Finding Limitless Product Ideas

Clearance pages run out. This lesson covers five ways to generate product candidates once the obvious sources are exhausted, including the technique usually called leaf sourcing or branch sourcing.

All five work in the same direction as manual sourcing reversed: instead of starting at a retailer and asking whether Amazon sells it dearer, you start on Amazon with something that sells well and go looking for somewhere cheaper to buy it.

Set up the Keepa hover chart first

Before any of this, turn on one Keepa setting. It makes every technique below several times faster.

1. Right click the Keepa extension and open Options.
2. Find Show price graphs when hovering images on Amazon and set it to yes.

Now hovering over any product image on Amazon shows its price and rank chart without opening the page. You can scan a whole page of results and dismiss most of them in seconds, rather than opening twenty tabs.

1. Look around your house

Amazon sells everything, from door handles to drills to baby products. Anything you own is a category somebody buys.

The value here is not the specific item; it is that you already know something about it. You know which brands are good, what a normal price is, and what the alternatives are. That knowledge is genuinely useful and most sellers never use it.

2. Work down the Best Sellers lists

Amazon publishes Best Sellers per category. Open one, then branch downwards into the subcategories: Beauty, then Skin Care, then Eyes. This is the leaf sourcing technique, and the direction matters.

The top-level lists are picked over by everybody. The narrow leaf categories several levels down are where products sell steadily and few people are looking. Keep descending until the categories are specific.

Hover to check the chart, and look for: no Amazon on the listing, a consistent sales rank, and a price high enough to be worth handling.

On that last point, the lesson gives a personal threshold worth borrowing: skip cheap items. A £10 product is dismissed and £15 is treated as a floor. The reason is that fees and handling do not shrink with the price, so the same work produces a much smaller return on a cheap item. Set a minimum and hold to it.

3. Search by brand

If a product works, its brand is worth exploring. Click the brand link on the listing, or search the brand name on Amazon, and go through the range with the hover chart.

This works because brands are stocked by the same retailers. Once you have found a shop that discounts one product from a brand, it very often discounts others.

4. Look at what other small sellers are selling

This is the most productive technique in the lesson and the least obvious.

1. Open a product with several offers and click through to the full list of sellers.
2. Look for FBA sellers with low feedback counts. The guidance given is to skip anyone above about 1,000 to 2,000 ratings and look at those below.
3. Click the seller's name, then open their storefront to see everything they sell.

The logic: a large seller is probably a brand or a distributor, and their catalogue tells you nothing you can act on. A small FBA seller is almost certainly doing arbitrage, exactly like you. Their storefront is a list of products that somebody has already established can be bought cheaply somewhere and sold profitably on Amazon.

You still have to find the source yourself, but the hardest part, deciding what is worth looking for, has been done.

5. Related and frequently-bought-together products

From any product page, look at what Amazon shows alongside it. This is branch sourcing in the other direction, and it produces candidates you would never have thought to search for.

Then find where to buy it

Having found a product on Amazon, you need a cheaper source. Copy the title, search it in Google, and use the Shopping tab to compare retailers.

One piece of advice here is worth more than the rest of the lesson: go past the first page of results. Everyone looks at the first page, so everyone finds the same retailers and competes with each other on the same deals. Pages two, three and four contain smaller shops that no software covers and no other seller has checked. Those are the sources worth finding, because a retailer nobody else uses stays profitable.

An honest worked example

The lesson follows one candidate all the way through and rejects it, which is the useful part. A product with a sales rank around 5,000 in Toys, not sold by Amazon, is found on Google Shopping at £12 and on eBay at £12. Putting the real numbers in gives a profit of £1.53 and a return of 12 percent.

That is declined. The rank was excellent, Amazon was absent, and the margin was still too thin. It is a good illustration that most candidates fail at the last step, and that finding an idea is not the same as finding a deal.

The cost of this method

It is slow. Working through storefronts and search pages produces good, unusual finds and it consumes hours.

Which makes it the ideal task to delegate. It is repetitive, it follows clear rules, and it needs no judgement beyond the criteria you set. The Scaling Up module covers handing this to an assistant, and this is the lesson to hand them.