5 Amazon FBA Product Ideas for 4th of July and Grilling

This Wednesday all Americans get out their favorite red, white, and blue socks, fire up the grills, and look up to the skies for fireworks. That’s right! It’s American Independence Day aka the 4th of July. Doing a quick glance around the ol ‘net, I saw that there was lots of cool products for sale to celebrate my Nation’s birth. And just like any good Amazon seller, I said to myself, “Hey! These would make some great Amazon FBA product ideas!”

So I went over to Uncommon Goods and brought up a list of grilling gifts. You can check out their list here: Find Unique Grilling Gifts | Uncommon Goods.

Hey Dave, aren’t these seasonal products?

Somewhat! But the cool thing about people who love to grill–especially Americans!–is that they think about it year round. So not only is this stuff great during the summer and the 4th of July, but it also makes great presents for birthdays and holidays through out the year. In fact, check out this Keepa graph for the last 365 days for this $35.99 grill set I found on Amazon:

As you can see, the best-seller ranking for this product stays well above 2,000 for most of the year. The only time it dipped was in late December and late July of 2017. Probably because they ran out of stock!

And what does a 2,000 BSR in Home/Kitchen mean in terms of product sales? According to Jungle Scout’s Free Estimator tool, that’s 2,280 units per month! 

Seasonsal schmeasonal!

 

5 Amazon FBA Product Ideas for the 4th of July and Grilling

Remember: While I do my best to arm you with the data you need to make good product decisions, there’s always the potential that the product may not work out. This material is meant for educational and entertainment purposes. Always do your own research.

1 – BBQ Toolbox (Opportunity 6)

Amazon FBA Product Ideas

What I learned with the Jungle Scout Chrome Extension Pro:

  • 142 average units in sales per month. As long as I can order as low as 300-500 units, should be fine to sell.
  • 31 average reviews for non-outliers. So it doesn’t take a lot to combat the preexisting sellers.
  • $33.77 average price. Not bad! If we can buy right, there might be some profit here.
  • Not a whole lot of AMZ sold products here. That’s a good sign, too.
  • Only one product had the dreaded “<5 sales.” So that means everyone’s selling at least a few per month.
  • One red flag: FBA fees are showing $9.47. That means it’s probably costly to ship.

Okay, so we’ve got a box here with decent sales, a decent price, and pretty low reviews. That all seems good, right?

My big fear, though, is that this sucker is going to be expensive to ship. A big thing about shipping stuff from overseas is that it’s more about the volume than the price. And these boxes are pretty large. The one pictured has dimensions of 18″ on one side. The standard palette can only hold 1 cubic meter. I’m guessing that you can probably only get about 34 of these onto a palette comfortably. I live in the landlocked state of Oklahoma where a palette DDU runs me roughly $1200. So that means my product’s cost is going to be $35.22 right from jump street, unless I order an entire shipping container of these.

With an average price of $33.77, there’s just no way that I can profit selling this product.

Verdict: Too costly to ship. Avoid!

 

2 – Kabob Grilling Baskets Set of 4 (Opportunity 7)

What I learned with the Jungle Scout Chrome Extension Pro:

  • 300 average units in sales per month. Heck yeah!
  • 53 average reviews for non-outliers. Probably a little competitive, but we might be able to hang.
  • $19.90 average price. Awesome. Right where we want to be.
  • Only a few of these products are sold by AMZ. So not too shabby.
  • Only one product had the dreaded “<5 sales.” So that means everyone’s selling at least a few per month.
  • FBA fulfillment fees are around $6.50. Again, we have an issue with a large item here.

Notice how I had to remove a few items from the list. There were grills, charcoal pans, and other random stuff in the search. Probably a sign that this is a relatively new product idea, or one that doesn’t get done often. That could be good or bad.

Checking in on Alibaba, these things are cheaaaap. I found one set that’s $1.00 – $2.00 for 1,000 units. Trouble again, though, is the volume of these items. With 300 units in sales per month, we’re going to need a lot to start. I’m guessing we can probably get 1,000 units onto 2 pallets. That’ll put our cost at about $4,000, or $4 per unit.

Let’s break it down. If we sell these for $24.95 (~30% more than the average price is what I like to shoot for) and our Amazon referral fees and FBA fees are $8.00 and our costs are $3.90, that leaves us with $12 to split between ads and profit.

