#526 – Stop Believing Nonsense on Amazon Rufus (Alexa For Shopping)!
Audio version above. Video version below
Has Rufus now called Alexa for Shopping completely changed the way shoppers search on Amazon, or are sellers overreacting to the AI hype? In this episode of the AM/PM Podcast, Bradley Sutton records from the Maldives for part one of his annual Maldives Honeymoon Launch series and breaks down what has changed, what has not changed, and why Amazon sellers should still care deeply about keywords, indexing, and traditional search.
Bradley explains that AI has absolutely changed e-commerce, but not necessarily in the way many people think. Rufus (Quick note: Rufus is now rebranded as Alexa for Shopping) can make the shopping journey easier, especially when customers are looking for solutions rather than a specific product. But when shoppers already know what they want, traditional Amazon search is still one of the fastest paths to purchase. Bradley also explains how optimizing for Amazon search can help sellers optimize for Rufus, using real examples of products missing important keywords and disappearing from both search results and Rufus recommendations.
The episode then shifts into product research strategies sellers can use to find new opportunities in 2026 and beyond. Bradley walks through keyword-based research using title density, search volume, review count, and sales filters, while also comparing those methods against raw AI suggestions that can produce unreliable data. He also explains how sellers can use free Amazon tools, such as Brand Analytics and Opportunity Explorer, to uncover low-conversion keywords, weakly competitive products, and products shoppers are searching for but not finding.
Bradley also shares creative ways to discover product ideas outside of standard research tools, including spotting trends on Etsy and Pinterest, applying saturated products to new niches, taking advantage of quick-moving pop culture trends, finding abandoned “zombie listings,” and using old-school product filters that still work today. The big takeaway: AI matters, Rufus matters, but the fundamentals of Amazon product research and keyword strategy are far from dead. Sellers who combine new AI awareness with proven data-driven research methods can still find serious opportunities before the market gets crowded.
For part two of this Maldives Honeymoon Launch series, head over to the Serious Sellers Podcast and listen to episode 750. Bradley goes deeper into keyword research, launch strategy, and how to get new products ranking on page one within days: https://h10.me/750
In episode 526 of the AM/PM Podcast, Bradley covers:
- 00:00 – Introduction
- 00:35 – The Maldives Honeymoon Launch Series
- 02:25 – How AI Has Changed E-Commerce
- 04:54 – Why Sellers Are Overreacting to Rufus/Alexa for Shopping Hype
- 08:58 – Product Discovery vs. Solution Discovery
- 11:26 – Why Keyword Research Still Matters
- 13:53 – Are Prime Members Using Rufus/Alexa for Shopping Instead of Search?
- 16:14 – Amazon Search Query Performance Data
- 18:01 – Product Research Strategies for 2026
- 22:28 – Using Amazon’s Free Product Research Tools
- 24:12 – Creative Ways to Find Product Opportunities
- 27:47 – Finding Zombie Listings and Old-School Opportunities
Transcript
Bradley Sutton:
The truth about whether Rufus and AI has completely changed Amazon search. Five really cool product research strategies that will help you find your next product. These and more on today’s episode. Hello everybody, and welcome to the AM/PM podcast. My name is Bradley Sutton, and I’ll be your host. And this is the show where we discuss all things Amazon, TikTok shop, and Walmart private label, and how to generate recurring revenue streams 24 hours a day during the AM and the PM, hence the name of the show. Get it? AM/PM podcast. And as a matter of fact, I’m actually recording this episode in the Maldives where I go once a year to record my special Maldives honeymoon episode. And even though I’m taking in the sun as I record this podcast, I’m still making money online. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Bradley Sutton:
All right guys, I am here in the Maldives and this is a one in a two-part series that I’m doing that I do once a year called the Maldives honeymoon launch. And in it, I talk about keyword research, we talk about how to launch your products and everything in between. Now, here’s the thing. If you guys are watching this here on the AM/PM podcast, which I imagine you are, you need to see the next episode, all right? So that is going to be in the Serious Sellers podcast. I’ll give you more info at the end, but it’s gonna be episode 750 in the Serious Sellers podcast. It’s part two of this. In this episode, we’re gonna be talking about, hey, what has changed and what hasn’t in AI? And we’re gonna be talking about things like, hey, how can you find new products? Can you find new products in this day and age? So a lot of cool stuff we’re gonna be going over today. So let’s go ahead and hop into it.
