It’s Here! The Million Dollar Case Study Commences…

Greg Mercer

February 10, 2017

Product Research, The Million Dollar Case Study

39 Comments

This article contains expert-led insights from a previous season of the Million Dollar Case Study.

MDCS is a free, comprehensive video series by Jungle Scout in which veteran Amazon sellers show budding entrepreneurs how to succeed on Amazon—by actually doing it. The series takes viewers step by step through the process of launching a real product on Amazon in real time—from product research to finding a supplier to advertising.

Check out our most current season here for the latest information on selling on Amazon.

I am inspired every day by you, the community of Amazon sellers: entrepreneurial, supportive, ambitious and energetic. Your passion for building big and meaningful businesses is contagious, and I thrive on it every day. Seriously.

“If your dreams don’t scare you, they aren’t big enough.”

Years ago when I started selling on Amazon, I didn’t have the slightest clue that my life would be so impacted by Amazon sellers. I am so lucky to have met such incredible people.

OK, so I didn’t want to sound like I’m giving an Oscars speech, but I want to give back to the community that has given me so much. I think that there are a few ways that I can do so: time, money, and coaching.

A New Case Study

I want to bring you in on my latest project, which I am ambitiously calling, “The Million Dollar Case Study”.

In short, I am going to sell one million dollar’s in physical products via ecommerce. The best part is, I will document every step of the way.

In the end, we will donate all proceeds to a charity. It is going to be an amazing journey, and I want you to come along for the ride!

Some of you may have followed along on our case study in 2016, the Jungle Stix Collaborative Launch. This was super fun and a great success. The million dollar case study is going to take this several steps further. Here’s a fun team photo op with our giant check for $33,221 at a recent team offsite in Mexico:

How We Will Get There

With the collaborative launch last year, we launched Jungle Stix—the bamboo marshmallow sticks that sold nearly $200k in the first year.

Here’s a snapshot of our sales (on a monthly basis) from January 1st, 2016 through February 1st 2017. $203k in that time frame. I’ll take that!

That was a big success, and ultimately we raised more than $51k that we’ve donated to Doctors Without Borders! Heck yeah, that was a win for all of us! (And a nice added bonus of coverage in Forbes, INC, and more).

So how is this Million Dollar Case Study going to work?

The process is going to be very similar to what we did with Jungle Stix:

Generate Product Ideas
Analyze & Choose a Product
Find a Supplier
Import the product
Sell on Amazon

Of course that is a very simplified overview, but don’t worry, I am going to share every detail of the journey.

What I think is more interesting this time around is the Amazon environment. As an ever-changing space it is now more competitive, with more sophisticated sellers, and of course more customers as well!

There are a few wrinkles that we are going to be exploring this time around…

Generate Sales Outside of Amazon: With our big hairy audacious goal of a million dollars in sales, we are going to have to squeeze sales from new channels. Specifically, I want to start a standalone webstore and try to generate sales from the site. I will dive into this a lot more in the near future, but I think that we can use a shopping cart solution (think Shopify), to put up our product and create more sales. There’s even a nifty little Shopify/Amazon integration to make the process even easier. More on that later…
International Marketplaces: I think going forward, one of the gaping opportunities for sellers around the world will be leveraging Amazon’s expanding footprint in new countries. I have already spotted hundreds of opportunities in each of the new marketplaces that Jungle Scout now supports, including UK, Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, and many more. I want to try selling products in these markets, which will be an interesting learning experience for everyone. And it will (hopefully) accelerate our progress towards a million dollars!
Multiple Products: If you create a brand, like we did with Jungle Creations (the parent brand) and Jungle Stix (the product, ie marshmallow sticks), you can generate incremental sales just by virtue of Amazon’s recommendation algorithm. So I am thinking that if I create a brand of complementary products, we can sell more on Amazon, and have a robust website to get more sales. Win win!

This case study will help you

I am going to host webinars for every step of the process. Similar to the Jungle Stix case study, you will have “over-the-shoulder” access to follow me, so you can then use the same strategies and tactics that I have.

But this time around, I want this to be an immersive learning experience. That means I want you to follow along, and take action alongside me. So in theory, you would be launching your own products alongside me, in real time.

We’ll be using Jungle Scout for our product research. Sign Up now so you can follow along with us!

Not sure exactly how to sell on Amazon, or what you will need to do? No problem, that’s the point! I will be putting together materials for each stage. Think of it as fun homework.

And voila, within a few months you too will have a profitable product listed on Amazon.

Sign up

Sounds fun, right?! It will be, I guarantee it.

If you want to join the first (and possibly most important) session, you can register for the webinar HERE.

This is where I will be sharing my strategies for finding product ideas, and come up with a whole list of ideas. From there, we will find suppliers in early March, order our samples soon after, and hopefully place our order by April. My goal is to have a product on Amazon by May.

I am so excited to get this started. Join me, register for the webinar, maybe start brainstorming your own ideas of possible products that you can sell, and plan to see me on February 22nd to gather our initial list of ideas!