top selling items on amazon

20 of the Best Products to Sell on Amazon Right Now

20 of the Best Products to Sell on Amazon Right Now

One of the biggest business opportunities in recent years is to sell hot items on amazon.

Amazon has literally exploded in popularity since its inception in 1994. Over the last 26 years, it has gobbled up 49% of the US eCommerce market.

To put that into perspective, Amazon pulls in more than the top three competitors combined - with eBay at 6.6%, Apple at 3.9% and Walmart rounding out the top four with 3.7%.

Naturally, with that much attention, selling one of the most popular items on Amazon will seriously fatten up your wallet.

And we’re willing to bet that’s why you came here today.

Well, you won’t be disappointed. Because in this post we’re going to cover everything you need to know to find the next amazon bestseller.

We’ll start by looking at how to choose top-selling items on amazon, then we’ll look at 3 tactics that’ll help you dig out the next Amazon bestseller before running through 20 hand-picked items that’ll be big for 2020 (and beyond)

Ready? Let's get to it!

The Best Way To Find Top Selling Items On Amazon

Finding the best selling products on Amazon isn’t as easy as it used to be. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Far from it actually.

Here we’ll share the biggest mistake most new amazon sellers make and outline the criteria you’ll need to select a best selling product.

Don’t Make This Mistake...

Most new Amazon sellers go wrong by attempting to sell trending products for the sake of it.

Hold up.

Isn’t this an article about finding trending products?

Well, yes... but it’s important to understand the difference between Amazon bestsellers and top-selling products.

This is especially true if you’re coming from a dropshipping mentality where finding trending products and getting them to market as quickly as possible is a great tactic to make money quickly.

But selling on Amazon is a slightly different beast. New sellers will often look up the Amazon top 100 Best Sellers list, see a trending product and jump into private labelling their own version to capture their piece of the pie.

Yes, it’s true that this tactic worked well in amazon’s earlier days - a lot of people made a lot of money doing this.

But times have changed. Nowadays this approach ends as a race to the bottom on which new sellers can only compete on price.

Spoiler alert: that doesn't end well.

So instead, let’s discover what you should look for to unearth profitable top-selling products on Amazon.

The Essential Criteria For Top Selling Products On Amazon

Amazon has over 12 million products to choose from. Needless to say, discovering a top-selling product can be like finding a needle in a haystack. But to simplify the process here are some key criteria to keep in mind.

• It can fit in a shoebox. Large, bulky products are expensive to ship and will eat up a sizable chunk of your profit margin. Keep your eyes peeled for small, lightweight products that are eligible for express air shipping.
• It retails for between $20-$100. Products priced above $20 give you a sufficient buffer to cover your costs (Amazon fees, cost of goods sold, advertising, etc.) While capping your retail price at $100 keeps your conversion rate healthy.
• Has more than 10 sales per day. Products with less than 10 sales per day probably don’t have sufficient demand to create a highly profitable Amazon business.
• Sales are distributed between multiple sellers. Trying to compete with one or two huge sellers who’ve gobbled up the whole market will make it harder to get your slice of the pie.
• Less than 300 reviews. Analyzing the number of reviews tells is an indicator of how competitive a product is. The lower the reviews the more potential a product may have - below 300 reviews is good, but below 200 is even better.
• Low seasonality. You don’t want to limit your sales to certain periods of the year. Use Google Trends to find products that are in constant demand all year round.
• It’s not sold in large chain stores. If people can simply head to their local store and find the exact same product you’re selling, it’ll be harder to stay competitive.
• Simple to manufacture. Highly technical products can cause headaches when it comes to quality control and customer service. Avoid products with electronics or delicate materials such as glass and opt for basic ones instead.
• There’s room for improvement. Scan customer feedback and see if there are any ways you can create a better product based on what consumers are looking for.

These time-tested guidelines have been used over and over again to find hot selling products on Amazon. Over the coming days, you can use this blueprint to create your own shortlist of awesome products to sell.