Bradley Sutton:
So first of all, this two-part series is called Maldives honeymoon. Is there a honeymoon? Yes, guys, the honeymoon period is alive and well. Here’s just a couple of things I’m gonna be talking about in the next episode. You guys can see this, those of you watching on YouTube, on how, hey, in just three or four days, I was able to get products live on Amazon and from unranked to the top five, 10 positions in just a few days. So honeymoon is still alive and well. But let’s take a step back and ask ourselves, has Rufus, Cosmo, things like that, completely changed search? Is this like a moot point to even talk about keyword research and trying to get to page one? First of all, let me just get this out of the way. AI has changed Ecom. And for those of you who have seen me talk on this, I’ve been talking about this this year, right? This is like one of my talk tracks this year. I’m going a little bit more in detail. So even if you have seen me talk about this, I have some different angles I wanna talk about. But nobody is dumb enough to say, including myself, oh no, Ecom is still the same. AI has not changed at all. Let me give you guys a personal example.
Bradley Sutton:
Quick personal anecdote. I’ve been going the last few months to this beauty clinic in Korea every few months where I get stuff done to my face. Nothing major like Botox or anything like that. But just like, hey, I’m getting up there in years. I wanna make sure I look young. Now, here’s the thing. They have this website. It’s called Muse Clinic. One of the best beauty clinics, in my opinion, in the world. Anyways, I don’t know anything about this stuff. For my entire life, I never did nothing to my face. All right, I barely even washed my face. Okay, I was just like, all right, let me rely on my good Filipino genes to look young, forget it. But now I’m all obsessed with, hey, making sure I still look young. Now, their website has all this stuff that I have never heard about. I don’t know what rejuran means and all these things. And so for my next session, I was like, you know what? I wanna do a deep dive on this website in order to understand what I need, right? So I was like, hey, let me just have ChatGPT read this website and go ahead and let me know what’s going on. Now, fast forward, I actually did end up going, and you can see me here in this picture if you’re watching this on YouTube with me getting about ready for the rejuran, getting my facial. But here’s the thing. When I asked ChatGPT, hey, can you read this website and tell me what you think I need? The answer it gave was, I’m sorry, this website, we can’t really read. It’s made in a format that we can’t even read. Now, here’s the thing, guys. If I was just some customer off the street who loves ChatGPT and I had never been to Muse Clinic before, what’s gonna happen?
Bradley Sutton:
Guess what? This Muse Clinic, because they did not adapt their e-com website for AI, they just lost a customer because I can’t even understand these things. Now, me, I had already been going there, so I was just like, all right, let me just do something else. And I just took a screen video and then I uploaded it at the ChatGPT and got what I needed. But you see, this is just one of the many, many ways AI has absolutely changed permanently e-commerce and selling online, even advertising online, right? So again, nobody is going to say that AI has not changed e-commerce. However, on LinkedIn and other places, we have the opposite end of the spectrum. You’ll hear comments like, Amazon SEO is dead. If you don’t optimize for Rufus, you are invisible. Keywords are meaningless. Amazon Rufus users, 60% more likely to buy the recommended product. The list goes on and on maybe of stuff you guys have seen, right? With kind of like clickbaity catchphrases like this. Now, I actually agree with most of the people who say these things. What I differ in is I think people are taking it differently. A lot of them are kind of exaggerating, using hyperbole to kind of like clickbait, which is fine, I do that too on some things. But people are drinking this Kool-Aid thinking that, hey, keywords don’t matter anymore, right? Everything is gonna be AI, everything is Rufus. Rufus has taken over, but is that the case?
