One of the key factors in choosing a niche for your is the quality of products available on Amazon. Here we take a look at a few rules and techniques for finding good product niches on Amazon.
Finding Products
First up we just need to find some products and get some ideas for niches. This starts the creative process and once we have a few different groups of products to look at we can analyse them further. Here are some methods to find products on Amazon:
- Amazon Best Sellers Lists – Browse the site to find these
- Amazon Associates Emails – Sign up for these in your Amazon Associate Account and you will get notifications of new products, special offers etc.
- Randomly Browse Amazon – Just click around and see what you stumble upon!
- Current Trends – what new products have been launched? Take a look at newspaper articles, tv shows etc.
- Your own interests – what do you know about and what are your hobbies?
- Google Trends – this tool shows what is popular, what is becoming popular and what is losing popularity
Important Tip: Look for specific niches (e.g. “Mens Mountain Bikes” instead of “Bikes) as this helps you stay focused
Once you have found a few niches to explore further, we then take a look at a few key points relating to Amazon and the products.
Checking the Quality of Amazon Products
If the products on Amazon are scarce, poorly priced or clearly not popular then it is not worth promoting them – no matter how attractive the niche in other ways. Follow these key points:
- Firstly make sure there are enough products to create a decent size store from (some niches may only have a handful of products however, and this is fine also).
- Make sure a good selection of the products have reviews, a few different sellers and preferably sold by Amazon themselves. You don’t want to build your site and then find that the products are discontinued.
- Check postage costs – high postage will lower conversions and this cannot be accurately shown on a 3rd party site. Free postage is preferable.
- If the product niche is new then you can take the risk on reviews coming over time and more products being added.
- Also consider the price of the products and how likely people are to buy. An LCD television is expensive and will give you a lot of commission, but the conversions will be lower.
- Impulse purchases (DVDs, Books, Gadgets etc.) will have a higher conversion but lower commissions.
- Consider also the 24 hour cookie and how much research people need to do to make a purchase. Using Fresh Store Builder you don’t have to worry about this, as it uses a shopping cart and that means the referral can be made up to 90 days later.
Important Note on Commissions: For Amazon UK sites there is a £7 cap on commission for any single item, meaning that the ideal price for products you promote is about £100 (depending on how many products you sell in a month, as the commission rate increases). Therefore, don’t promote expensive products in the UK as a rule. In Amazon USA some categories have a fixed percentage – electronics is 4% – and this changes often so make sure you are up to date on this.
4 Responses
“Using Fresh Store Builder you don’t have to worry about this, as it uses a shopping cart and that meants the referral can be made up to 90 days later.”
Could you please explain that point further? Is the full amazon cookie good for 90 days? On that single product? Product category? I don’t fully understand how these commission cookies are working with Amazon and Fresh Store Builder. Help?
Once a product has been added to the cart on Amazon the referrer is remembered against it. The product will stay in that persons cart for up to 90 days and therefore the referral can be made up to 90 days.
With Fresh Store Builder you have a “remote shopping cart” which means when you add to cart on your store, it adds to cart on the Amazon site. When you go to checkout on an FSB store it confirms the addition to the Amazon cart.
Slightly hard to explain but hopefully that makes sense!
So are you saying once the product has been added to the cart, in the Fresh Store site, then it is also added to the person’s cart on Amazon? Then if they purchase any time in the next 90 days through their cart on Amazon then you will get credit for the sale? Or only if they complete their purchase while on the Fresh Store site within 90 days?
If you do get credit for the sale on amazon’s site will you also get commission for anything else they may add to their cart on amazon before checking out on the amazon site? Or does it apply only to the item they added to their cart on the Fresh Store site?
Thanks in advance for clearing this up!
Yes – when they add to cart on a FSB site, it adds on Amazon. If they then purchase that item in 90 days you get the commission. They can purchase from Amazon or FSB, both give the credit to you.
Anything extra added to the cart within 24 hours also has up to 90 days. Anything added after 24 hours of leaving your FSB site does not give you the credit.
Hope that helps 🙂