Dominating Your Niche via Product Selection


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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

Contact

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