If you’ve not been living under a rock, you have heard of Amazon.
Moreover, if you live in the US, you’re likely to get at least a few orders delivered to your door every month, courtesy of the biggest online retailer in the world.
What you might have not heard of though, is Amazon’s “FBA” program.
Nope, I’m not taking about the unrecognized cousin of the federal bureau… but rather about the “Fulfillment By Amazon” program.
The name is pretty self-explanatory: FBA is a program than allows pretty much any person in the world to leverage the huge resources, customer trust and commerce infrastructure of the giant retailer to distribute your own physical products.
And notice that I said “any person”. I didn’t mention “any company”.
I don’t know if you got the memo, but we live in the XXI century now, and one of the greatest things about this new millenia is the “democratization” of pretty much everything, including business models and opportunities that used to be reserved for the ones with the deep pockets…
The invention, productions and distribution of physical goods was, of course, one of these “untouchable” opportunities for the little guy… until Amazon decided it was time to disrupt yet another industry.
Of course, these are great news for you and for me!
But it’s still only the beginning…
As you may be thinking, getting Amazon to warehouse and distribute your physical products is beyond great… but you still have to design and get those products produced, don’t you?
And of course factories are expensive.
Or so everyone believes (for our own good!).
You see, a few year ago I read a funny phrase somewhere…
“God created the world. Everything else, China made”
Love them or hate them, I don’t think that anybody can deny the fact that China is the biggest producers of all kinds of goods.
That’s what makes Chinese factories’ prices unbeatable.
Not only that, but innovations cycles run at neck-breaking speed over there!
It needs to be, since the amount of competition among factories is atrocious (especially when you consider that the Intellection Property laws in China are quite “relaxed” to say it nicely).
“Now, how can you and I take advantage of this, and what has all of this to do with Amazon FBA?“
Glad you asked!
Amazon is not only the biggest online retailer in the US –about 50% of all e-commerce purchases that happen in the US are made in Amazon.com– but it also offers an advantage that was never available before, at least that you had literally MILLIONS to spend.
Nope, I’m not taking about the ability of using all of Amazon’s warehouses to keep your inventory for almost free… (but that’s for sure a good one!)
I’m taking PRODUCT RESEARCH.
If you were to do your own product research -which it used to be a must for any company trying to break into the retail business- you’d have to invest millions…
But Amazon has not invest millions on product research, of course. They invested TENS OF BILLIONS.
And now, you can instantly leverage all of that research…. FOR FREE.
How’s that?
There are in fact several ways that you can take advantage of this pure gold that Amazon puts in your hands.
But due to the limited space of this article, let’s focus in the main 2 ways: Best Sellers Lists and BSR (Best Sellers Rank).
It blows my mind how few people actually takes advantage of these billion-dollars resources that are just there for the taking!
Amazon Best Sellers List
Let’s start with the first and arguably the most used of these 2 resources: Amazon’s Best Sellers Lists.
Just head to the link above and you’ll find an ordered list –by actual sales– of the best 100 products in every single category and subcategory (there are HUNDREDS of them) in Amazon’s Marketplace.
I cannot even start articulating how valuable this list is!
You can instantly –and for absolutely no charge– find what the best products are in any category under the sun…
(not exaggerating a bit here: Amazon carries more than 350 MILLION products in their inventory!)
The reason why I’m including Marketplace Sellers is because more than 50% of the product units sold on Amazon’s Marketplace actually are sold by third-party vendors, as you can see here:
Amazon Best Sellers Ranking (BSR)
More importantly:
EVERY SINGLE PRODUCT sold on Amazon has it’s own “BSR”.
What does that mean?
This is where the real gold mine of Amazon resides… and incredibly, the most unused product intelligence resource of all!
Let’s stop for a minute here, since I want you to let this fact to sink in…
FIRST, consider that we’re talking about an universe of almost 350 MILLION PRODUCTS here…
Moreover, EACH and EVERYONE of these products has been assigned by Amazon a unique number that’s directly tied to how many units this products has sold, weighted by recency.
This number is called the BSR or Best Sellers Rank.
This means that you can go WAY BEYOND the 100 best sellers of each Amazon category…
…and know exactly how good or bad ANY product is from the sales standpoint -arguably the only POV that has any value in business- before investing a cent in inventory!
Do you want to enter a market you have no prior knowledge about?
Let BSR be your billion-dollar guide!
Want to craft a new unique product… but would prefer coming back with the arrows in the back that every pioneers gets?
Let BSR be your guide!
There is, of course, a whole lot more to say about the billion-dollar research that Amazon is putting in your hands every single day, and how to take advantage of it to build a multi-million-dollar e-commerce business from home in 2020.
And these 2 tools we discussed in this article are not, by any stretch of imagination, the only ones that the giant retailer is giving you on a silver platter.
But we’ll have to leave that for another article, or a more in-depth tutorial in the E-commerce Growth Hacker’s YouTube Channel.
See you next time!