Bradley Sutton:
Let’s first just take a step back and talk about AI. What is the purpose of AI, all right? How many of you guys own a Tesla? All right, I have a Tesla. Why do I have a Tesla? Not because I love Elon Musk or I’m a fanboy or anything like that. I do it for the autopilot. It’s kind of like AI, right? Now, think about Tesla autopilot. Like, for example, when it backs into a parking space on its own. What is the purpose of this AI? Is it to do something inherently different than a human would do? Is it flying the car into the parking space? Is it making it a boat and floating it into a parking space? No, it’s doing the exact same thing a human is gonna do. It’s like looking around all sides. When you’re a human who’s parking, right? And I know you guys who are in the EU and Asia know how to do backing into parking spaces a lot better than Americans because we never back into spaces. But anyways, you’re looking to your left and your right, you’re looking behind you in your mirrors and stuff, trying to get in, right? Now, that’s just what the AI is doing. It’s not doing something fundamentally different or inherently different. It’s doing the same thing, but in a more efficient way and a faster way. It can look all 360 degrees around it, just like a human would have to do a little bit, you know, it takes a few seconds to do, all right? So that’s the same thing with AI, guys.
Bradley Sutton:
AI is designed to make things easier, not to just give you something brand new that a human would never be able to do. You know, whenever you think about stuff that AI does, maybe it helps you do something that you couldn’t do before, but somebody else was doing this work, all right? And when we talk about AI and Amazon, it’s the same thing. Everything that Amazon does is designed to make the customer journey easier. It’s not meant to completely change their behavior, all right? It’s like meant to take things that maybe somebody would do off of Amazon on Amazon. It’s maybe to speed up things, speed up delivery. Everything Amazon does is about the customer. So when you think about it, any AI that Amazon is doing, right, as far as like Search and Rufus and things like that, what is it designed for? It’s designed to make the process easier for the customer, not to fundamentally change the very nature of shopping per se, but it’s how can they find the products easier, all right? So with that in mind, a lot of the stuff that is new, like the things that Rufus does, if you strip it down to its core, what it’s doing is just making it easier of what customers were trying to do in the first place, not fundamentally change stuff. And because of that, a lot of the new stuff is not gonna change what you do. It might change what you have to, you know, the methods of finding things, but it’s not going to change what you as a seller should be doing because at the end of the day, a customer is trying to find something for, that he needs to buy, right?
Bradley Sutton:
Now, the method of how you can make sure you’re connecting with that customer might change with inherent things like Rufus. Like for example, before, how would you get in the customer’s mind? You would maybe search for reviews, right? And read reviews and understand what people search for. Now, you grew with Rufus, all right? So again, Rufus is not necessarily changing and making people do something that they wouldn’t normally do, okay? Now, this is where it comes in. To me, there’s like a couple of different ways that people find products. There’s product discovery and solution discovery, all right? Product discovery is like, I already know exactly what I need, or not exactly, but like generally what I need. I have a keyword in mind for it, I enter it in the search bar and I search. Like for example, let’s say I know I need salicylic acid shampoo. Well, if I knew I needed that, I just type it into the search bar. Let me tell you guys, AI is not going to make that any easier. It actually, if you try and do that in AI, it might make it harder, right? What is easier than just typing salicylic acid shampoo in the search results and then just looking at some shopping results? Nothing’s going to be better than that for right now, right?
