Without the aid of software tools, it would be incredibly hard to succeed as a solopreneur Amazon seller.
When you think about it, the most complex piece of software that we lean on to make it as an FBA seller is Seller Central itself. Given that it helps fuel the largest marketplace in history, it's probably safe to assume that it's the most powerful seller tool to ever exist.
But enough about Seller Central, all Amazon FBA sellers are required to use it. What sets us apart is what we use in addition to Seller Central, so let me use this opportunity to highlight some of my favorites.
Product Research Tools
The DS Amazon Quickview Chrome extension will show you product BSRs on the search results page, allowing you to easily scan products to see how well they're selling.
The BSR being visible on search results allows you to eyeball the competition relatively quickly as well.
As of February 2019, Keepa is a paid product. I now recommend using Helium 10 (FREE) & did a writeup about transitioning from Keepa to Helium 10.
Keep will show you a products BSR history on a line graph when you are on a produt listing screen.
Use this to your advantage - it's a great indicator of the seasonality of products. Don't get caught ordering more inventory than you need and overpaying storage fees.
The Jungle Scout web app is a paid resource where you can search for profitable products across specific categories & provide additional filters such as min/max price, BSR, sales, revenue, reviews, weight, + more!
I've personally used this to find multiple profitable products that I still sell to this day and would strongly vouch for them.
Profitability Tools
Run the FBA Calculator For Amazon chrome extension by clicking the icon in your web browser from a product listing screen.
Consider signing up for my FBA course where I share my product research workbook and show how we can use this data to project (very accurately) how much money we can project to make from a product on Amazon, without spending a dime.
Jungle Scout Chrome Extension (paid)
The Jungle Scout chrome extension is basically a jack of all trades tool that we can run on an Amazon search results screen or product listing screen to see BSRs, sales volume, projected revenue, and even projected profit.
The best new feature is the "Opportunity Score" where the tool weighs the competition (existing sellers) vs the demand to estimate the difficulty of breaking through in this category.
As far as paid Amazon product research tools go, I suggest taking a strong look at Jungle Scout. They're an all around great company that are really looking to help FBA sellers succeed.
Fetcher (Now re-branded as Jungle Scout Sales Analytics)
Fetcher is an accounting tool that will take into account your product + inbound shipping costs and determine your profitability for you.
Don't sleep on what an incredibly complex equation this is - things like Amazon fees, variable list price, PPC, storage fees, and returns will convolute this equation beyond belief.
Instead of spending days trying to figure out much money of your revenue is actually profit, pay $20/mo and receive daily emails informing you of your day over day / week over week / month over month profits.
If you input your product lead time (I use 70 days), Fetcher will also tell you when it's time to re-order a SKU (orange = it's almost time; red = order asap).
Fetcher is also what I rely on for my Amazon FBA numbers when I published my monthly income reports.
Automation Tools
Feedback Whiz is great for a number of reasons. I began using it to automate communications with my Amazon customers, such as the "you recently received your product, please leave honest feedback" request as well as the "negative feedback received" automated email follow up.
It also alerts me every time one of my tracked products receives a review, and matches reviewers with order IDs.
I use it to quickly & easily view product return rates, check inventory levels, and track whether or not I have the buy box (you can also enable buy box alerts that let you know if a hijacker jumps on your listing).
Since I began using Feedback Whiz, they've expanded it to rival fetcher in calculating profitability, as well as an advertising/PPC campaign manager (currently still in beta).
Managing multiple advertising campaigns for multiple products can become very tedious, and failure to watch them can be extremely costly.
Fortunately, Teikametrics is available to automate your keyword bids and prevent them from getting out of control. You can set a target ACoS, sit back, and watch it work its magic to get you there on a campaign to campaign basis.
You'll really only need have to take action once a week following their weekly email that recommends negating certain keywords, moving words from automatic campaigns to manual, and improving targeting on certain words by changing their ad groups.
They also make performing these actions incredibly easy within their website UI, which will then feed into your Amazon seller account via API.
The only drawback about Teikamatrics is the price. For me, I found certain scenarios where I let campaign spend get out of control and realized I could've paid for this software with how much I overspent, making the decision to give it a try an easy one (I'm on an annual contract).
Similar to why I first started using EfficientEra, JumpSend makes it easy to send automated emails to your Amazon customers.
They're also a product launch service, where you can offer your product at a steeply discounted rate to their customers in hopes of getting a quick sales spike and improving your product BSR, and in turn improving its position in search results.
Keyword Tools
The need for in-depth keyword research isn't the same in today as it once was. Following a statement from Amazon confirming that only the first 250 characters of your search terms would be indexed, sellers had to drastically cut back their lists of keywords that contained up to 5,000 characters to only the most revelant ones.
When you generate your backend keywords, include words that aren't on your listing title, bullets, or description. This is a great place to include common misspellings, synonyms, and even translations (Spanish words definitely help).
General Keyword Research Web Apps
- Scientific Seller App
- Sonar Keyword Tool
- Spellorg Common Misspellings
- Thesaurus Synonym Finder
- MerchantWords (paid)
Bundle Shopper is a Google Chrome extension that works from any Amazon (product / results) page and allows you to quickly find complementary products & create exclusive bundles, by algorithmically studying related product keywords. This is a great way to get your listing to stand out from the crowd.
AMZ Suggestion Expander is a Chrome extension expands the number of search suggestions that are shown in the Amazon search bar by showing the keywords that Amazon would suggest before and after the keywords you have entered.
