How to Make £29,320 Per Month By Killing Insects

...A 'Smash Hit' Private Label Product Case Study

 

This is Part 1 of a 3-part series on importing 'Smash Hit' products on Amazon...

 

Part 1 - [You Are HERE] HOW TO MAKE £29,320 PER MONTH BY KILLING INSECTS

 

Part 2 - HOW TO 'VALIDATE' WITH A SMALL TEST BATCH (...$100 OR LESS)

 

Part 3 - HOW HAVING A ‘BRAND MINDSET’ WILL 4X YOUR RESULTS (AND WHY YOU SHOULDN'T SELECT PRODUCTS YOU'RE PASSIONATE ABOUT)

 

 

The reason I'm doing a case study for you in this blog post, is three fold. 

 

Firstly, I want to give you a quick walk through of exactly how I found this private label product to do a case study on (it's not mine by the way ;).

 

Secondly, I want to showcase a product that's working really well, tell you a little bit about why and how I know it's working really well. 

 

Thirdly, I want to do a thorough analysis of the product review so you can see how it would perform, if you were to import and see a product just like this. 

 

 

The way this is going to help you is: 

 

  • It's going to help you understand a little bit more about how I find products. 

 

  • Understand what type of products work really well

 

  • Also understand when you're thinking about importing a product, how you can do a very thorough analysis so you know what to expect and there are no surprises along the way. 

 

 

When I was trying to find a product to show you for this case study, the one I found was actually relatively boring and unspectacular. 

 

This is a pattern I'm actually starting to see at the moment with private label products that are successful. 

 

It seems to me that the more boring the product is, the better it qualifies for you to private label. 

 

 

The product I found for you today, is a moth trap.

 

(If you want to check this out yourself, the ASIN is: B00KVGC5F6) and it’s on amazon.co.uk.

 

Quick Note: By the way, you might think that this product is cruel because it kills moths. 

 

Personally, I hate the bastards and I say, "Trap them and kill them all." 

There's nothing worse than coming home to my bedroom and finding a couple of moths flying around, bashing into the lamp, smacking into the wall, getting their weird dust everywhere. 

 

I really hate them. 

 

Finding this product and realising that it's going to be good for a case study, actually gives me a certain level of sinister satisfaction. 

 

Maybe if we release more products like this, we can eradicate them from the planet ;)

 

So with that in mind, let’s begin by talking about how I realised that the moth traps were actually going to be an awesome idea for a private label product. 

 

It's not exactly something you wake up in the morning thinking is going to be generating you income and paying for your cocktails and lifestyle, right? 

 

Certainly not why I expected it to be selling at any point in my Amazon career. 

 

But the as I’ve mentioned before, BORING products just seem to work.

 

So how did I find this product? 

 

Well it was relatively simple.

 

I was thinking back to a product that I saw selling very, very well on the Amazon Marketplace. 

 

Actually the marketplace was starting to get saturated, and this product has a LOT of competition right now.

 

I remember that this product was made just from cloth. 

 

I thought to myself, why is this product so cool? 

 

Well because it's so light, it's so small, and so easy to import. 

 

It's not very complicated. It's basically just a piece of cloth. 

 

What I did when I was finding a case study product for you to analyse and give you the example, is simply type the word ‘cloth’ into the Amazon search bar as my search term.

 

This is what kicked off the search. 

 

I actually got really, really ridiculously lucky with this search and I found this quite a viable product in a matter of about 15 minutes. 

 

On average, it takes me about four hours to find a product that looks really viable. 

 

Sometimes it takes me five, six hours. 

 

However, sometimes this can happen and I'll find one in just 15 minutes. 

 

A lot of it is down to luck but on average it's around four hours for me.

 

This time I got really lucky. 

 

So I typed in cloth, had a look through the pages and on page three, there was one moth trap being sold with a very bad best seller ranking. 

 

I thought, “Well why don't I have a look to see if there are other moth traps that are selling successfully?” 

I just typed moth trap into Amazon and the first page results ended up looking really good. 

 

Something like THIS:

 

 (This is when I realised just how lucky I'd got in this short time I was researching products!)

 

Do you want to find out the fastest way to uncover hot opportunities like this on the Amazon marketplace? In my Perfect Private Label training, I'll show you how to research and import products that do more than $2,000 in profit per month each. 

 

You'll learn how to build a brand, use advanced marketing to get your products to sell consistently, and how to run your business from a laptop.

 

(NOTE: need training on how to begin importing private label products? See Ecommerce Freedom's Perfect Private Label course by clicking HERE).

