Best Products To Sell On Amazon (and What You Shouldn’t)

The Amazon marketplace handles 40% of U.S. e-commerce sales and has more annual sales than all but 11 countries. That’s a huge business, and there’s room for more sellers to get their share. But first, you have to answer an important question: what are the best products to sell on Amazon?

We’re going to provide information about selling products on Amazon from the business owners of companies like ShedDefender, Pooch Selfie, and from owners like Michael Jackness and Ryan Hogue. These four businesses make a combined $200K per month selling products on Amazon. 

Get ready to learn everything you need to know to find the best items to sell on Amazon.

Is it Profitable to Sell on Amazon?

If you’re wondering whether selling on Amazon is worth the effort, the answer is clear: definitely, it is! And it’s easy to get started. 

We talked with several business owners who shared their positive experience with Amazon sales.

Michael Jackness, the cofounder of Ecom Crew told us:

Casey Walters, the owner of Shed Defender, told us that his Amazon selling accounts for about 65% of his business’s sales. He also told us:

Check out our interview with Casey below.

Now that we know you can count on making a profit with your Amazon business, let’s look at why you should choose Amazon over other e-commerce platforms.

Why You Should Sell on Amazon

You should sell on Amazon for several reasons:

1. Amazon had over 2.4 billion views in March 2023, according to SimilarWeb. (Only Google, YouTube, and Facebook have more.)
2. Amazon categories make selling items easy.
3. Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) handles fulfillment, shipping, and quality control so you can focus on growing your business.
4. Amazon has the most sophisticated logistics network on the planet. This helps you provide better service to your customers.

Next, let’s look at what to sell on Amazon.

Features of Best Products to Sell on Amazon for Beginners

Before you open your Amazon store, doing a bit of research about what products are easy to sell will pay off in the long run.

Michael Jackness told us:

The best product to sell on Amazon will have the following characteristics:

Michael had another great tip:

Check out our interview with him below.

Keep reading to find hot-selling items on Amazon with low competition.

What Are the Best Products to Sell on Amazon?

Based on our criteria above, we used Jungle Scout’s Opportunity Finder from 4/12/23 to find very low competition keywords that sell at least 1,000 per month at a value of $10-$100 with a niche rating of 6-10. We also excluded big brands and highly seasonal items. It produced 266 products across the following product categories:

(Not familiar with Jungle Scout? We’ll explain this helpful research tool and others like it later on in the article.)

Let’s take a closer look at the items that made up the best sellers in each category to spot opportunities for your business to sell on Amazon.

Games and Toys

According to Jungle Scout, toys and games were the most purchased product category with nearly 20% of the top 200 top product ideas. The most popular selling items during this time were:

Amazon sellers should be aware that this product market niche is going to be highly seasonal because popular toys are changing frequently.

Health & Household

The next most commonly sold items come from the health and household category. There were 31 high-demand products on this list, including:

Beauty Products & Personal Care

Beauty product ideas include items like:

Grocery & Gourmet Food

Food products are among the popular categories for Amazon buyers, with 23 items that have low competition amongst Amazon sellers. You might want to consider:

Clothing, Shoes, and Jewelry

Clothing, shoes, and jewelry all make good product ideas to sell on Amazon. High ranking profitable products for Amazon sellers include:

If you’re feeling inspired to get started, first have a listen to Ryan Hogue as he explains how he makes $30K on Amazon in our podcast below.

Ready for more ideas to sell in your Amazon store? Read on.

Baby Products

There is consistent demand on the Amazon store for baby products, including:

Home & Kitchen

The home and kitchen category has a lot of demand without too much competition for the following products:

Kitchen & Dining

Some low-competition products that are in high demand while online shopping are:

Tools & Home Improvement

The tools and home improvement category  has consistent sales in:

If you start selling these products, you won’t be competing with many other sellers.

Pet Supplies

Another popular category to sell products is pet supplies. There are some products I was surprised by that are easier to rank, including: 

If you choose to sell items in these profitable product categories, don’t forget to carry things like leashes, cat boxes, collars, and pet food. For more ideas on selling pet care items, find out how Casey Walters started ShedDefender and makes over $150K per month on Amazon.

Sports & Outdoors

You’d be surprised by some of the things that end up in best-selling categories. Jungle Scout suggests someone start selling:

You can always go with staples like camping equipment too.

