✔ ALIBABA 1688 | GET THE REAL PRICE YOU CAN SOURCE YOUR AMAZON PRIVATE LABEL PRODUCT FOR

by Tomer

April 24, 2020

Welcome This is Tomer from Sourcing-Monster again! Today we are going to talk about Product Research in-depth and how you can effectively source and know your item’s price.

Recap on Product Research Part 1 & 2

After Product Research Part 2, I realised that there are some things that are missing, or I didn’t really cover in-depth like how to get the target price.

When you see an item, how can you calculate the profit margin well enough so you can really know if it’s profitable or not?

 This is very important, It all comes to the margin.

Part 1, I covered what is product research, what is the mentality that you need and the basics of making a good product that will last for the long run. 

Part 2, I really covered how we do it, how I really find the product opportunities on Amazon by browsing through other competitors or other listings that are out there and trying to find an opportunity to get into the competition. So it’s always good to go into a market that has a bigger, bigger cap, bigger margins, bigger profits.

This part is so important, because if you get into a market and you don’t really like a product, then you don’t really leave enough profit margin that can really make the difference and be able to dominate the market when you’re launching your product.

So today let’s tackle more about profitability and target price in depth.

Profitability Calculator

To calculate profitability and target price, you have to make use of one of the Helium 10 features called Profitability Calculator.

This innovation from Helium 10 gives you the power to see how profitable a particular product would be at a glance if you sold it. This kind of tool would be very valuable if you are always wondering what your Amazon business total revenue is, or if you are making any net profit.

You will be able to check out details like the following:

  • Product dimensions and weight
  • FBA storage fees
  • Profit margin percentages
  • Shipping fees
  • Current item price
  • Product sizing
  • and more!

Once you know the price range of the product, based on the data provided by Xray Amazon Product Research, you may now enter that info to the designated field within the Profitability Calculator and it will let you see the profit margin you’ll get for a certain target price you try to enter. 

Ideally, we want a 28-30% profit margin.

More about Alibaba 1688

Alibaba 1688

How to determine the Target Price?

Apart from checking on Alibaba on how much the supplier offers a certain product when ordered in bulk, another method I practice is checking the www.1688.com website. It seems like the “Chinese Alibaba” where you can actually see the real and more competitive prices.

Why is it good? It’s good because it gives you leverage and better price understanding when you negotiate and talk with suppliers. Sellers sell to each other at times thus affecting the real wholesale price. Knowing the best price allows you to compare and negotiate with suppliers better in a way that you can stretch them to give you the best price.

The www.1688.com site

What I normally do is go to www.168.com and at the same time, I open another tab for English to Chinese language translation.  

This way I can translate the English name of the product to Chinese terms and writings and use it for searching items as this website only uses Chinese words for keyword searches. This will then show me a similar item and their best price.

Also, the prices here are in CNY so I would need to convert it to USD.

That’s how I get the real price of the product which helps me a lot in setting the target price

I will also share other ways that might work for you like finding items or product ideas on Pinterest,  Etsy, and Wish. You can surely find ideas there but not comparable to doing it on Amazon where you get a hold of the relevant data that is why it’s my favorite method. It gives more value to your time and promotes a speedy process.

Our Goal

I’m all about productivity speed. Our goal here is to really attack while the market is hot. We can add as many products in the market while the opportunity is still there, that’s how I approach things and see things.

How do we actually do it?

First, I’d like to go on Amazon.com and browse for products. For example, I am looking at a car window shade, from here I want to get to know the target price.

To determine the target price, we will let Helium 10 load up and show the Profitability Calculator option, I’ll click on it and a dialogue box will show up where I can actually put the price and it will bring up the projected profit margin with a certain target price.

Unit manufacturing cost – we set an amount that is not really high and not very low too. Just the right amount considering the unit price of the item, shipping, packaging, and the likes. We want to consider all that otherwise if we put a lower price than that then our all profit margin model will be wrong.