 

 

 

Now let’s get onto the analysis. 

 

The first thing I analyse with products always, is the REVENUE.

 

In fact, this is what I call my ‘litmus test’. 

 

Is the product going to work or not? 

 

First thing that completely tells you in black and white whether it's going to work, is the revenue. 

 

If it's not performing well enough, I won't go anywhere near it. 

 

The first, second, and third products on the page of search results when I typed in moth traps were doing £29,320 per month, £13,782 per month, and £11,444 per month respectively.

 

 

The top three sellers were crushing it.

 

This is what we always want to look at because if there's three sellers getting great revenue, we know that if we come in with a fourth product, we have a good chance of getting good revenue as well because there's lots of money going through the marketplace. 

 

At this point, you know your product's not going to be fluke. 

 

You know you're not going to have to deal with any jungle scout errors where one product just spiked in sales for some reason. 

 

We know three sellers means that it's definitely a good area to be in because we're going where the money is. 

 

So at first glance, this product looked awesome. 

 

Once I realised this, I started to look at the competition levels. 

 

This is the second thing I always look at. 

 

As far as I could tell, there were no big brands that I recognised selling moth traps. 

 

There was one random pest control company from Malaysia which I'd never realised existed. 

 

I don't think anybody else really knows about this brand.

 

Hence, because they weren't widely known, that wouldn't be an advantage for them and wouldn't give them more reason to show that their product was good quality or anything. 

 

So all in all the competition wasn’t gonna be a problem, plus the reviews were very low:

 

 

(The highest was 232 - way under 400).

 

 

For revenues like that with very low reviews, the competition levels looked very solid. 

 

No well established products, not too many reviews, and no big brands.

 

Once I figured out the revenue was good and the competition levels were good, then finally,  I wanted to see if I could add value. 

 

If the marketplace has got all the basis covered, you're not going to be able to come in and offer a product that solves problems.

 

At the end of the day, to run a successful business, you need to solve problems and charge people for those solutions. 

 

That's basically what you do in any business. 

 

If there are no problems to solve, then you have no way of making money. 

 

So I set out to see what value I could add to the moth trap market.

 

The first place to look when you want to add value?

 

= The REVIEWS.

 

According to the reviews, there are quite a few obvious problems in the moth traps marketplace on Amazon.

 

Some of the designs were a bit weird. 

 

Some of them had reviews saying, "The glue wasn't sticky enough." 

 

Another one said, "The pheromones being used to attract the moths weren't really working." 

 

One reviewer also said that the handle wasn't the right shape and it didn't cling onto the rail in the wardrobe where you were supposed to have the moth trap sitting.

 

 

Also a lot of these moth traps were sold in packs - packs of five and packs of ten.

 

One really obvious way to add value is just to offer more quantity. 

 

I could have done a pack of 12 or a pack of 15. 

 

So after a quick look around, I realised there’s DEFINITELY room to add value in this marketplace

 

The three main pillars of product research were covered. 

 

Great revenue, low competition levels, and opportunity to add value. 

 

At this point, I was stricken with the realisation of how lucky I was to find this product so incredibly quickly. 

 

I realised that it was going to be a good choice for this case study. 

 

Once you find a product that has all these three pillars and realise the product looks like it's going to be a good fit, you always want to look a little bit deeper at a product's criteria to see if there are any potential problems - Anything that could complicate the process.

 

This product wasn't free of problems, although it did come out pretty well.

 

First of all, the price point for this product was pretty low. 

 

One of them was around £7.99, another was £3.99, and another one was £14.99. 

 

The £14.99 product was in our price range, that's totally fine. 

 

You'd need to come in at the premium end of the marketplace if you wanted to offer this product and have a reason for the extra cost. 

 

Customers aren't going to spend more money if there's no reason for them to.

 

They're just going to choose the cheaper products if yours is a rip off. 

 

Price point was a little bit low. 

 

You have to come in with a good design and a good reason why customers will be willing to spend more on your product. 

 

If you could do that, the product would be fine. 

 

I showed this product to my girlfriend and she pointed out something, very clever.

 

She said that, "A moth trap could actually be a summer product in the UK because the moths always come in the spring and summer months when the weather's warmer and in the cold weather, they all disappear." 

 

This brings me to a very important point. 

 

Whenever you're looking for a private label product, always think about usage of the product and where the product's going to be used. 

 

Usage and location are two key things to think about. 

 

If you're selling barbecue gloves to people in the North Pole, that’s probably not going to go down well as compared to selling them in California. 

