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Nick Young joins us on product selection in niche markets
- Niche domination and strategy of product selection
- Selling 8 figures a year thanks to this strategy
- Go after a whole niche and dominate it
- First 2yrs saw lots of growth with $2.5m in revenue off that first product
- Went into Me Too products and did $7.5m in the 2nd year but profitability was dropping
- Best products were where they added more variations in the same category
- Niche products and niche markets was good
- The original me-too products died as a lifecycle after a year
- Now they have products that are lasting 2-3 years
How do you know you’ve hit the right momentum in the market?
- The market can be too big and difficult to break into as it’s dominated by certain competition
- The market is too small or narrow for you to expand sideways into it with more variations etc
- How do you determine if the market is the right size to enter nad expand products into
- Looking for $5k-15k monthly revenue
- SIlicon baking mat has little differentiation so no good to add value to
- Looking at doing multi-packs, bundling, etc
- Evaluate the competition – is there an opportunity to be in the top 5 spot on keywords
- Are the PPC results going into the 5th page still relevant?
- If still relevant for the top 10 keywords it indicates lots of people going for this niche
- Expecting Amazon to come after giveaways so we’re going for markets we can differentiate in
Launch with Variations?
- Depends how expensive the product is
- If ROI is massive with a 300-400% ROI and a cheap product with a high payout
- Then we will launch with 3 products to maximise AMS and have a competitive advantage
- Three also helps with logistics with the supplier
- We test a lot
- If we find one is working well then we’ll go back to the Supplier and roll out more variations to dominate
- We aim to cannibalise before someone does it to us
- Moneyballing is their strategy
Scientific Category
- Scientific as a category
- Industrial scientific has lower sales volume but is an opportunity
- Sell where other people aren’t
- Why don’t people want to do this product and how can I turn this to a competitive edge
Product Design
- Have some patents
- Just entering some product design but more around customising with colours and patterns
Manufacturing
- All China or domestic?
- Majority of OEM products are made in China
- Domestic suppliers are not as quick as Chinese suppliers
- US Supplements supplier has worked well
- Domestic is a lot better cashflow-wise
- Margin is less but return on cashflow is a lot faster
- Did a BOM and got it a lot cheaper by getting everything shipped in to the manufacturer to get it put together
- Negotiate 30-60 days with the manufacturer and getting paid every two weeks by Amazon
Domestic
- Find the right partner for product selection and it’s terrific in the US
- They are willing to try new things and make it happen
- China is focussed on volume but domestic suppliers are focussed on relationships
Determine the Market
- Based on search volume and keywords
- Products with a broad amount of keywords
- We want to go and rank for as many long tail keywords and synonyms as possible
- Plug it into seller.tools with search volume
- See sales volume before sourcing a product
- Filter to exact searches and you’ll see how much opportunity you have to go after the keywords
- Find only 3-4 competitors and call different with <100 reviews
- And if no headline ads then they’re not tapping into the full marketing power that Amazon has
Launch Budget
- Launch budget is how much for a product with 3 variations
- First started with giveaways we would put down $50k
- 1,500 units for giveaways and product landed at $5
- We cut it down to max 8-10k per SKU and max 15k for all the variations
- Sticking to a strict budget is key if launching rapidly
- Now have 250 SKUs
Differentiating your Product
- Merchandise it in a different way to add value
- Difficult for others to compete against
- They can drop price, increase PPC and Add Coupons but they can’t change their product
- Arbitrage of FBA fees by changing the shape of a product to reduce the cost of Amazon Fees on your product and add to your margin
- Shaved 2 inches on each size and dropped from small-oversize to large standard
- This shaved $4 off the product and helped us destroy the competition
- Optimising the carton size (63cm one-side and less than ~20lb to reduce costs
- Work all this out even before we go to the factory
- How many units can you get in a carton – used for 3PL but send in on a weekly loose cart based on sales velocity volume
- Ask for a Bill of Materials from the factory
Optimising your Product Selection Research
- 3PL optimise costing
- Optimising on velocity
- Reducing the size of the packaging
- Flexible material to reduce size and reduce CPM
- People get to the stage of finding the product and are exhausted
- Do what people aren’t willing to do
- Using the same tools as everyone else then you’re dipping in the same pond