It’s been said that selling on Amazon is a lot like being in the Wild West – wide open spaces, opportunity around every corner, the majority of life revolving around what you put into your “cart.” Now, hopefully you’re more e-commerce explorer than snake oil salesperson, but the point stands. The Amazon marketplace is somewhere to stake your claim, sell your wares, and speak to the masses.
While that may have been especially true in the earlier 2000’s, today, the e-commerce landscape may feel a little… more developed. The fact that I’m even using the term e-commerce should tell you how far we’ve come. As Amazon grows and grows, they’ve made it easier and easier to “stake our claim.” Well, with greater accessibility comes greater competition.
However, last year was unlike any other year we’ve had in history. A global pandemic forced life to adapt. Likewise, the Amazon marketplace was forced to handle some new challenges. Dramatically increased traffic, entire new trending product areas, and a higher reliance than ever before on the convenience of online shopping.
Selling on Amazon in 2021 sees us moving forward after this “soft reset” of a 2020 in quarantine. As such, you may find yourself at one of several crossroads:
- You have the means to start your own private label business from home, 100% online, and you need your first product ideas.
- You have already been selling on Amazon, but want to make 2021 the year you expand your offering to a new product niche.
- You are struggling on Amazon with your current product and are ready, willing, and able to pivot to a new product line.
While we can’t guarantee anyone new Amazon product in 2021 will punch your golden ticket, we have the next best thing: A full stable of Amazon analytic tools that can help uncover the top selling Amazon products in 2021. But, we want to do more than just give you a list of popular, arbitrary Amazon products.
Give an Amazon seller a product, they’ll be inspired for a day. Teach an Amazon seller to find best selling products and they’ll be inspired for life.
These are the data points we’ll be cross-referencing, each one producing results that are further and further distilled:
- Historical data trends from 2020
- A look at the current Amazon Best Seller List
- Using Helium 10 tools to mine data other sellers cannot get
Disclaimer: We are not guaranteeing that any “bestselling” product you find on Amazon today will also be “bestselling” for you, should you choose to pursue them. Top products on Amazon are often the most competitive. We’re here to help you identify a potential path on which to begin your product research.
Glancing at a Few 2020 Trending Product Patterns
Before we look to 2021, I think it’s worth noting three important trends on Amazon in 2020.
1. As of January 2020, these were the top reasons shoppers used Amazon
Find more statistics at Statista
Notice, the top reasons for people using Amazon tend to center around convenience (fast shipping, price, returns, access to Amazon reviews, etc.). Only 22% of people shop on Amazon to find “unique items” they cannot locate anywhere else.
Even by mid-2020, well into the COVID-19 pandemic, the above reasons for a Prime subscription were further reinforced, with 89% of people using Amazon for free 1-day shipping.
What does this tell us?
It’s not necessarily up to you to find the most groundbreaking, innovative product out there when looking for the best products to sell on Amazon in 2021. It’s about being able to find the right product that A) Enough people are looking for and B) you can offer consistently with Amazon’s world-class convenience.
Interested in where to begin with product research? We’ve compiled everything you need to know for you in our Amazon product research guide.
2. Beauty products win big during quarantine’s early months
3. Apparel falls steeply during that same time period
Are the above points #2 and #3 things to make your final 2021 product decision on? Probably not. But, these trends are clearly tied to the global pandemic and may very well be trends that persist.
Will working from home become a new normal? Have certain, winning product categories cemented themselves as Amazon staples for years to come?
Amazon Best Sellers List
Now, let’s tackle the most obvious place to find top selling Amazon products, the Amazon Best Sellers list. This is where you will find top-performing products separated by category. Before we dig into the products, remember, the Amazon Best Seller list is based largely on BSR. BSR (Best Sellers Rank) is a unit of measurement Amazon gives to each product on Amazon. It’s based on recent sales and sales velocity (how much “momentum” a product has been selling at recently). BSR is updated hourly and changes multiple times throughout the day. Using the Best Seller List is a good place to refer to recent trending products, but not necessarily to guarantee that certain products are the “top sellers” for an entire month or year, for example.
We still encourage you to browse this list in the early stages of your Amazon product research. Here are a few of the top products for some of the more popular product categories on Amazon.
Toys & Games
Cell Phones & Accessories
Handmade
Are you an entrepreneur with a knack for working with your hands? Amazon Handmade is the space for you. For a deeper look into a corner of the online marketplace that combines the charm of Etsy with the infrastructure of Amazon, check out our Amazon Handmade walkthrough!
Kitchen & Dining
Want to see a real-world case study of selling on Amazon that documents an e-commerce journey from product research all the way to running paid ads for your products? Project X shows you how a product as simple (and random) as a kitchen egg tray may be a more profitable product than you would’ve thought.
Data is Your Best Friend When Finding Top Selling Amazon Products
Let’s talk tools, you’re going to need them.
Helium 10’s Black Box is our flagship Amazon product research tool that taps a database of over 2 billion products and utilizes advanced filtering functions to effectively serve you product opportunity on a shiny silver platter.
In fact, Black Box has so many filters it can be a little daunting to create your first search. As an example, I am going to use the kitchen drawer organizer (the #3 currently best selling item in the image above) from the Kitchen & Dining product category for reference.
Using Xray (part of Helium 10’s free Amazon chrome extension) we can see that the estimated monthly sales volume (units) is just over 41,000 and the estimated monthly revenue for this product is right around $400,000 (wow!).
Keep in mind, we ran this chrome extension straight from the product’s Amazon listing. You can do this with any product on Amazon to glean valuable data estimates when researching your next product ideas.
Once in Black Box (this tool is separate from the Chrome Extension), we can start filling out our search parameters.
We will:
- Refine our category to “Kitchen & Dining” only
- Set a minimum monthly revenue of $400,000 (we know from using Xray this is a good ballpark figure for a bestselling kitchen product)
- Set our product price range from $15-$50 (we still want to find a profitable product)
- Set a minimum product review count of 10 (to only show us products with at least some customer feedback)
- Set our minimum monthly sales (units) to 40,000
Just like that…
Results! Over 30 different Amazon products with the exact specifications we searched for. Notice I also sorted results (in the upper right corner) to show me products with the highest amount of sales first.
Not interested in kitchen food scales? I don’t blame you! Just head back up to your search filters and use the “Exclude Title Keywords” feature to exclude every result containing the word “scale.”
Boom, no more scales.
You can conduct these searches within any product category with a nearly limitless combination of filtering options. Now you aren’t stuck perusing the Amazon Best Seller List with everyone else – you have a customizable search console specifically created for sniffing out Amazon product niche opportunities.
What if you want to see an Amazon product’s sales trend over time?
Using Helium 10’s Trendster (and 60 seconds of your time), plug in up to four product ASINs (found in the “Product Details” section of any listing) and up to four of your own keywords.
Now you have a 24 hour, 7-day, 30-day, 1-year, or all-time look at the sales ranking of your ASIN(s) as well as a Google trends graph for your chosen keyword(s).
When you’re thinking of starting your own Amazon store, browsing the top selling products isn’t a bad place to start. But it’s also not the only place you should go. Remember, the best selling products on Amazon are often popular with Amazon shoppers and other sellers. When looking for low competition products, you can’t only go by best selling product data. However, by looking at top selling products, you will get an idea of what kind of products are trending, and it could lead you down interesting rabbit trails of product research.
If you’re truly interested in finding a product that sells big and has the opportunity for sustainable profit, we invite you to turn your attention to the most important part of looking for an Amazon FBA product…
Original Post from Top Selling Amazon Products
