Amazon product research in the USA: what Amazon.com rewards, and what it costs to compete

Why the US store needs its own research

A product that looks open in Germany or Canada can be closed on Amazon.com, and the reverse happens too. Each marketplace has its own search results, its own review counts and its own set of sellers, so a verdict from one store tells you very little about another. SellRadar covers 13 marketplaces for this reason, and the same search term regularly gets a different verdict in each.

Three things tend to be different in the US:

• Demand is larger, so a niche that would be too small elsewhere can support a launch here.
• Review counts on page one are usually higher, because established listings have had more buyers to collect them from.
• The page attracts more sellers, including large brands and factories selling directly, which pushes prices down in commodity categories.

The practical result is that you should never carry a verdict across from another store. Run the check again on Amazon.com, with the US search term a US shopper would actually type. "Trash can" and "rubbish bin" are the same product and two completely different pages.

What it costs to sell on Amazon.com

Before any product numbers, know the fixed costs of the store itself. Amazon's Professional selling plan in the US is $39.99 a month. The Individual plan has no monthly fee and charges $0.99 for every item sold instead, which only makes sense below roughly 40 sales a month.

On every sale, Amazon takes a referral fee, which is 15% of the sale price in most categories, with some categories higher or lower. If you use FBA, a fulfilment fee is charged per unit based on size and weight, plus monthly storage, and storage costs more from October to December. Amazon's free FBA revenue calculator gives the exact figures for a given product, and it is worth running every candidate through it before you trust any margin a third-party tool shows you.

A quick example, with made-up but realistic inputs, shows how fast the price disappears:

That is about 27% of the sale price before storage, returns and the monthly plan. A product priced at $14.99 with the same costs would be close to zero. This is why the US store punishes cheap products: fulfilment fees do not shrink in proportion to the price. The profitability guide goes through each line in more detail.

The checks that matter most on a crowded page

In most categories on Amazon.com, people clearly buy the product. What you need to know is whether there is room for a new listing on page one, and that comes from looking at the listings themselves.

1. Search the term in a private browser window with a US delivery address set, so the results match what a US shopper sees.
2. Skip the Sponsored placements and open the top 20 organic results.
3. For each one, note the review count, the rating, the price and whether the seller is a known brand.
4. Count how many listings have fewer than a few hundred reviews, a rating below 4.2 or photos you could clearly beat.
5. Check whether Amazon itself is a seller on any of the top listings, since that makes the price war much harder to win.
6. Take the median price and run it through the fee example above.

If fewer than three of the 20 look beatable, the page is usually too tight for a first product, however strong the demand. The competition checker guide explains how to judge each listing, and spotting weak listings covers the details that give a page away.

Where openings still show up on Amazon.com

The US page is crowded on average, but averages hide a lot. Openings tend to cluster in a few places.

Unglamorous categories get less attention from new sellers, so the listings in them are often older and weaker. Garage storage, replacement parts and cleaning tools rarely appear in "trending products" videos, which is part of why they stay open. Variants of a crowded product can also be open: the large size, the left-handed version, the one that fits a specific model. A niche that needs some knowledge to sell well, such as aquarium equipment or musical instrument accessories, tends to keep out sellers who are just following a list of hot products.

Price bands help too. On some pages, every strong listing sits between $15 and $20 and nobody has built a better version at $35. If the reviews on the cheap listings complain about the same weakness, the higher band may be undefended. The low-competition guide has more ways to find these gaps.

Selling into the US from another country

Many sellers researching Amazon.com live somewhere else, and the research is the same for them. What changes is the paperwork and the cost line.

• Account and tax. Non-US sellers complete a tax interview in Seller Central, usually with a W-8BEN form, and need a bank account that can receive payments, or use Amazon's currency converter.
• Importing. Amazon does not act as your importer of record, so you or your freight forwarder handles customs, and duties depend on the product's tariff classification. Duty rates on goods from some countries have changed often in the last few years, so check the current rate for your product rather than relying on last year's quote.
• Landed cost. Freight, duty, customs brokerage and the trip from the port to an FBA warehouse all belong in your landed cost per unit. Sellers abroad often underestimate this line, and it is the one that turns a 27% margin into a 12% one.
• Returns and support. US shoppers expect fast refunds and easy returns, and Amazon enforces this whatever time zone you are in.

The same products are worth selling either way, but a seller who also pays international freight and duty needs a slightly wider margin for a product to work.

A US research routine that fits in one evening

Put together, a sensible routine for one candidate looks like this. Check demand with Amazon's Product Opportunity Explorer if you have a Seller Central account, then look at 12 months of price and rank history for the top three listings. Read the top 20 organic listings and count the beatable ones. Run the median price through the FBA calculator with your real landed cost. If all three checks pass, read the one- and two-star reviews on the leaders to find what buyers keep complaining about.

By hand, that takes about 30 to 40 minutes per product. SellRadar does the listing read and the fee maths for Amazon.com in under a minute and returns a Launch, Watch or Skip verdict with the reasons written out. You get three full checks a month on the free plan. The four questions behind any product decision are the same whichever way you do it.

Frequently asked questions