Bradley Sutton:
If I have to have a conversation with AI to ask back and forth about it, it’s already making the shopping experience less efficient, right? But here’s the thing. The other thing is solution discovery. When somebody doesn’t know exactly what they need, like, hey, what am I going to get for a 50th wedding anniversary, all right? You’re not looking for gold and black streamers or something like that, right? You don’t know. Well, so before you might search that thing maybe on Google or on ChatGPT or something. I feel like Amazon is trying to get that solution discovery into Amazon. That’s what Rufus can do that kind of changes the game for buyers. Instead of having to go on ChatGPT, look up videos or something like that, now you can just go into Rufus and ask this question, then find out what you need. Oh, I want black and gold streamer hats. Now you type in the keyword, right? But here’s an example of that. What if I didn’t know I need salicylic acid shampoo? So what I did to ChatGPT was I typed in, hey, I’ve got this dry scallop and I’ve tried this and that. What do I need? And what ChatGPT basically ended up saying is, hey, you need salicylic acid shampoo. If I typed it into Rufus, the same exact thing comes up of, hey, I don’t know what I need. It’s the same answer came up that I need salicylic acid shampoo.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, interestingly, if I just go directly to Rufus, skip the search bar and type in best salicylic acid shampoo, the search results are very similar to what you see in page one. Like, you know, the three, there’s only three that come up, but they’re mostly from page one. Like here are those products right here. Those of you watching on YouTube can see that, hey, this T-Sal product and these other products came up, right? So if you type the same keyword in Rufus and the search bar, you know, page one usually has those products. Now, here’s an interesting thing though. We as sellers don’t always know all of the strange ways that somebody might use to find a product, right? In the search bar or in Rufus, doesn’t matter what we’re talking about here. Like, for example, if I were to, you know, put in all of the top salicylic acid shampoos, this T-Sal one and a few of the others that were all on page one, and I used Rebirth to extract the keywords, the main keywords, here are some of the top keywords for this niche. Now, how many of these would you have known about? Like, would you have known scalp cleanser? Maybe. Would you have known dandruff treatment? You know, maybe. But what about scalp detox? I wouldn’t have thought about that, right? I was like, what? That seems like a weird word. So what about these top sellers? Do they all know it? Like Neutrogena, that’s a, you know, these guys have millions of dollars. It’s a, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars company, I would assume, you know, Neutrogena. Interestingly enough, and remember this Neutrogena product does show up when you type in Rufus Best Salicylic Acid Shampoo, and it’s top of the search in Best Salicylic Acid Shampoo.
Bradley Sutton:
But did you know that scalp detox and this other word, I don’t know what it means, Feliculite shampoo, these two keywords are not indexed in this T-Sal Neutrogena product. In other words, it is not searchable for these keywords. Not that it doesn’t appear in the search results, it’s just like literally not indexed. All right, using Helium 10 Index Checker. Even this top company doesn’t have all of the keywords. And so they are not searchable for somebody who is gonna type in scalp detox, which is a top keyword for salicylic acid shampoos. They are not gonna show up in the search results. Now, if I type in what is the best salicylic acid shampoo that’s also a Feliculite shampoo, or if I type in, hey, what’s the top Feliculite shampoos? Guess what? Not only does this product not show up in the search results, it does not show up in Rufus. So guys, optimizing for search results is optimizing for Rufus and vice versa, right? You can’t just assume that, hey, I don’t need these keywords in my listing. Rufus is gonna know every single possible keyword that somebody might search for. It might work that some way sometimes. Some keywords where you’re not even indexed for, it might come up in Rufus or in search, right? But you can’t rely on that. Why not do the traditional keyword research we’ve always done to make sure you show up in search results and to make sure you show up in Rufus? Now let’s think, are Prime members really using Rufus in place of search?
Bradley Sutton:
One thing I wanted to do as an example of why people are confused about this fact, right? Remember that one quote at the beginning, very reputable report this came from, said Amazon Rufus users were 60% more likely to buy the recommended product. In other words, it’s inferring that, hey, somebody searches on Rufus on something and it recommends this product. Then, hey, they’re 60% more likely to buy it. What did Amazon really say in whatever they were quoting? Here’s the actual quote from Amazon. Hey, 250 million customers have used Rufus, but customers that use Rufus during a shopping journey are 60% more likely to complete a purchase. What could it mean, a shopping journey? How many of you have used Rufus to check the price history of a product? I’ve used Rufus to do that, use it quite often to do that. Guess what, is that a shopping journey? Sure, it’s a shopping journey. How many of you have used Rufus to maybe summarize the reviews? Is that part of the shopping journey? Absolutely, it’s part of the shopping journey. What if you check Rufus for compatibility once you’re on a page? Is that part of the shopping journey? Yes. Do all of these things make it more likely that somebody would purchase? Of course. Do any of these have to do with search or discovering a product? No, not in the slightest, all right? So you see how people can just twist quotes and then if you read it without digging into it, you might be misled about what the actual quote is.