 

Could Moth Traps be Seasonal?

 

What I did to see if this product was seasonal and whether people would only buy it during the summer was that I had a look in Google Trends.

 

This is the easiest way to see whether a product is seasonal or not. 

 

I typed in moth trap as my search.

 

If you check out the screenshot below, you can see that indeed, there is a little bit of seasonality with this product. 

 

 

As you can see, there’s a bit of a curve and the product does get more searches in the warmer months.

 

This indicates people probably buy more moth traps in the Summer.

 

However this isn't exactly a crazy spike like you would have got if you typed in Christmas tree, where it only sells in December:

 

 

The moth trap just has a gentle curve.

 

There's just a little bit more interest throughout the warmer months.

 

We can assume this product will sell more in the summer months but it's not going to be too crazily slow selling in the winter, from the data shown in Google Trends. 

 

You could definitely plan to buy lots of stock in January to prepare for the warmer months, understand sales are going to be slower in the winter but it doesn't mean it's a deal breaker. 

 

 

Understanding if a product is seasonal (or not) should help you avoid nasty surprises.

 

If you understand how your product is going to perform throughout the year, then you're fine.

 

For example: you could have one product that sells really well in the warmer weather and another product that works really well in the winter months. 

 

Then, together you've got a portfolio that works well, all year round.

 

What you don't want to have happen is THINK that your product is evergreen and going to sell all year round, then realise that it is massively seasonal. 

 

Incidentally, this happened with one of my products recently. 


The sales were slow in recently, and after a bit of digging, I realised that people really do love to buy this item in the colder months. 

 

It happens. 

 

I just have to wait a few months for the sales to come in again.

 

But if you're careful and you check Google Trends when you're looking at your product, hopefully it won't happen to you. 

 

Seasonal products can be a little bit of an issue but it's not a deal breaker.

 

It definitely will still get you some decent revenue in the warmer months.

 

Could It Be Difficult To Check The Quality Of A Moth Trap Sample?

 

It’s really important to get a sample of any product that you want to import, before you place a big order.

 

This is so we can test, hold, and feel it to make sure it's a good quality product whilst ensuring it works well and does its job properly. 

 

In order to actually test this product, it would have to be in the summer and we'd have to have some moths to try and catch with it. 

 

This could be a little bit difficult if you don't have moths in your house or if it's in the winter. 

 

That could be another potential issue that makes this product a little bit hard to import and sell successfully. 

 

You'd have to get into a situation where there are lots of moths somewhere and test it out. 

 

This is something you should thing about when choosing a product…

 

Can I test the sample to prove it’s good quality?

 

You don't want to sell a product that doesn't work.

 

 

But for now, let’s say that you managed to overcome these hurdles. 

 

You didn't mind the product selling more in the summer months and you could find a way to test it. 

 

Let’s do a round up of ‘moth traps’ to see if it would be a good choice to private label…

 

Overall, Here's My Verdict For This Product:

 

  • It has absolutely brilliant revenue. You know that you're going to be making some killer sales, especially in the warmer months. 

 

  • There's room for improvement in the marketplace because some of the designs fall short where you can come in with a better offering and compete. 

 

  • There's definitely room for you to compete. There's not too many products with really high reviews or a brand. 

 

All in all, I'd feel very confident this product could make me £2,000 per month or more in profit. 

 

If I hadn't had shown it here as a case study, I definitely would be adding to my inventory.

 

The whole point of this case study was to just give you an example of a product that's crushing it, tell you why and how I found, and show you how to do an analysis. 

 

Also, by seeing as many examples as possible, you’ll get to know the in’s and out’s of WHY I do each stage of analysis, and how important each one is.

 

Hopefully, this has really helped you and if you liked this, let me know and I can do more case studies on products that are crushing it. 

 

If we get enough of them, maybe you can actually just choose one of these products to import and sell in your account. 

 

(NOTE: need training on how to begin importing private label products? See Ecommerce Freedom's Perfect Private Label course by clicking HERE).

 

Oliver Denyer About Ollie


Ollie is an ecommerce and lifestyle business enthusiast.
He's sold over $1,000,000 worth of products that he's never had to touch, pack or ship himself.
A persistent disdain towards feeling like he's in a "job" has inspired him to create businesses that are FUN to run.
This means leveraging big companies to ship products, outsourcing laborious tasks to a team of VA's and running everything from a laptop.
He's passionate about sharing his knowledge with the world and helping people find more freedom through business.

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