Patio, Lawn, and Garden

Surprisingly, all the easy keywords were about trapping mice and rats habitating in your garden. If you look at the best sellers in Amazon Marketplace, you find a completely different story. The garden best-selling categories include items like:

Electronics/Cell Phones & Accessories

I used ahrefs to investigate the search volume of certain keywords on Amazon, and it showed some interesting numbers within the electronics categories. Nearly 60% of searches involved electronics, which is weird because you’d think if so many people research products on there that there would be some crossover between the ahrefs results and Jungle Scout. My guess is that with so many sellers, the electronics are highly competitive. Items that make this list include:

We’ve given you all kinds of ideas to find your own niche market. What will you start selling on Amazon?

Amazon Restricted Products

At this point, you know everything you could possibly want to know about top selling Amazon products, but what about Amazon seller restrictions?

Restricted products on Amazon include 41 categories. For some categories you can’t sell at all, and for others you have to follow specific rules. Just make sure you read the rules for each category in which you sell. Review Amazon’s restricted categories page before selling stuff on Amazon.

Can you sell alcohol on Amazon?

Maybe. Amazon does allow wine sales, but there is a catch. Many states do not allow direct-to-consumer sales of alcohol, and it is the seller’s responsibility to follow all state and local laws. There’s a loophole though. As an online business, you are allowed to sell brewing kits with all the ingredients to brew alcohol.

Learn more about Amazon’s alcohol policies.

What Is an Amazon #1 Best Seller?

An Amazon best seller rank compares the current sales and the sales history. If a product is ranked #1, it means that it is the most sold item on Amazon in that category during the specific hour. The most bought items on Amazon may be shown for the entirety of Amazon, but each store also shows their trending items on Amazon.

How to Find the Best Products to Sell on Amazon

There are a lot of ways to perform product research as an Amazon business. Aside from Jungle Scout, other sources for researching profitable products include:

1. Amazon’s Best Selling Products
2. Researching Competitors’ Stores
3. Keyword Research
4. Find Private Label Products to Sell on Amazon
5. Use Retail Arbitrage to Source Amazon Products
6. Find Direct-Source Products on Amazon
7. Check Out Other Marketplaces
8. Avoid Big Brands
9. Consider Selling Custom Print-on-Demand Products on Amazon
10. Reverse Engineer Top Industry Amazon Affiliate Publishers

Let’s look at each of these resources in greater detail.

Amazon’s Best Selling Products

Amazon knows what their customers want better than any third party. They know their exact search volume, click-through rate, and top purchases. Other sites that report on Amazon sales can only pull the information from Amazon and try to guesstimate their algorithms. 

Knowing this, the first step you should take is to review Amazon’s best sellers page. It will give you a good idea of what product categories and items sell well. The picture below shows the top-selling items at the time of writing.

Research the Competition

Next, you’ll want to use product research software like Jungle Scout or other Amazon seller tools. These sites help an e-commerce business:

• Identify top-selling products
• Track performance over time
• Find high-performing keywords
• Source products
• Create optimized product listings
• Learn about selling items on Amazon

Read about other product research tools.

Keyword Research

Once you perform product research and decide what items to sell online, You’ll need to perform keyword research to find:

• Search Volume
• Sales Volume
• Price
• Keywords for Title and Product Description

You’ll also be able to view recent and historical sales to get an idea of whether the average price and search volume are increasing or decreasing. 

New to keyword research? Our article on starting an eCommerce Business has more tips. 

Find Private Label Products to Sell on Amazon

Private label selling can be highly profitable if there is an untapped market. If you find items that are completely missing from Amazon selling, find a way to source them and start selling before other sellers realize they can underbid you.

Use Retail Arbitrage to Source Amazon Products

Retail arbitrage is a method of finding products that are being sold at a lower price at one site or retailer, buying them all, and then selling them somewhere else. 

Many of the best things to sell on Amazon may be discontinued or limited edition items. Amazon top sellers can often buy trending products at retail prices, mark them up, and then make two or three times the manufacturer’s suggested retail price. 

These items become trending products on Amazon and other e-commerce platforms. Learn more about an eBay seller’s retail arbitrage tricks and try them with Amazon trending products.

What Can You Sell On Amazon: Direct-Source Products

If you can bypass the wholesaler and go straight to the manufacturer, this will lower your cost per item dramatically—but you’ll have to buy more of each product.

This is both a benefit and a potential risk because your storage fees will increase, but your gross margin will also increase. As long as you can sell the items within a month, you shouldn’t be hit with huge storage fees.

Check Out Other Marketplaces

Another place to find best selling products is on other websites. You can use a tool like CNET shopping extension to find places online that sell a product for a lower price.

Avoid Big Brands

Top-selling items on Amazon are often big name brands. These won’t be the most profitable items to sell on Amazon because you have to have a:

• Higher seller’s rank
• Better SEO strategy
• Lower product cost

As a new seller, you are unlikely to be able to compete with big brands that are offering top-selling products on Amazon. 

