Helium 10 Black Box Review

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Amazon product research was, for me, the longest step in the process of launching my first Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) private label product.

It didn't need to be, and it definitely doesn't have to be for you.

My problem was that I was so focused on finding a true "unicorn" product, solely based on my product research.

As a result, my FBA business almost never got off the ground!

This is often referred to as "paralysis by over analysis" and poses a major threat to many people's ambitions & dreams.

It's so easy to get caught up over analyzing every detail about your business to the extent that it threatens your ability to actually get started!

I spent over 2 months in the product research phase - FAR too long - as the result of a few things:

• My FBA coach gave me the formula to calculate profitability of products, but left out how to estimate shipping costs
• My expectations were too high, I expected to find product(s) doing massive revenue with few sellers & no reviews

Ultimately I learned that it's best to be agile when it comes to launching products & risk takers are often rewarded.

I recently wrote a post about filing taxes for your FBA business - remember if you launch a product & break even, you wont be taxed... and if you somehow lose money on it, you can write that off against your other income!

If can afford to start an FBA business, you absolute should - and the sooner you start the better because fortune favors those that take action.

And remember - I'm here to help you along the way! Seriously!

Helium 10 vs Jungle Scout

Before we get into using Helium 10 for Amazon product research, I wanted to mention that I've already written a review of Jungle Scout, their biggest competitor.

In 2018, Greg Mercer (founder of JungleScout) ran an experiment to test how accurate Amazon research tools for finding profitable FBA products actually were. I found out about this on an episode of Seller Sessions (one of my favorite FBA podcasts).

Here are the results of their study:

* click to expand

You can read the full article here.

I felt like I had to share this up front. JungleScout is more expensive for a reason - it's the most accurate tool on the market.

I just ran a test between Helium 10 & Jungle Scout on a product I am selling myself. Helium 10 overestimated the revenue to be $4,291.41, whereas Jungle Scout came in much closer at $3,887. It's not a massive difference, but it's worth noting.

Does that mean we can't trust their counterpart Helium 10? Of course not!

Pricing is important to pretty much all Amazon sellers, & there's a pretty large discrepancy between Helium 10 & Jungle Scout.

Helium 10 gives you 20 free uses of Black Box just for signing up!

Afterwards, Black Box is $37/mo on their a la carte plan.

Jungle Scout also allows you to take a test drive of their product research database as well, & after the free trial it's $39/mo ($25/mo on the annual plan) for their "Start-Up" (cheapest) plan.

The takeaway: Jungle Scout's Product Database is a more accurate & only $2 more per month (or $12 cheaper if you pay annually).

Helium 10 Black Box Filters

I'm always looking for new products to sell on Amazon.

I don't know when I will feel like I've accomplished "enough" with my conquest of Amazon. Most likely that day will never come, so I'm going to keep pushing, launching new SKUs for the foreseeable future.

p.s. You should too!

Take advantage of the fact you can use filters when searching for products.

Categories

Searching by category is primarily used to exclude certain categories (more so than to include).

You basically want to avoid competing with people selling print on demand products at all cost... and avoid competing with categories that are dominated by expensive/high-end products and/or wholesale products (assuming you're looking to launch your own branded private label products, which is what I recommend).

As such, the categories you choose to query on are flexible, but I would recommend avoiding:

• Books
• Camera & Photo
• Cell Phones & Accessories
• Clothing, Shoe, Jewelry
• Musical Instruments

I am searching the following product categories:

• Arts, Crafts, & Sewing
• Automotive
• Home & Kitchen
• Industrial & Scientific
• Kitchen & Dining
• Office Products
• Patio, Lawn, & Garden
• Pet Supplies
• Sports & Outdoors

Monthly Revenue

How much money do you want to make off the product?

If the typical profit margin is 25-30% and you want to make $2,000 profit from the product, then you'll want to filter for products making at least $6,000 in monthly revenue.