3 Free & Effective Ways to Do Amazon Product Research

Now that you know what characteristics to look for in a product, let’s cover how you’re going to look for them.

There are a few paid product research tools out there like Jungle Scout and AMZScout. These can be helpful, but for now, we’re going to show you 3 free methods that’ll help you figure out new bestseller items on Amazon.

Method #1: Brainstorm!

Every great business started with a single idea. And one of the best places to look for such ideas is in your day to day life (and the lives of people you know.)

Here are three categories to get your brain juices flowing:

• Hobbies: What activities do you love to do in your free time? It could be playing the guitar, painting with watercolours or riding a mountain bike.
• Problems: What issues do you or those around you run into on a daily or weekly basis? It could be that you get lower back pain after working at a desk for long periods or that you can’t fall asleep at night because the noise from the street is too loud.
• Passions: What gets you super excited? It could be travelling to new places, cooking up great food at home or cranking out a great day's work.

Choosing a product in a niche that you’re familiar with can be a brilliant competitive advantage. If you’re a keen yogi then you’ll likely be able to see more opportunities than someone who has never set foot on a mat.

This will feed into your marketing too - you’ll know the types of language that resonate and understand your target customers behaviour better than most (because you are one!).

What’s more, products that fall into these categories typically are higher-margin than ones that don’t. That’s because purchases that are driven by passions, hobbies or problems aren’t as sensitive to price as other items.

To illustrate, think about the average person buying a kitchen knife. Most people will go for a functional, low-cost knife that’ll handle all the basics. But now imagine somebody who's obsessed with cooking. They’d happily spend double or even triple the average consumer’s budget to get an extra special knife simply because they’re passionate about it.

So, open a spreadsheet on your phone or carry a notebook and pen with you. Over the next few days, brainstorm ideas under these three categories. Don’t be afraid to put anything and everything onto the list. Editing can happen once your worksheet is brimming with product ideas.

Method #2: Spy On Successful Sellers

Modelling your approach after successful Amazon sellers is a great way to cut your product research time in half.

But the key word here is modelling - you never want to copy exactly what your competitors are doing. There’s a couple of reasons for this:

• Copying what somebody else is doing means you’re playing catch up
• You’ll never learn how to find your own successful products
• You’ll be stealing somebody else’s hard work

There’s two tactics to discover what your competitors are getting up to. The first one lets you discover what products people are launching right now by following any PPC campaigns that they’re running

Analysing Competitors PPC Ads

If the competition is advertising their products using Amazon PPC it’s pretty likely that they’re making a good ball of dough off it. The reason is that the seller must have decent margins if they’re able to cover the additional cost of advertising while maintaining profitability.

Here’s what you do:

• Search for a product you’re thinking about selling
• In the search results, look for products that say ‘sponsored’ on them
• Click into them and note them down

And voila! You’ll now be able to say with 90% certainty that the products on your list are profitable.

Does that mean you can sell them and be profitable? Not always because there are so many factors involved. But it is nevertheless a good way to validate the demand for an existing product idea.

Keep Tabs on Seller Catalogues

This is an easy tactic that’ll let you peer into what successful sellers are lining up to be there next big win. It’s simple as clicking on their seller display name on one of their product pages.

You’ll then be able to view every product they’re selling. It’s best to only use this tactic for smaller sellers who you can compete with. Steer clear of any large companies who make their profit by selling thousands of units.

Method #3: Consult Your Supplier

If you’ve already sold a product with success on Amazon, simply asking your supplier about what’s selling well right now can give you a plethora of product ideas to choose from.

Suppliers can be working across multiple industries and are in contact with many different sellers. They usually have information about what’s selling like hot cakes before anyone else further down the supply chain.

What’s more, using the same supplier for multiple products lets you leverage economies of scale. Because the more products that you order from a supplier the further you can push down the price per unit. Yes, even if they’re not the same product.

That means that as your Amazon business grows, you’ll be able to command a lower unit cost than your competitors and develop a pricing advantage that other’s simply won’t be able to beat.

