I'm not going to bury the lead as we head into another Q4 Amazon sales rush:
PopSockets made a lot of Amazon Merch sellers a lot of money last Christmas.
Unfortunately, I didn't take advantage of the massive opportunity to sell them, and missed out on quite a bit of cash.
That said, I've learned my lesson and am ramping up my PopSockets for Q4 2019.
With any product to be sold on Amazon, it's best to do a little niche research before diving in.
This tried & true sales principal will always hold true:
If you're selling products that no one wants to buy, you wont make any sales.
Fortunately, Amazon exposes a data point to us that lets us gauge how well a product is selling:
Best Seller Rank (BSR)
A products BSR tells us how well that product is selling relative to other products in the same category, and product research tools like AMZ Scout have evolved over time to be able to predict the # of sales that a product does each month as a result.
So we will leverage this information to try and identify high demand opportunities, in this case, in the PopSockets market!
Merch Informer PopSocket Research
Merch Informer's Product Search tool allows us to filter by Merch product type - in this case, we can set it to "PopSocket" & seed it with some key words.
If you haven't already, go ahead and set up a free trial & give the Merch Informer suite of tools a show - they're pretty awesome & have made a lot of Merch'ers a lot of money.
In the example below, I seeded it with some very high-level keywords: "Gag Gift".
Gag gift really just means an ironic design, intended to make the recipient laugh. Gift giving in Q4 is a HUGE driver of sales, so it definitely doesn't hurt to optimize your listing as a 'gift'.
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This generates us a bunch of ideas on the fly for PopSocket designs that could be marketed as gag gifts.
What I love about this approach to niche research is it shows you the "need to know" all in one screen:
- The design
- The sale price
- The BSR
Check it out:
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Any niche design with a BSR of under 1,000,000 for T-shirts is worth pursuing in my opinion, and for PopSockets I'd try to go after BSRs of 500,000 or less.
(remember that BSR is relative to each product's Amazon category)
You should also check out Merch Informer's Trend Tracker which allows you to filter the results based on the period of time that they've been in the BSR range that you specify.
In the example below, I used the following filters:
- Period: Three months (longer time range = bigger sample size = my preference)
- Average BSR: 100,000 - 200,000 (I feel like it's slightly less competitive if you avoid the 0-100,000 range)
- Category: PopSockets
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You can see that it returned 731 results, meaning 731 products had an average BSR in the range of 100K-200K over the past 3 months.
This is ideal for any Amazon Merch product, as it represents consistent sales over a long-ish period of time.
Keep in mind that you may see Copyright/Trademark protected search results - try to avoid recreating these.
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In this example, you can see that they are using a design from Disney's movie: The Little Mermaid (do your best to steer clear of these!).
Besides that, you should be good to go - use this list of consistent selling niches as inspiration for your PopSocket designs!
PopSocket Research Using Phone Cases
Not to re-state the obvious, but a good indicator of how well a product will sell is to evaluate how well the competition is selling.
In the previous section, we looked at how we can leverage Merch Informer (which leverages BSR data over time) to try and find high-volume niches for PopSockets.
But we can also do PopSocket research by looking at a non-PopSocket product... we can look at phone cases!
It's not at all uncommon for people (predominantly females) to make purchasing decisions for PopSockets based on the design of their phone case.
Given that the new iPhone 11 recently came out, I performed a keyword search on Amazon for "iPhone 11 case".
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Most of the best sellers are some variation of a solid matte color... but the themed designs are great to replicate as PopSocket designs!
You'll have to solve the problem of how to match the design... but one benefit of PopSockets is that their graphics are very small in dimensions (485px x 485px) & typically easy to design for.
The end goal is to piggy back on the success of popular phone cases (which sell in much higher volume than PopSockets at low-end BSRs) and ultimately show up in the "frequently bought together" seciton:
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PopSocket = phone accessory... so it makes perfect sense that someone who's excited that they just bought a new $1,100 iPhone is ready to drop another few hundred on add-ons!
PS. I'm an Android lover, that was meant to be a jab at iPhones being overpriced :)