I plugged in the top seller into Keyword Scout and came back with some decent results for keywords in terms of search volume. Only trouble is that most of these keywords were coming up more than $1.00 for exact matches. Could get pricey with ads. And since we don’t have a lot of margin to work with to begin with, it’s tough.

Verdict: high ad costs and shipping costs make this product hard to sell competitively.

 

3 – Golfer BBQ Set (Opportunity 5)

What I learned with the Jungle Scout Chrome Extension Pro:

  • Pretty low sales. You’d have to do some killer negotiating to find a vendor who would be willing to sell such a low minimum order quantity.
  • 11 average reviews for non-outliers. Not a lot of other sellers in the space, so that’s good!
  • $29.57 average price. Terrific higher price.
  • Only a few of these products are sold by AMZ. Don’t have to worry about Big Poppa Orange competing with us.
  • Lots of <5 sellers. Yuh oh… that’s a bad sign.
  • FBA fulfillment fees are around $7.12. Don’t let the image fool you. This is a large product!

There’s a reason this is a 5 on the opportunity score. Frankly, it should probably be less. To make matters worse, they aren’t cheap on Alibaba either.

Verdict: Low sales, high price, way too many red flags.

 

4 – Bristle Free Grill Brush (Opportunity 8)

What I learned with the Jungle Scout Chrome Extension Pro:

  • 276 average sales. Perfect!
  • 30 average reviews for non-outliers. Also great! Plus, the outliers only had a little bit over 100 and it was still a 7 opp.
  • $19.53 average price. Great middle-of-the-road price.
  • Only a few of these products are sold by AMZ. Don’t have to worry about Big Poppa Orange competing with us.
  • Nearly all sellers doing 200+ units. Great, great sign!
  • FBA fulfillment fees are around $2.99. Small and lightweight!

Finally, a good product opportunity! The research metrics are where we want. Plus, it looks like they’re going for $2 – $4 on Alibaba. Not as cheap as I want it, but still not bad. However, I’m confident we can probably either air drop them or load them all onto one pallet for only another $1.00 per unit. So our costs will probably fall somewhere around $4 per unit.

I’d price it around $24.95 (and make sure to put it in a nice box, too), which means Amazon will take about $6.75 in their fees. Subtracting cost of goods, that leaves us with $14.20 to work with for ads.

My only trepidation is that ads might end up being costly. Keyword Scout‘s showing ad costs for $1-$2 for most of the key phrases. Still, the term “grill brush” comes up with 1,593 different keywords for us to use. Using the 2.5 Rule, there’s 60+ exact match keywords that cost less than $0.62 and over 250 for broad match. I think we could get ACoS under 25%. That leaves us with about $8 per unit in profit, for $2,208 per month.

Verdict: This product has the potential to earn $2,208 per month in profit on an initial product investment of roughly $4,000. Definitely worth considering!

 

5 – Fruit Keg Tapping Kit (Opportunity 6)

What I learned with the Jungle Scout Chrome Extension Pro:

  • 104 average sales. Not the best.
  • Removing only one product turned this from an opportunity 7 product to an opportunity 6. This is a big mistake that a lot of new sellers make. They see a high opportunity score, but don’t take a moment to remove outliers. All it took was removing a single entry and bam! Average sales dropped immediately.
  • 8 average reviews for non-outliers. Well, that’s not too bad at all!
  • $29.92 average price. I love that average price.
  • Only a few of these products are sold by AMZ. Don’t have to worry about Big Poppa Orange competing with us.
  • A lot of <5 sellers. This category seems to be owned by only a handful of sellers. Beware!
  • FBA fulfillment fees are around $2.99. Small and lightweight! So that’s a plus.

This is a tricky product. It’s got a lot of good things going for it such as its low competition and that it’s lightweight. What worries me, though, is that this one has a little more seasonal edge than the other products I wrote about. Plus, it has only a few sellers doing the majority of the sales.

Checking on Alibaba, we can buy these for around $3 each. Plus MOQs are pretty low, so you can get into 500 units of this product for probably less than $2,000.

Breaking it down, at $24.95, fees will run us about $6.75. That leaves us with $14.20. So that leaves ads and profit. Unfortunately, checking Keyword Scout, there’s just not a whole lot of great keywords for this product. That tells me that demand is very low, and that the sellers who are making sales on Amazon aren’t doing it with Amazon traffic, but probably bringing their own in.

Verdict: avoid this product. It’s fool’s gold.

 

See you next time with more Amazon FBA product ideas!