Now that you’ve got a blueprint for what top selling products on Amazon looks like, and a road map to discover said products, it’s time to give you some inspiration with 20 hot products that we dug up to get you started.

The Top 20 Products to Sell on Amazon to Inspire Your Search

1) Baby Carriers

With over 12,000 babies born every day in the USA, the baby niche is the perfect example of a market that has no seasonality.

The best part? New parents are naturally passionate about getting the best for their newborn child. And there are tonnes of products you need to buy to help your little one through the first years of their life.

Baby carriers are one such high demand product. They’re perfect for parents who need to leave their house but want to keep their baby close to them.

What’s great is that you can find lots of suppliers selling these on Alibaba at prices that allow room for a healthy mark-up. They’re popular now and they’re going to stay that way going into the future.

Pro Tip: On Amazon, having a unique selling proposition is key. With more and more dads carrying their babies around nowadays, why not explore the possibility of creating a baby carrier aimed specifically at men?

2) Travel Mugs

Travel mugs are an awesome product that's always in demand. With coffee aficionados on the rise around the world, more people are becoming interested in making their own coffee at home and taking it with them.

Here Amazon seller Corkcicle has taken an everyday product and just upgraded it a little by swapping plastic for wood - a savvy move that caters to consumers who are more environmentally conscious.

By improving on the basic style that you find in any local store or cafe, Corkcicle can slap a hefty $30 price tag onto their product which is most likely around 3-4x the unit cost they’re buying them at.

Corkcicle doesn’t only sell on Amazon - check out their website, for inspiration about how to build a brand around a private label product that sets you apart from your competitors.

Also Read: The 20 Best Shopify Stores To Inspire & Uplift Your Business To The Next Level

3) Pet Nail Clippers

Pet products regularly feature among the most sold items on Amazon. Similar to parents with a newborn child, pet owners are understandably crazy about their pets.

These clippers are a simple solution to the common problem of cutting your pet’s nails. They’re super easy to source and while they retail for a relatively low price they actually offer a surprising good margin.

For example, here’s a supplier from Alibaba offering a similar product for less than $1:

4) Grilling Gloves

Grilling accessories are passion products (seeing a trend here?) that have a large market of enthusiasts who’re on the hunt for easy to improve their craft.

Grilling gloves are the perfect way to avoid picking up any nasty burns or scalds while BBQing at high temperatures.

Interestingly this particular product is marketed towards women by emphasising it’s the smaller size glove. This is a great way to differentiate themselves from the other sellers targeting men.

Pro Tip: A quick look through the questions shows that multiple people are asking if the product is American made. In this case, it’s made in China, so by finding an American manufacturer, you could give yourself an edge over the competition. Especially when you consider that BBQ enthusiasts are likely to support American industry.

5) Pet Beds

While this breaks our ‘keep it small’ rule, sometimes if a product is light enough and still easy to ship it’s ok if it’s a little bigger than a standard shoebox. Especially if the profit margin is sufficient to cover the slightly higher shipping costs.

By putting ‘dog bed’ into Google Trends you can see that it’s a product with solid growth over the last five years. And since it’s not showing any signs of slowing down soon, now is the perfect time to jump in and put your own spin on the product.

Think about adding a unique element to your product if possible - it could be micro-allergen resistant or made from sustainable materials or targeted to just one specific dog breed. The key is to offer customers a reason to buy your product over all others in the Amazon marketplace.

6) Muscle Care

If you’re into fitness, you’ve no doubt seen the explosion in popularity of tools to aid recovery after a hard training session.

This bundle of massage tools makes the perfect gift to give to an athlete or fitness fanatic. The beauty of the bundle is that it’d be very hard to sell the individual parts profitably because the margins would be so low.

However, by grouping a number of lower-priced items together, you can increase the order value and significantly pump up that profit margin.