To have an idea about an item’s unit cost, we can search using the relevant keyword in Alibaba. The goal is to find the closest item to the one that we are checking so we can get the real price.

So, I would browse through all the listings matching the product that we are looking for and open tabs so I can see them better. In some cases you will not really get the exact match but, you can open and check the items that are kind of the same. It’s okay. And it really depends. There is no black and white.  

From there, you’ll see the price range and I will always go with the lower price but l also check the one with the highest price.

Example #1

The car window shade product is really cool because it becomes smaller when it’s folded. Let’s say it’s for $1 apiece, and their MOQ is 1000 ( Minimum Order Quantity) we might not meet their MOQ since we only want 500 units. So they will not really accept 500 unless we give them a better price, so instead of getting it lower, they will quote $1 per piece.

Let’s assume that the price will be $1.5 per piece and we’re going to sell it for $4, that is a good value. Or we can maybe settle at  $5 or $5.5 with the shipping cost.

Using the Profitability calculator, let’s put $5 on the Unit Manufacturing Cost and this amount would then give us a margin of 15%. We can play with the number and try to set the UMP at $3 or $4 so the profit margin will change and go up as well.

The minimum requirement is at least a 30% profit margin. 

It took me two months just to find my first product. In order to be a hundred percent on your first product, you want to eliminate and make sure that the checklists that you have are the best or it’s the best product that meets your checklist. 

And if that part is not skipped to the next one, feel confident so you’re not making a mistake and wasting valuable money

Example #2

Let’s talk about some other product as an example – Balloon Pumps.

When I search for Balloon pumps most of the results will show electric operated items but we don’t want them due to complexity and many other factors. Using Jungle Scout, we can see the product’s number and data and start from there to see if there is an opportunity.

For this item, I can see that the pictures are okay, It looks like a good opportunity. This is good or this is a way to do the main product, they are showing the actual product, they are showing the packaging in a nice way. Based on the other items, this is a good product because they’re bundled and they give other things like tape and some other stuff.

As far as the main Image Opportunity, I would say it’s 60-70% good. That’s because the image listings show similar looking photos and none of them really stand out. That gives you a chance to do a better image and stand out among the rest.

Next, we would do a Keyword test and to do that we’d have to use Helium 10. Upon checking, it basically looks like it has good margins and enough review ratings and activity and sales. This means there is a room for us and if we come up with a premium product to the market, we improve the known item issues then we can stand out and bring long term value.

Other essential points to consider

Birthday Items – there is really no season for birthdays or for balloons. It’s not seasonal so we can also consider this opportunity.

Christmas related items –  You don’t need Christmas ornaments all year round as it’s very seasonal. So it’s common sense that you don’t focus on seasonal items.

There is another tool to help you determine whether a product is seasonal or not. This is within Helium 10 that would show right below the item’s image on Amazon.

Patent –  This is also one major thing that you have to check otherwise you will be wasting a lot of time focusing on an item that in the end would turn up as patented.

Conclusion

In general, try to find products that catch your eye and a product that you know about.

Go ahead and try to go to Amazon to search and browse and apply the criteria and pointers that I mentioned above

GET THE REAL PRICE YOU CAN SOURCE YOUR AMAZON PRIVATE LABEL PRODUCT FOR So that would be all for this blog. Again, I would like you to subscribe to like and share this video and help me grow this channel. This will help me and allow me to create more content and basically share my knowledge and my success with you. And thank you I appreciate it. You have a great day and start doing product research. Good luck!

About the author

My name is Tomer, and I founded Sourcing Monster to share proven tips and methods that I use every day for my Amazon business to provide value and growth for you as well as you journey through your own business!

Feel free to comment or share any feedback down below!

{"email":"Email address invalid","url":"Website address invalid","required":"Required field missing"}

Stay Updated with the latest Amazon FBA News

It's time for you to get the latest Amazon FBA Updates, News and tips so you can scale and grow your Private Label business.

>