Using Amazon To Spot New Trends

I recently published a hub on how to make money with Amazon and followed up with finding products to sell on Amazon. Just to complete the set I thought that some people might be interested in learning how to discover new sales trends using Amazon.

One of the best tools to use in order to find good products is the Amazon bestellers lists. All of the main categories, and most of the subcategories have these. You'll find them on the right hand side of the page. Usually they show the top five or six bestsellers in a skyscraper banner type format - but if you click on the link at the bottom of the list that say "See all bestsellers in the XXXXXXX category", you will get to see the best selling 100 items in whatever category you are viewing, displayed 25 to a page.

You can be pretty sure that anything that makes it into the top ten, twenty or thirty of one of the Amazon bestseller lists is selling well and is probably not a bad choice for you to promote. However, there is further valuable information that you can glean from these lists.

The image above is taken from the "toys & games" category bestsellers list. It shows only the top three items in order to make it legible.

Apart from the number one, two, three bestselling items, you can also see what price people are prepared to pay for any particular item. This may, or may not, be important to you. If you're planning to sell items using the Amazon associate scheme (and why not, it's very profitable), then the price is whatever Amazon say it is. You might want to check that it's a competitive price when compared to other online vendors of course.

On the other hand, just because you found this useful information on Amazon doesn't mean that you have to promote the product using Amazon itself. You might choose to promote it using another vendor who has either a better price or who offers you a higher commission. It's up to you.

There are two other very important pieces of information available here which you should make good use of. The first of these is the number of days that the product has been in the top 100. We can see here that the number one selling product, Pipsqueak, the yellow hamster, has been in the top 100 for 44 days.

That isn't a long time. You will typically find that most of the products in the top 100 have been there for a long time. Microsoft Office 2007, for example, has been in the top 100 bestsellers in the software category for 1017 days (at the time of writing). Pipsqueak is a new kid on the block.

We can also see that the number 3 product, Num Nums the hamster, has a green arrow pointing upwards - which just means that the popularity of that product is increasing. If it were falling there would be a red arrow pointing downwards.

In this particular case, we have stumbled across a product that is not only selling well but is new and is trending upwards. We have a fad - and these Zhu Zhu pet hamsters are well worth promoting.

Of course, you won't always find this type of product in the top ten. In fact, the ideal scenario for you is to find them before they get into the top ten bestsellers and everyone else knows about them. So check out the items between 50 and 100 on the bestsellers list. Look for new entries and watch to see if they are rising up the list or falling down. The lists are updated every hour - it's practically real time sales information that Amazon are giving you - so you shouldn't take long to spot any rising stars!