This isn’t a concept that’s limited to recovery tools - anytime you’ve found a product with the potential to sell on Amazon, but the retail price is too low to make money, think about other closely related items you can add to create a product set.

Pro Tip: Go above and beyond other sellers and put together a free downloadable guide that shows customers how to use your product for maximum benefit.

7) Silicone Baking Mats

Lockdowns around the world have introduced swathes of new people to the art and pleasure of baking at home.

These handy baking mats allow you to make healthier bakes by eliminating the need to butter your baking tray, while also making the traditional messy wash-up a lot more bearable.

Even though they’re competing with many other sellers (including Amazon themselves) HotPop is managing to sell good volume on these units and take home a tidy profit for themselves.

A large part of their success comes down to an expert;y crafted product description, along with a litany of stellar reviews from satisfied customers.

8) Silicone Baking Moulds

Carrying the baking trend is these awesome silicone moulds. These are one of the most popular products on amazon in the cooking niche. Their bright colours make your kitchen bakes shine and they’re also BPA, PVC and eco friendly.

You can see that this product has mass appeal - while it’s primarily targeted at baking enthusiasts, it can also be used by people looking to portion control their food, or put snacks for their kids.

That means a huge audience will have an interest in buying this product - which means your capacity to scale your business is greatly increased.

9) Marshmallow Sticks

If you’ve got a hobby, chances are you probably have a good idea already about what kinds of products others who share your enthusiasm are looking for.

These marshmallow sticks are red hot (excuse the pun) among camping and outdoor hobbyists. The last thing you want is a kid going too close to a campfire to roast a marshmallow 0 so these sticks remedy that problem.

Notice how they’re a simple solution to a common problem. We touched on looking for simplicity as one of the criteria required to find the best selling products on Amazon. There’s no high-tech or electronics here - just basic materials and simple design - a.k.a. nothing to go wrong and blow up your customer support.

10) Baby Loungers

As mentioned earlier, the population is always being topped up from the lower end and products in the baby niche always have a solid chance of selling well.

These Baby loungers are fast becoming popular with new parents - plus you can find them on Alibaba for a low price which means it’s not hard to come away with a nice profit from each sale.

Hopping over to Google Trends, you can see that the demand has been steadily growing over the last five years, with the last 2 years, in particular, seeing a big bump in the volume of Google search queries.

11) Laptop Stand

The recent coronavirus pandemic has forced many people to work from home. A knock-on is that people are going to be looking to build home offices that’ll help them stay productive throughout the workday.

Laptop stands like this one are great because they’re easy to ship, readily available on Alibaba and again, are just simple basic products that provide a solution to a common problem.

Maybe think about pairing it up with a wireless keyboard and mouse and market it as the home office in a box to increase your average order value.

12) Office Organization

Continuing on with the same theme, people want to keep their workspace neat and tidy. Office cable trays like this are a great product to help with that.

It’s not seasonal, it’s low-tech, easy to ship and is in that sweetest price range of $20-40 where high-margin impulse buys happen.

13) Compression Socks

Compression socks are super light and easy to ship. But another great thing about them is that they wear out pretty quick meaning you’ll likely get repeat customers if they’re satisfied with your product.

Because they’re cheap, you can quickly run quality tests by contacting multiple suppliers and asking for samples. For a product like this with many sellers, it’s essential that you choose a higher quality product and try to differentiate yourself.

Remember, with the most sold items on Amazon, we don’t want to be competing on price - think about custom printing unique designs that appeal to a specific niche group within the overall compression sock market.

14) Bed Bridge

I’ll admit it when researching products for this post, I’d never even heard of a bed bridge. But this product is booming and it’s likely to only continue to go up in popularity as more people discover it.

What is it? It’s a solution that helps you turn two single beds into a double bed. It’s perfect for home situations or for couples who are renting accommodation that comes with a twin bed set up.

It gives people and property managers the ability to switch up their sleeping arrangements with ease. It’s easy to ship and again it retails at the super sweet price point of $40-60.

