What's a good product to sell on Amazon FBA?

What to look for in the next product launch (based on our data spending $20m/year in Amazon Ads across all categories):

- can sell for a minimum of 4x landed COGS. This will keep it profitable. Without this, nothing else matters

- substantial price point: preferably $30 or more. You want to genetically engineer your product to work with Amazon Ads (the #1 distribution channel of Amazon products) before you ever launch it! The magic of selling more expensive stuff on Amazon is that the cost of Amazon PPC stays the same (the average cost per click right now is $0.95), but for every unit you sell, you make more profit! You want to sell a $100 thing with $0.95 clicks, not a $20 thing with $0.95 clicks.

- a weird niche that's "2-3 layers deep". For example, not a multivitamin for all pets. Not a multivitamin for dogs. Not even a joint supplement for dogs (without strong differentiator). But rather: a joint supplement for pet lizards. I especially like niche medical, Industrial & Scientific, and Automotive.

- in terms of keyword research, there are 5-10 niche keywords with 2,000-20,000 monthly searches that we can rank on page 1 for with 5-15 sales per day per keyword. Use a keyword research tool to check.

- not for everyone: generic kitchen, baby, sports products, etc. is not where I'd start as a brand new seller. They are needlessly competitive in the 2020s. And also, Amazon is now large enough where even smaller niches can cashflow really nicely. Much easier and less pressure to stack 5 niche products together to make $100k/mo vs. have 1 hit vitamin c pill that will make $100k/mo. Less risk of revenue concentration, too!

- it helps if we're a customer for the product. Not necessary, but it helps find points of product differentiation. I tell folks: look at your credit card receipts from the last year! What did you buy?

- physically lightweight; preferably fits in a shoebox when disassembled/packed.

- not hyper-seasonal. Easter stuff, Vday stuff, etc. isn't ideal for initial products because it's a "walk in the desert" for most of the year.

And...

Honorable mentions:

- made in America, given the current climate. Not possible with all product types and that's fine.

- a painkiller, not a vitamin. Vitamins: if you don't take them, nothing bad happens. Heck, I can skip my magnesium for a week and not feel a thing. Do they make my life a little better? Sure. Will I miss 'em? Not really. Painkillers: if you don't take them, ouch! You hurt. You want the pain to go away now! Have you ever had a splitting headache? A fresh papercut? It's all you can think about in that moment. From Tony Fadell, iPod lead & inventor of Nest thermostat.

- can't be easily purchased in a Walmart. You want a product that's hard for shoppers to acquire in physical stores so that it practically FORCES customers to buy it online, and hence on Amazon (Amazon is 56% of all ecommerce orders now). From Pat, who is me.

- built on trends, not fads. From The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: "A fad is a wave in the ocean. A trend is the tide. A fad gets a lot of hype, and a trend gets very little. Like a wave, a fad is very visible, but it goes up and down in a big hurry. Like the tide, a trend is almost invisible, but it's very powerful over the long term. A fad is a short-term phenomenon that might be profitable, but a fad doesn't last long enough to do a company much good. [Companies] often gear up as if a fad were a trend."

Rooting for you,

Pat