it just didn’t work out
With PPC costs, took a loss on it
After a couple of months he realised it was a loser and cut it
Don’t fall in love with your product – get out of it as soon as you can

Liran did stick with it longer than he should have which compounded his amazon product failure
Didn’t really evaluate the data on Amazon and sees this as a rookie mistake
Seeing a product first and then bringing it to Amazon, rather than using the Amazon data to tell you which product to bring
Two most common mistakes Liran sees:
- Nutritionist works with products and decides to bring them to Amazon, without realising how competitive it can be
- My friend’s Uncle has a factory and I can buy things at a good price, then deciding to bring that product to Amazon without checking it out first
Liran feels he made similar mistakes with the moccasins, buying product at a Trade Show and deciding to bring it to Amazon

Danny looks at the average price of the market and is realistic with the price he can charge, based on the top 12 on page 1 to get a feel for what the market will stand for that product
Kids babies, value for money has a lot of window shoppers in the baby space as they are constantly comparing products
Conversion rates were lower too with high impressions
Issues with the sizing, people would buy the 6m and then come back and say it was way too big and return it
There is a premium in the space and they are charging $24 but are ubiquitous and in retail stores
One of Liran’s mistakes was thinking he could compete on price with this long established brand
Amazon isn’t really a ‘premium’ market place
You don’t see loads of Rolex or high -end watches or expensive shoes selling well on Amazon
Amazon is a ‘good quality’ product marketplace and not a ‘premium qulaity’ marketplace
Liran was too much of a rookie to catch these mistakes

Tried to compete with a larger brand that is well established
Took a product and tried selling at a premium price when the avg price on the page is a lot lower and you’re an unknown brand
Also, didn’t use any data or Amazon data to assess whether this was a good product or not

Customer demand – not inventing something new, making sure there’s enough demand
Not just one seller on the 1st page making all the revenue
Bunch of sellers on page 1 with thousands of revenue per month (Viralaunch – market intelligence)
Finding the main keyword and can I rank for that keyword
Looking at the reviews on the 1st page search results, if I get to the first page using giveaways can I ‘stick’ on that page
Who is surrounding me, and do they have 500 reviews, or are there some with 20-50 reviews that are doing well that show I can compete on there
You don’t want to see pages 2,3 and 4 with the same product – over-saturated

Don’t back into a product on Amazon
Don’t have product idea first – you NEED to understand the data
KNOW what you’re main keyword is
Use Helium 10 and Magnet to get Amazon search volume
Is there enough actual people searching for the main keyword
Look at the data on that keyword to figure out if you can compete
Don’t think that you’re going to bring a new product with no reviews and charge more than anybody else