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Hey, how's it going? It's Ollie here. Today we have a question from Ruhi and Ruhi asks, how do you work out what to sell in places the Jungle Scout tool and others are not supported?

 

This is a really interesting question and inspired me actually because I've done product research outside of Amazon before, where you can't use Jungle Scout and we wouldn't think you'd be able to use Jungle Scout and I've learned quite a lot about the process and I thought it'd be a good opportunity to share it with you.

 

So I think what Ruhi's asking here is, if you want to sell a product off Amazon - maybe you want to sell it on your own website, or you want to sell products perhaps on Shopify or eBay, or with some kind of funnel that you build, or just in some other place and you can't just click the Jungle Scout button and see the entire marketplace and analyze the competition and demand and stuff - how do you do it?

 

Well, this is the interesting thing because you can use Amazon product research to get a good start on figuring out the competition and demand levels of a niche. Even if you're not selling on Amazon. In fact, many marketers, before they launch any product, go to Amazon and look at the reviews inside products, inside certain niches, even if they're not looking to sell the product on Amazon directly.

 

Because like I said, a couple of videos ago, right when someone was asking is Amazon still a viable thing in 2020? Amazon now own 50% of the eCommerce revenue and 50% of the industry. So the chances are that whatever niche you're going to sell in, most of the sellers have got their products on Amazon.

 

Therefore it represents a very good chunk of the competition, right? So if you're thinking about selling a product, maybe on a website, maybe on eBay and maybe on Shopify or whatever, then the first thing I would do is still use Jungle Scout. Still look at the data on Amazon and use that to get an estimate of where that market place is.

 

If there's tons and tons of tons of sellers selling the products on Amazon and they've got loads of reviews and there's loads of brands, then if the competition is really high on Amazon, it's pretty obvious there's going to be high elsewhere as well. If the competition is super low and hardly anyone selling on Amazon, then it's quite likely that the competition will be low off Amazon as well, so it's a good place to stop.

 

You can at least get an estimate by using Jungle Scout, but then you have to consider a few other things. Because when we're looking for a hot product, there's always a few things we want to take into account. We want high demand. In other words, we want evidence that people want to buy the thing.

 

So Amazon can tell you that. If loads of people are buying the thing on Amazon, then loads of people will buy the thing on Shopify or on eBay or on a website. That could be a great place to start, but competition can be slightly different.

 

For example, let's say you wanted to build a landing page. Maybe a website or something, and you wanted to drive Facebook traffic directly to this landing page to sell a certain eCommerce product. Or maybe you wanted to give it away for free, maybe a free plus shipping offer and build like a tripwire funnel and have like upsells and things like that.

 

That's how you wanted to build your customer base and jumpstart your eCommerce brand. So you're sending traffic from Facebook to your website. It wouldn't really make too much sense to look at the competition levels on Amazon and only take that data into account because what you might find is yes, the competition levels on Amazon might be really high, for example.

 

But on Facebook, nobody's tapped into this model yet and nobody's using Facebook to sell this product. So yes, the competition levels might be crazy on Amazon, but if you're the only one on Facebook, then you're going to get all of that traffic from Facebook only seeing your product.

 

Now, that's quite an unlikely scenario, right? There's lots of people who use Facebook to advertise, but the point is, you want to look at the competition on the platform your selling within, and analyze that to make sure there's an opportunity there. And it could be anything. It could be super, super high on Facebook or whatever platform you're advertising on. It could be really low, but have a look, you know, try and get the data, try and become the customer and figure out what the customer sees.

 

So for example, if you're interested in selling.. I don't know, I mean it could be anything. It could be maybe kitchen supplies. You want to sell kitchen supplies on Facebook and start interacting with loads of pages on Facebook that involve kitchen supplies, have Facebook open, log in, and then go on other websites and start looking for kitchen supplies, right?

 

Go to loads of kitchen supply websites. What will happen is after a while of you doing this stuff, Facebook will figure out that you're interested in kitchen supplies and you'll start to see adverts about these kitchen supplies from sellers and you'll get a good idea of what the competition looks like.

 

Then you can make an analysis. Is there room to compete here? Is there something that these advertisers aren't doing right now, which I can do to add value to the marketplace and compete?

 

So that's my advice. Use Amazon as a starting point. Even if you're selling off Amazon, just because of the sheer volume of data you can get from there. But then dive a little deeper into your particular marketplace, where your competition hangs out.

 

In fact, one thing that is probably very under-served at the moment is print advertising. People who read newspapers generally have a much better attention span while they're doing the thing, while they're paying attention to the media versus people online, right?

 

I mean, if you think about it. When we're online, what's usually happening? Even on our phone or on our laptop, okay, I've usually got about six tabs open on the browser and at any one time there's about a billion things going on just in the browser. Plus you've got all the notifications on your laptop. Maybe there's a glitch or something happening at the same time, and a computer or a phone is pretty much like a custom built distraction machine.

 

So trying to get people's attention online is notoriously hard because give them five seconds and they're off on YouTube looking at cat videos. When someone's reading a newspaper, they're usually sitting down, and the newspapers are the only thing they got going on. So if there's an advert there with your product on it in a certain section of the newspaper, then the chances are if they're interested, then you've got their attention and it can be a very, very powerful way to attract customers.

 

Now, yes, it's more expensive in many ways, but something to consider. If you want to sell stuff off Amazon and you want another way to sell your products in a less competitive marketplace, could be something to try.

 

Anyway, thanks so much for watching this video. I hope it was helpful, Ruhi, and anyone else who watched it. If you've got any more questions, make sure you comment down below. And if you're watching this video outside of my Facebook group, then click the link above or below this video to join the group and you'll see a box appear as you join. Type your question in that box and I'll answer it on a video.

 

Thanks so much for watching this video and we'll speak soon.