Lesson 6 of 8
Advanced Product Analysis
The harder signals to read before committing: how many sellers are on the listing, how steady the rank is, and how the price has behaved.
The software gives you a filtered list. This lesson is about the checks you run on a candidate before spending money, in the order that eliminates products fastest.
The starting filters, and when to change them
The recommended settings while you are learning are the ones from the previous lesson: sales rank within 5 percent, minimum return on investment 30 percent, minimum profit 3, and Amazon excluded.
There is one point worth making about the rank filter as you gain experience. Everyone chases the lowest ranks, which is precisely why those listings carry the most sellers. A product with a higher rank has less competition, and with fewer sellers sharing the sales you can sometimes move the same volume yourself.
So the tight filter is right at the start, because you want stock turning quickly while you learn. Later, test looser ranks deliberately and see what happens.
Narrowing the results
- Keyword filter. Type "doll" or "transformers" to restrict the list to what you know how to judge.
- Sorting order. Change it, for the reason given before: default order produces the same products for everybody.
- Match type. Where a retailer supplies barcodes, choose barcode match rather than title match. A barcode match is an identification; a title match is an inference. Not all retailers provide them.
Check one: has Amazon been on this listing recently
This is the check that catches products the filter lets through, and it is the most valuable idea in the lesson.
Excluding Amazon removes listings where Amazon is selling right now. It does not tell you about last month. A product Amazon sells most of the time, and happens to be out of stock on today, passes the filter and is a bad buy: Amazon returns to the listing, takes the Buy Box, and the price collapses while you are holding stock.
The working rule: check the Keepa chart and reject anything where Amazon has held the listing more than about half the time.
The lesson demonstrates this on a product showing almost £17 profit at 67 percent return, which looks excellent, and rejects it because Amazon has been on the listing recently. That discipline is worth copying. An attractive margin is exactly when you are most tempted to skip the check.
Check two: the profit, with your own tax position
Read the profit and return figures, and read the fee breakdown underneath them. If you are VAT registered, enable that setting in your account so the calculation reflects it. Amazon's own calculator does not account for your VAT, so a figure taken from the Seller app will overstate what you keep.
The lesson works this through: the app shows £19.42 profit, VAT adds roughly £2, and the real figure is about £17.50. Still a good deal, and the difference is worth knowing before you build a purchase around it.
Check three: estimated sales
How many units the product moves per month. The example shows 8, which is described as acceptable rather than good, with the note that actual sales are often somewhat higher than the estimate.
What matters is that you divide this by the number of sellers to get your own likely share, and then decide how many units to buy. Eight sales a month with two sellers is a very different purchase from eight sales a month with ten.
Check four: price and rank consistency
- Average price. Steady means the margin should hold. Falling means it will be smaller by the time you sell.
- Sales rank range. Know your own ceiling per category. The lesson uses 150,000 in Toys, and accepts a product whose rank moves around within that band.
Movement in the rank line is a good sign, not a bad one. Each jump is a sale. A flat line means nothing is happening.
Check five: is it actually in stock at the retailer
Do this early, because it is quick and it saves wasted analysis. Arbitrage Hero refreshes store data on a cycle, currently every three days, so a listing may have sold out since the last check.
Click through to the retailer and confirm the item is available and can be delivered to you or to your prep centre.
Check six: does the Amazon price match what you were shown
Compare the price in your results against the live Amazon page. Prices move.
The lesson shows a case worth understanding. The results show an item price of about 45, the page shows a total near 49, and the difference is that the Buy Box is currently held by a merchant-fulfilled seller charging roughly 4 for delivery. The item price and the total are two different numbers.
The lesson: the number that matters is what the customer pays in total. A merchant-fulfilled Buy Box with a delivery charge is a different competitive situation from an FBA Buy Box at the same headline price, because your FBA offer includes delivery and theirs does not.
Check seven: can you actually sell it
The last check and the one never to skip. Open the Amazon Seller app, scan the product from your screen, and confirm two things: that it is the right product, and that it is not restricted for you.
Then list it before buying it. Eligibility is personal, and finding out after delivery that you cannot list an item leaves you holding stock with nowhere to go.
The faster version
With a SellerAmp SAS or BuyBotPro licence enabled in your settings, the links carry your figures across and the extension opens already populated. In the example that surfaces the whole picture at once: £17.39 profit, nearly 87 percent return, one FBA seller and one merchant-fulfilled seller.
Two competitors on a product selling around 8 times a month is a reasonable position, and the conclusion drawn is a modest purchase of five to ten units, sized so that the recent sales rate would clear them in a month or two. That is the right shape of decision: buy the quantity the demand supports, not the quantity the margin tempts you into.
It is an estimate from past sales, not a schedule. Demand shifts, sellers arrive, and stock that does not move pays storage. Sizing the purchase to the evidence is what limits the damage when it goes the other way.
The order to run these in
- Is it in stock at the retailer?
- Has Amazon been on the listing more than half the time?
- Do the profit and return still work with your tax position?
- How many sales a month, divided by how many sellers?
- Are price and rank consistent?
- Does the live Amazon total price match?
- Can you list it, and have you listed it?
Most candidates die at step 2 or step 4. Running them in this order means you spend your time on the ones that might survive.