Hope you enjoyed this list of product ideas.  I know last time I said I was going to do some Williams Sonoma Mexican Dining options, but I guess I forgot the 4th was coming up! Whoops! So I’ll try to get to that one next week.

If you have any questions about these products or my sourcing style, please drop a message in the comments below. Or, you can email me at [email protected]

And if you need more product ideas, be sure to grab our list of 10,000 bestselling products on Amazon.

See you soon!

 

NEXT: Mexican Cuisine Products

18 comments on “5 Amazon FBA Product Ideas for 4th of July and Grilling

  1. Could you explain how to use onpallet? Where are you getting the information to get your calculations for shipping?
    Thanks!

    1. Hey Janna,

      Mostly personal experience. Although, recently I’ve gotten some crazy cheap quotes from one of my vendors ($340 DDU for 600 items), so it might even be cheaper than I’ve been predicting.

      Also, keep in mind that I live in a land locked state. lol… selling from Oklahoma comes with its pains. We also don’t have a local FC. 😀

  2. Hi Dave,

    I had a question about what Janice asked you, basically when doing a CE search do you include the PPC results as well as results with 100 plus reviews?

    Thanks

    Marcus

    1. Hey Marcus,

      Yeah, great question! And yes, I do, as long as it’s relevant. Mostly, it lets me know what those with strong PPC strategies are doing in terms of sales. I’m especially interested, too, if they have low review counts. However, their metrics sometimes can “muddy the waters” as their not representative of the page’s organic traffic.

  3. Dave, love your analyses, but I’m kinda stumped on how you calculate your estimated shipping fees.

    First off, are your shipping costs high(er) because you’re shipping direct to your home in Oklahoma–not direct to AMZ?

    Secondly, when you see high fees why does that automatically mean costly shipping–is that a rule of thumb? High fees=costly shipping?

    Finally, how do you calculate how much product can fit on a pallet? And, is there a standard shipping cost for a pallet? And really finally, is everything shipped on a pallet when using sea freight? Thanks!

    1. Hey Barry!

      Great questions. These days, I mostly ship direct to Amazon. But in my experience a pallet of goods is usually about $1000-$1200 no matter where I’m sending it. Even if I send it to myself first, it’s usually about $90 to send the DFW FC.

      When I see high FBA fees which equate to picking/packing/shipping, that usually tells me that it’s a large product dimension-wise or it’s heavy. Typically, the kind of stuff I like to source are usually under 1lb, so FBA fees are $2.99 or less.

      There’s an awesome website called onpallet.com that calculates pallets for you based on dimensions. And yes, it all goes sea freight. Air express just does it by boxes.

      Great questions!

  4. I also review the Chrome Extension results and review outliers that skew too high in cost, or are clearly in the wrong category. The Extension rescores the results whenever you remove an item.

    BTW: Have you noticed a lot of products are in the wrong category, or at least seem to be? Is that a strategy, or just sloppiness?

  5. Hi Dave
    Thank you for your thorough explanation on these 5 products.

    Could you kindly point to where to find more information on “non-outliers”.

    I’ve been trying to search it on your blog, but is finding it difficult to locate this information.

    Thanks

    1. Hey Janice!

      Yeah, no problem! Basically, the non-outliers are those that have less than 100 reviews. So when I use the CE, any product that’s got over 100 reviews or isn’t relevant to the search I remove with the CE Pro. That way, I can get a better estimate of what to expect. Often, products with high review counts (or even those that aren’t the same was what I’m selling) can skew the results. For example, if I looked up “coffee cup” and a bunch of Keurig pods showed up on the search results, those pods would sully the search. Does that make sense?

      1. Hi Dave

        Are you saying that when I look up a product through Chrome Extension I should:
        1. Remove products with 100+ reviews, so only look at listings with less than 100 reviews
        2. Remove listings that aren’t relevant

        Is this how you remove the outliers?

        Thanks

        1. Sorry, I have one last question,

          Do you include the PPC result? Or do you remove all the PPC listings as well when looking at the result?

          1. Janice,

            No, I include those, too. Great question, though! I like the PPC results because they give me an idea of how well non-organic does, too. Especially if I’m finding low-cost PPC ads for that category. I will say, though, that I have removed those listings in the past.

        2. Janice,

          Yeah! That’s what I do and it seems to work in getting an accurate view of what’s up. I also get nervous if I remove too many listings. Like, if there’s 25 results in the SERP and I have to remove 15 just to get down, that’s probably a bad sign.

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