15) Yoga Mats

Yoga mats have been one of the top items sold on Amazon for years. They’re a product that can pull in an insane profit margin if you do them right.

They’re certainly a much more competitive product than others on this list, but that doesn’t mean you can’t carve out your own portion of the yoga mat pie.

You’ll need to invest a little more in the branding side of things to be able to command a higher price point as TopPlus have done in the above example.

16) Can Insulators

Can insulators aren’t just hot items on Amazon, but they’re popping up on social media feeds left, right and centre. What’s great is that they’re not super easy to find in regular stores - so people are more likely to turn to Amazon to get their hands on them.

While they’re a slightly seasonal product, you’d be able to get consistent sales throughout the year by selling to different markets. They have a super low cost per unit and relatively high retail price - but like yoga mats, it’s all about the brand.

It would be wise to create a community around your insulators - it could be beer lovers, it could be party people or BBQ fanatics - but creating a brand that speaks to them in a relatable way will allow you to push your prices up and make more profit.

17) Knee Pads for Work

Despite all our technical advancements, physical labouring jobs aren’t going anywhere soon. These kneepads have multiple uses - construction, cleaning, gardening etc. and are a requirement for many trades.

Amazon seller Thunderbolt is shipping a good volume of these per day, but overall the product is nowhere near saturation. After starting less than a year ago, Thunderbolt’s stats show that they’re probably already clearing six figures of profit in a year.

Don’t just think about knee pads though - use your brain to come up with a list of ideas for manual labour related products or protective gear that aren’t easy to find (or are much more expensive) in regular stores.

18) Conference Microphone

Have you ever been on a video call and found it super hard to hear the other person or have them struggle to hear you?

Now that many of us are working from home, that’s an everyday occurrence. Now I know we said now tech products, but this is the absolute low end of the technical spectrum, so we’re recommending that you break the rules on this one.

These are available for next to nothing on Alibaba, but here’s a more premium one we found with USB functionality that you could market in the $30-50 price range.

19) Cycling Gloves

Cycling is growing in popularity at a pretty steady rate over the six months. That means that people are going to be looking for accessories to go along with their new hobby.

Cycling gloves tick the boxes for our product requirements - they’re lightweight, simple, aren’t super competitive and offer a decent product margin.

This pair is selling for $17.99 which is just below our $20 profit-protecting threshold. So, just like the microphone above, seek out a more premium product or niche-down (maybe make a version with an American flag design on it) and pitch it at a slightly higher price point.

20) Food Thermometers

As more people learn to cook at home, food thermometers are coming into vogue. This particular product is an excellent example of how a seller is improving on a past product to rocket themselves to the top of the market.

They’ve sourced or designed a food thermometer that’s not only waterproof but also comes with a built-in beer opener. Instead of having to buy 2 kitchen gadgets, you now have one that can do both tasks.

Always be thinking about how you can improve upon existing products - it doesn’t have to be anything groundbreaking - just as in this example, doubling up two tools into one can be a shortcut to creating a best selling product on Amazon.

Go Forth & Find More Hot Items On Amazon

Phew! There you have it.

Hopefully this article has equipped you with the know-how to go out there and find the next top selling item on Amazon.

We’ve covered:

• The characteristics of a top selling profitable Amazon product
• 3 free amazon product research tactics
• 20 examples of best seller items on Amazon

And while all this theoretical knowledge is great, sometimes the most important thing isn’t the process or the methodology that you use.

But the fact that you take massive action.

It doesn’t matter if it’s imperfect action. It doesn’t matter if you make lots of mistakes. What matters is that you get the ball rolling and start your Amazon journey today.

Nobody ever just happened to uncover one of the most bought items on amazon by complete accident. You can bet your bottom dollar that they came up short time and time again.

If you’re serious about sourcing and selling one of the most sold items on Amazon, then you’ll need to be ready to do likewise.

Armed with the knowledge in this post, you’re more than ready to start identifying killer products - so open that spreadsheet on your phone and get to work!