(There may be some exceptions to this. For instance, if one of your toys makes the best Amazon items list, you might be able to add batteries for it and be able to upsell customers easily.) 

Copy Amazon Affiliate Strategies

Influencers are in all the selling categories. They know how to build their own brand, and they can turn ordinary things into trending Amazon products. Find the best influencers in your industry and study what they do. When they release a new video for a product, put those trending things on sale.

Use Google Trends

Google Trends shows you what is trending on the world’s largest search engine. Trends on Google can soon become some of the best products on Amazon. Just be aware that the Amazon best selling products change fast. 

Make sure to check whether the hot items to sell on Amazon are short-term or cyclical. A celebrity blooper is probably short-term, while NFL merchandise is cyclical because it will have another season the next year.

What Is the Best Selling Strategy on Amazon?

There are four main ways of selling on Amazon. They each have their pros and cons, and if you want to achieve sustainable growth, you should consider each of the strategies and your own products before deciding. We’ll discuss each of the strategies below.

• Amazon FBA
• Amazon Merch
• Print-on-Demand 
• Digital Products
• Fulfillment by Manufacturer

Let’s first find the best items to sell on Amazon FBA.

Amazon FBA

New sellers will want to consider using Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). Both Ryan and Casey use Amazon FBA. Ryan told us:

The top sellers on Amazon typically use this strategy because it improves their shipping costs, customer service, and click-through rate. 

Most products will work well with Amazon FBA, but larger products can get more costly quickly because of the storage costs and shipping fees. We discuss this strategy in our FBA blog.

Amazon Merch

Amazon Merch is Amazon’s print-on-demand service. New sellers that just want to sell shirts, hoodies, tote bags, phone cases, pop sockets, and throw pillows will want to apply for this business model. Amazon approves designs and starts selling them on the website. You’ll get between 80 cents and $3.00 royalty for each of your products Amazon sells. Products qualify for Amazon Prime too.

Print-on-Demand

Most print-on-demand companies don’t qualify for Prime membership like Amazon Merch. It normally takes two weeks for the customer to receive the product. 

The benefit of working with Print-on-Demand companies is that other companies like Printful have more of the most profitable product categories. They can also be connected to other e-commerce sites. These are best for products that Amazon merch does not offer.

Digital Products

In case you’ve forgotten, Amazon started as a bookseller. Needless to say, one of the best products to sell on Amazon is books. You can sell books as ebooks and paperbacks. This service is called Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing or (Amazon KDP).

Fulfillment by Manufacturer

If you use other e-commerce sites and do your own manufacturing, your own private label business might want to fulfill orders. The problem with this is you have to have more monthly sales volumes to pay for the location and all the shipping.

This strategy is normally used by higher volume sellers who have developed a reputation and can benefit from higher sales margins when people visit their own website.

Where to Get Products to Sell on Amazon

You can get products to sell on Amazon from the following locations:

• Dropshipping Companies
• Wholesalers
• Private Label Sellers

Let’s look at each way to buy the most sold items on Amazon.

Dropshipping

Buying from dropshippers can be a good way to get Amazon top-selling items. When you work with a dropshipper, you are mostly focused on the keywords and marketing for the top Amazon products. The dropshipping company will ship the products once you pay for the things you sell on Amazon.

Wholesale

Wholesaling is buying items from a manufacturer or distributor in bulk then marking up prices on those the best selling Amazon products. This method normally helps you get the best items on Amazon at a lower price per item, but your overall startup costs will be higher. Check out our blog about how to get your products in stores to learn more about wholesalers.

Private Label

A private label requires designing your own products with the help of a manufacturer. You can talk to manufacturers on Alibaba or AliExpress to find suppliers that can help you create things to sell on Amazon. There are also locations in the U.S., but they are normally best for product development and small order sizes. Learn about manufacturing before you engage with a manufacturer.

Make Your Own Brand The Best Amazon Products

At this point, you know:

It’s important to remember that whether you’re selling locally or in international markets, the best selling products on Amazon are normally Amazon Prime eligible. When you ask yourself:

“What should I sell on Amazon?”

Don’t forget to consider whether it would also be one of the best products to sell on Amazon FBA. 

Here’s another thing to keep in mind: all the business owners we have talked to told us that customer feedback is critical, so make sure you understand how to get customer feedback without breaking the rules.

What Amazon most popular items are you thinking about selling?

Resources

Wonder where we got the statistics in the first paragraph? You can find them (and a lot of other great info) here:

• 74 Amazon Statistics
• The World’s Tech Giants, Compared to the Size of Economies