The Jungle Scout Amazon extension is the forefather of extensions, and the reason many FBA sellers see success. Unique workflows built over years of product research let sellers discover the best items for their stores.
But let’s rewind a little bit. Why should you care about Jungle Scout in the first place? Certainly, you know the best products for your store, right? Not quite.
In Q1 2018 half of Amazon’s sales came from third-party sellers. The company owes much of its recent growth and popularity to strong sales from its “fulfilled by Amazon” program, but that large marketplace makes it difficult to beat the competition.
With so many sellers, it’s hard to stand out and deliver in-demand products that make your store money. When everyone’s selling the hot new item, the person willing to make the least money makes the most sales.
So what do some sellers have that others don’t? The answer lies, of course, with Jungle Scout’s ability to help sellers find the best products for their store.
Jungle Scout 101
Let’s first touch on what Jungle Scout does. The program and extension both allow sellers to search Amazon’s product database by identifier numbers, categories, keywords, and more.
You can also look into product sales trends, inventories, popular niches, price changes, and estimated sales. Plus, all the information gets compiled into a “competition metric,” which leads to the program’s real power – the ability to monitor successful products.
What Makes a Good Product?
Before we talk about Jungle Scout’s features, we need to understand what makes a good product. What specifically should you look for when you’re choosing products for your store?
Price is the first and most obvious thing. People often purchase cheap products without thinking. You want to keep price consistent with your store, but low enough that consumers will make “snap” decisions.
Next, you’ll need to look at the overall competition level. Products with low competition are good, but can also indicate that the product isn’t popular. Hone in on products with some, but not too many reviews.
You should also look for fairly popular products with bad marketing. Even with high competition, some product descriptions are so bad it’s amazing people buy the product at all. Improve those descriptions and reap the rewards.
Surprisingly, size also matters when you’re selling products. The smaller the product the less it costs to ship, the lower your overhead, and the lower you can price the product while still making a profit.
The Product Database
Jungle Scout’s product database gives the ability to sort products by price, estimated sales, dimensions, and other metrics listed above. Sellers can further sort by these metrics to discover products that not only are in demand, but also fit their store’s criteria.
The Product Track
You can add products from the database into the product tracker to follow their sales activity, inventory, seller rankings, pricing, and more. The tracker shows real-time product information instead of relying on only historical product data.
Sellers can watch products with favorable metrics to see how they fair over longer time periods before committing to building a supply chain.
The Niche Hunter
The niche hunter tool lets you search keywords in specific marketplaces, categories and of course, niches. Have a keyword that leads users to your store? You can discover products associated with that keyword.
Each product is also given an opportunity score created with an in-house algorithm. The score, along with the listing quality score, show which products are in demand but have poor listings and thus an opportunity to create your own superior listing.
Choosing Your Product
Choosing products isn’t easy. You’ll need to understand what makes a good product and how to use Jungle Scout’s tools to find viable items. Once you have your preliminary list, you need to choose which products make the cut.
To do this, you look at demand and competition. Let’s start with demand. The more people want the product, the greater the demand and the more sellers the marketplace can support.
Use the above tools to look at which products have sellers that average around 10 units per day. Products with several of these sellers are “in demand.”
Once you’ve sorted potential product by demand, competition dictates which products make the final cut. Reviews are the easiest way to gauge a product’s competitiveness. In-demand products without many reviews probably have little competition.
The Jungle Scout chrome extension can quickly show reviews for each product on your short list. Beyond their number, those reviews can also offer insight into the consumer pulse of a certain product.
And not only can you find out how customers feel about a product, but also what the seller could have done better. Products with negative reviews pointed at the seller indicate a less competitive marketplace.
Finally, Jungle Scout can estimate sellers’ Amazon Best Seller Ranking metric to reveal monthly product sales. Products with low monthly sales but high keyword volume are excellent targets.
Is Jungle Scout Right for My FBA Business?
In short, yes. Any FBA seller can benefit from Jungle Scout’s ability to identify new products. However, in the long run, Jungle Scout can only identify products.
It’s up to you as a seller to choose which products both fit with your store and meet the demand versus competition guidelines. Luckily, Jungle Scout offers enough robust tools that it’s almost down to choosing your favorite products.
If you follow the above guide, Jungle Scout can help you zero in on the best products for your store. After making your short list, it’s all about choosing which products are best for your store.