Episode #42: Greg Mercer of Jungle Scout Interview (Product Research - PART ONE)

(Note: all links to Jungle Scouts are affiliate links).

How did you come to be selling on Amazon? & Why Private Label?

Greg started with a day job as a civil engineer. About 3 years ago, he started buying items wholesale and sold them on Amazon. As that got more competitive, he switched to Private Label products.

What is difference between Private Label vs. Wholesale model? 

Wholesale: buy welk known brands from wholesaler, then sell on existing listings and rotate through the buy box, which is normally about the lowest price. 3 years ago that was okay, but it became very competitive.

With PL, you own the listing;  since it is your product, you can justify work getting reviews, nice photos etc. Greg never did the Retail Arbitrage (RA) model because it is not scalable. Greg was looking for a system, not exchanging hours for dollars

Why develop Jungle Scout?

The biggest bottle neck in Greg’s business was finding more products. At one point he had a team of 8 VAs in the Philippines who would look at ideas, fill out a spreadsheet. This is when he created the Jungle Scout Chrome extension is the same as the VAs - instead of 30 minutes, it takes 2 seconds.

Greg was trying to scale fast, so with a list of 200 keywords, one person (VA) could only get through 20 a day.

What is Jungle Scout and how do you use it?

Two tools: Chrome extension and Web App. (Chrome is a free browser you can download)

Extension integrates into browser - look on Amazon, click on JS button - pop gives you the relevant data to make decisions on products or sales. Data like price, how much you nett after fees.

Web App: Web based software that runs on the Jungle Scout website. It has several features - the most popular is the product Dat abase. It’s a rebuild of Amazon’s catalogue  for Sellers, rather than buyers (which is what Amazon.com is designed for), with filters  with your criteria -for example:

Sales: over 300 a month; and under 50 reviews; priced over $20, under 1 lb weight” .

What are your criteria for product selection?

This is for the USA store but a variation would work in UK etc. For example for keyword "Glass cups"-

Demand: 3000 units a month of demand [on page 1 of search results]. If doing manually, add up all the sales of “glass cups” (eliminate irrelevant results).

 That is a good number if you are aiming to sell 10 a day yourself (300 a month) - which is 10% of the total market. That’s easy to find but we want lower competition. 

Competition: 1 or 2 sellers in top 5 listings with under 50 reviews.  And in top 10 sellers, 3 or 4 listings with under 50 reviews.  This tells you it’s not too mature a niche. IF competition has hundreds of reviews, you’ll find it hard to compete.

Big picture: it’s a small %age of all listings on Amazon - but there are 100s of Millions of products on Amazon so that’s a lot of items!

Price: $20 or more. The smaller the simpler the better- easier for storage etc.

These are just rules of thumb - it can be good if it’s a bit less demand but a bit Less competition.

Every time I found a product I liked using the Product tracker, it looked hyper competitive.  How can I use the Chrome extension to find lower competition products?

The best tool is actually not the Extension, it’s best to use the Product Database on the Web App.

You can put in your criteria for products with under 50 reviews and min 3000 units sold a month.

You can do this with the Chrome Extension. Once you HAVE an idea, the Extension is the best tool to have.