Amazon Market Research: How much can I sell on Amazon Europe?
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As an Amazon seller in the UK, it is easy to launch your products abroad. All you need to do on Seller Central is click “sell globally” and start adding products to new foreign marketplaces.
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BUT WAIT – DON’T CLICK ON SELL GLOBALLY WITHOUT DOING SOME RESEARCH!
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Many companies want a piece of the international market opportunity on Amazon.
Few companies look at profitability and the competitive landscape on Amazon before clicking Sell Globally.
Yet it’s no longer true that to sell better on Amazon you need to sell more of everything in ever more marketplaces.
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Before you launch internationally on Amazon, ask yourself: does selling on Amazon Europe or Amazon.com make good business sense?
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– Who else is selling similar products to yours in France, Japan, Singapore or Spain?
– How much money are they making every month?
– What is your USP in the new market?
– Can you sell at a competitive price once FBA fees or shipping is taken into account?
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Do you need product research software (Helium10, JungleScout) to assess your international Amazon market opportunity?
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At Sell Beyond, we often see wholesale businesses list all of their SKUs on Amazon. They try to sell as much as possible of everything and use this “pile it high” process when exporting to Amazon marketplaces in Europe or Amazon.com without checking whether it makes sense. This can create problems in logistics, organisation and profitability. Don’t make this mistake – do the market research!
But what product research is right for your Amazon business? Although Amazon only offers a small amount of information to Amazon sellers through Seller Central Brand Analytics, there is software available to anyone which can give insights to what people are selling on Amazon.
The two market leaders for this are JungleScout and Helium10. They use techniques to give you an indication of how the market is working with data that Amazon provides everyone. We use both here at Sell Beyond.
Helium10 is a major player in the Amazon seller space. The software has lots of great features, but the section we’re focusing on is the X-Ray Amazon Product Research chrome extension. Helium 10 will let you view 50 products free per month before the subscription costs kick in.
JungleScout is an important piece of software for Amazon sellers. The Jungle Scout chrome extension is part of a monthly subscription package and does not come with a free version.
Warning: you must understand how these pieces of software work and where the numbers come from to get the best out of the data!
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How to find the product category and sales rank of an item being sold on Amazon
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So how do these tools work?
Amazon has a “bestselling products” page for every product category.
To find the product category of any item:
Scroll down the product page to the product information box and click on the blue link.
Amazon will give you the bestsellers in this category — this information is updated on an hourly basis. Yes, hourly — the products are in a continual competition against each other. This Best Sellers competition is monitored by Amazon into an ever-evolving “sales rank” of products in every category.
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Helium 10 and JungleScout: how do they work?
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JungleScout and Helium10 use these sales rank movements as a basis to estimate sales volumes over time of products.
As you can see from the below sales ranking tracker (from Keepa) an item’s sales ranking changes all the time.
Helium 10 and Jungle Scout use these changes in sales ranking to produce estimates about volume sold. By multiplying the estimated numbers of items by list price, they give the user a monthly estimated sales revenue for each product.
Both Helium 10 and JungleScout calculate these revenues slightly differently. JungleScout tends to over-estimate revenue, and Helium 10 tends to under-estimate revenue. When you compare a product using both chrome extensions, the numbers will not be the same. These figures are therefore not exact.
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How to use Helium 10 and Jungle Scout to do market research on Amazon
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Let’s say we are looking to launch adult colouring pencils into the French market.
1. Type the keyword of the product you’re searching for into the search bar
2. Click on the JungleScout chrome extension.
3. Click on the Helium 10 chrome extension
4. Order the results by revenue
5. Click on results to see sales volume over time
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How to interpret the results of a Helium 10 or Jungle Scout research
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Remember you are looking at estimations. These figures are “proxy” data – i.e. they are stand-in figures, not accurate analyses. They can only give you an idea about order of magnitude: are companies selling a bit, a lot or loads? The numbers are not exact.
You can download the data as a .csv file to view in Excel, and you can select the columns that can appear.
Other useful information to know for market research is
1. How many reviews does the competitor item have?
2. How long has the competitor been selling on Amazon?
3. Is the item sold FBA?
4. Does the item have seasonal spikes?
5. What score do Helium 10 and JungleScout give the product category?
Earlier this year, Sell Beyond spoke to a business owner that was selling kettlebells and exercise bikes in the UK. He had launched them on Amazon EU without looking at the numbers. Every returned item cost him the profit of 10 sold items.
Selling those items on Amazon France and Germany made no business sense, so he eventually delisted his products from Amazon Europe. This was a costly error he could have easily avoided if market research had been conducted and the logistics were considered before deciding to click the “Sell globally” button.
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