Finding the Best-Selling Products on Amazon: Your First Step to Seller Success

Finding demand for a product is one of the first elements to success for any business. In the past, entrepreneurs would create companies on a hunch or simply from a product idea. Later, businesses learned to do extensive market research including surveys and focus groups before launching. Today, you can just go look up the figures on Amazon to see if a product sells.

What is Best Sellers Rank (BSR)?

BSR (Best Sellers Rank) is an integrated feature of the Amazon platform. It is calculated and made available for every single product on the platform. It is different for each Amazon platform, so beware if you compare the BSR on the U.S. Amazon platform with the BSR of the U.K. platform, even though it will hold the same products in many cases.

About halfway down a product detail page on Amazon, you will find the bestsellers rank for the product and the categories for which it is ranking. Image source: Author

Finding your product idea for e-commerce

When you enter the high-paced and dynamic world of online selling, finding the right products is a key step in the process of setting up your business. It has an impact on the way you set up as an Amazon seller. Your product sourcing is also important for your choice of fulfillment, deciding whether to use FBA or FBM.

You can use your own delivery solution, which Amazon calls FBM, "Fulfillment by Merchant," or you can take advantage of Amazon FBA, "Fulfillment by Amazon," where you plug into the same excellent platform it uses for servicing clients with its own products.

How do you see what products are best sellers on Amazon?

For each Amazon marketplace, you will find a publicly available list of popular items right now. The list is updated every hour. Knowing that the Amazon best selling item as I write this paragraph is the Original Reversible Octopus Plushie may not help you define a successful business. It can be useful, however, to look at the categories the top sellers appear in.

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How to find the top-selling products on Amazon right now in various markets:

Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/bestsellers

Amazon Brazil: https://www.amazon.com.br/bestsellers

Amazon Japan: https://www.amazon.co.jp/bestsellers

Amazon Netherlands: https://www.amazon.nl/bestsellers

Amazon France: https://www.amazon.fr/bestsellers

What are the best selling product categories on Amazon?

Each of the best seller pages referenced above is first organized by product and then by category. At any given moment, this will point you to the most popular categories. The Amazon tools provider Jungle Scout analyzed this data more in detail in a report and found that the following 10 categories were the most important.

The top 10 high-demand product categories on Amazon:

• Home & Kitchen
• Sports & Outdoors
• Toys & Games
• Health, Household & Baby Care
• Beauty & Personal Care
• Kitchen & Dining
• Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry
• Baby Products
• Garden & Outdoor
• Tools & Home Improvement

For a more fun walk-through of brilliant products, check out this article on Bustle showcasing these consistent best sellers and many more:

• A natural botanical extract foot peel
• Brushed microfiber sheets
• A broom and mop holder
• Supportive gel pillows
• A two-in-one convertible stick vacuum cleaner
• A vegan sun-protection lip balm

But how can you use this information for defining an Amazon Seller strategy? Other sellers' success in no way guarantees yours. At the moment I write this, the octopus has gone out of stock and isn't a top seller anymore. The first category that appears on the Amazon bestseller list is gift cards. This information is not useful for your research, neither are categories such as video games and books, which we skip in the list below.

A great way to analyze product performance and find opportunities is to use a tool such as Jungle Scout mentioned above, or Helium10's Black Box product research tool. But there is also a lot to learn directly from the best seller listing. Let's explore some product categories below.

1. Electronics

Electronics is one of the top categories on the bestseller list at the time of writing. The three top-selling products in the electronics category are all Amazon products at this point in time: a Fire TV stick, an Echo Show, and an Amazon Smart Plug. By clicking on the category link just below the category name, you can go to the full list of top products in that category.

The electronics bestseller list is dominated by Amazon products and other branded products. A new seller can’t easily break into that market due to required validations by the brand. But in position 23 we find a USB hub, the Sabrent 4-Port USB 2.0 Hub, which is an interesting product type.

The bestseller list on Amazon is organized by product and by category. In the category list, you can find the top three and click on them to see the full bestseller list for the category. Image source: Author

Clicking through to the product detail page of that product, you can see the categories it is ranking in. By searching for the "best sellers rank" inside the page, you can easily jump directly to the section detailing the categories in which this product appears as a top seller:

• #2 in Computers & Accessories
• #1 in Computer Networking Hubs

Computer networking hubs looks like a category in high demand. You can further explore the category to estimate its number of sellers and its competitiveness.

2. Camera & Photo

The best seller in the Camera & Photo category at this time is Wyze Cam, a smart home camera with night vision. Clicking on the product takes you to the product detail page where you can look for a narrower category. Scroll down to the best seller rank of the product.

Products from the camera and photo category are high on Amazon's bestsellers list. Image source: Author

In the best sellers rank section of the Wyze Cam, you will find that this product is no. 1 in Camera and Photo, no. 1 in Bullet Surveillance Cameras, and no. 2 in Amazon Launchpad Electronics. There are links on the categories so you can go straight to the category you want to investigate further.

Via this research approach, you can further research for an interesting product category or stick to surveillance cameras as a category with high demand currently.

3. Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry

The third best seller category on the Amazon top list appearing at this point in time is Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry. In this category, it will be important to steer clear of branded products, as any products you list for a branded product requires validation from the brand owner.

In the clothing category, finding interesting products to sell involves looking for unbranded products. Image source: Author

The first product on the bestseller list provides an interesting product type: yoga pants. When you go to the product detail page, you find the following bestseller rankings:

• #1 in Women's Shops
• #1 in Running Clothing
• #1 in Women's Athletic Leggings

Yoga pants appear in several categories but don't seem to have a category of their own. Examining the number of sellers and competitiveness will require more research, but this can represent an opportunity to find subcategories with less competition where your own product is more likely to surface.

The sweet spot is high-demand categories with low competition

It is almost too easy to find high-demand products to sell. But as it is easy for you, it will also be easy for other sellers. For this reason, you should try to find products that have strong demand but where the competitive pressure isn't too high.

Finding lower-competition products means looking for subcategories and researching the products that appear in a search for the category name. By checking the BSR for each of the products, you will be able to examine the competitive space. Determining whether you would be able to appear on that search results page can guide your choice of products.