Keep in mind that different products within the same niche will do different revenue numbers based on their organic rank position in the search results.

That's why it's probably best to ignore the maximum monthly revenue filter for the most part, or set it to a high number.

Price

When it comes to product price, I've sold in the range of $4.99 all the way up to $150. If I had to guess, the average product cost is probably between $20-$25.

Higher price points typically means more money is required to bank roll inventory costs, but if you can float it you should take advantage of this barrier to entry.

I'm going to use $19 - $51.

Review Count

Reviews are an indicator of how many sales a product has gotten.

The longer a product has been available for sale on Amazon, the more reviews it's likely to have, and the harder time you and I are likely to have overtaking it in organic search results.

Fortunately, we can query on the min/max # of reviews that a product has, as a way of helping us avoid direct competition with long-standing incumbents on valuable keywords that we would likely struggle to overtake.

I like to use 150 reviews as a maximum.

* Note: Further product research is required than just using the Black Box. We'll still want to head over to Amazon.com and check out each potential niche for ourselves.

Review Rating

I didn't understand what this was at first, so I had to run a few tests.

This appears to let us query on the average star review count. I'm going to use "5" because I don't think this parameter is all that helpful.

The actually number of product reviews is a better indicator to me, as products can be selling well but we relatively new on Amazon and have high variance with their average review.

More sales = more reviews = less variance.

Shipping Size Tier

Take it from me, you don't want to sell oversize items if you can avoid it.

Sometimes I look at deterrents like this as an opportunity to find an edge to use to my advantage.

Selling oversize products is NOT one of those times! I learned the hard way. Oversize products means two things:

• You pay more in storage fees
• You pay crazy high reshipping fees on returns

It's best to avoid this headache, unless you're EXTREMELY confident that you can keep the return rate of your oversize product(s) low.

I'm going to filter on Small Standard-Size & Large Standard-Size.

My Black Box Filters

Here's what I used:

* click to expand

This is a great start to our product hunt, and I'm very pleased with the filters that Helium 10's Black Box has made available (albeit, they are pretty standard).

How To Use Helium 10 Black Box

Now that we've got our filters entered, lets sift through some of the results together.

As I recommended in my blog post on Amazon FBA product research, we need to keep an eye out for things we want to avoid just as much as we want to keep an eye out for the desirable traits.

I go much more in depth in my aforementioned article, but at a high level we want to avoid:

• Fragile items
• Print on demand items
• Oversize items
• Items made from chemicals
• Items that include batteries
• Patented or products (or products that might infringe on Trademarks)

Conversely, the ideal FBA product has a subset of desiretable traits (it's OK not to check every box... the more, the better)

• Consistently low BSR (not seasonal)
• Low/medium competition
• High demand
• Profit margin of at least 30%
• Not fragile (can it withstand a 5 foot drop without breaking in standard packaging?)
• Not infringing on someone's legal protections
• Not oversize
• Within your budget (this is one of my best Amazon FBA insights - I strongly recommend reading it)

Lets analyze some of these products and fine a candidate for the next step - the validation phase.

My First Search

Lets walk through my first search results:

Wall Art

* click to expand

Wall art is too similar to print on demand, and art is too subjective in general to be worth investing in as an FBA product.

Bed Skirt

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Bed skirts are too easily reproduced by your competition & too similar to wholesale items like bedsheets.

Tea Pot

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Tea pots are way too fragile.

My Second Search

Helium 10 only gives you 10 search results if you're in the free tier, so you may need to re-search and change your filters.

I recommend playing around with categories when you perform new searches - I updated my query to only include:

• Arts, Crafts, & Sewing
• Automotive
• Industrial & Scientific

I was immediately pleased with the results:

Synthetic Cable Rope

* click to expand

This product is light weight, has a great price point, does over $7,000 in monthly revenue and is a prime candidate for further research!

Sign up today & save on your Helium 10 account!