Bradley Sutton:
I’ve been doing polls every six months asking people, hey, are you using Rufus for search? Very small number of people are using Rufus for search, very, very small. A lot more people are using it for price history reviews and a big portion, 60, 70% are not using Rufus at all. Now, guys, just because 60 or 70% aren’t using something, that doesn’t mean you should ignore it. I’m never gonna say, I’ve been talking about you need to optimize for Rufus for years, right? Since it came out. But just again, it’s not something that, oh my God, this is taking over search, all right? So keep this in mind, guys. Search is here to stay for now. Things could change, Amazon could launch something different but for now, do not be freaked out that, oh my God, Rufus is completely changing the search journey. Now, here’s the most mic drop moment about this. I can’t drop this mic, it’s a very expensive mic and I’m only holding it right here, it’s gonna break. But if you ever wonder, hey, Bradley, you’re just postulating on this stuff. I’m telling you, Rufus is how people search even though you probably can’t find anybody to actually tell you that, right? Or who actually search on Amazon. You can look at the search query performance data directly from Amazon, not a Helium 10 estimation or anything, the actual number of searches. And here at Helium 10, we have access to all that data from months before Rufus even came into the picture to even recently. And I’m doing this every six months, I’m checking. And you can see the numbers, those of you watching this online and you can see or on YouTube, you can see that, hey, the searches that were happening before Rufus even came to the picture in 2024, it’s about the same number, actually a little bit less.
Bradley Sutton:
In other words, search has gone up. So in other words, if 50,000 people were searching for your keywords that lead to your product in 2024, early before Rufus was in the picture, the same amount of people, if not a little bit more, are still searching for it. So this just, I could have just led with this and just stopped without all this other stuff, but to just show you that, hey, people are still using traditional search overwhelmingly to find products. Are people using that to discover solutions? Absolutely not. Nobody ever searched in the search bar, hey, I am going to a 50th wedding anniversary and I need to get an idea. That’s not the way people use search. People would go off of Amazon. Now that kind of stuff, I think people are definitely using Rufus for. So remember, don’t be distracted and sip too much Kool-Aid. I could use some Kool-Aid right now. It’s freaking hot here in the Maldives, but don’t be worrying about this stuff, that search has completely changed because Rufus has not replaced search. Now, before we get into the launch episode, which is the next episode, let’s talk about a few things to help find new products to launch. Can you start a brand from scratch? Can you add brands in 2026? Guys, people are adding products all the time, being successful, big sellers, small sellers. What’s some of the ways? Here’s one thing. I like to search for keywords. This is kind of different than other people, but I like to search for keywords when it comes to products. And so here’s something I enter in Helium 10 is I enter a title density of less than five. That means less than five products on page one have the exact search term in the title, right? To me, that’s an indication of a newer opportunity because you have something that’s saturated like collagen peptides. It’s like the title density is like 40, right? Why? Because 40 out of the 50 listings on page one all have that search term collagen peptides in the title.
Bradley Sutton:
Another thing is, hey, I look for search volume over 4,000. This is just a random number I chose. You can choose whatever floats your boat. I also put in black box top 10 products on page one. Five of them at least have less than 150 reviews. And then I also do the top 10 products on page one. Less than five of them are doing $5,000 of sales, meaning to me there’s opportunity. I could go flip that opposite and it would still work pretty good. Now, interestingly enough, a couple of years ago, or about a year and a half or so ago, I actually found this using this exact system, a product that I was like really wanted to launch. It was this something called meat resting blanket. And I’m like, what in the actual heck is a meat resting blanket? Why does meat need to rest? I’m not a barbecuer, so I don’t know, maybe you guys are making fun of me because you think that everybody knows this, but I guess like after you grill meat or barbecue meat or cook it, then you like let it rest in some like insulated bag and it gets flavorful. I don’t know, whatever the heck this is. That’s the beauty about Amazon. You find stuff, you don’t even know what it does, right? And I was like, wow, this is like a killer product. It was doing really well at the time. Now here you can see the BSR chart of when I saw this product. Yeah, it was two years ago in April of 2024, where it was like killing it, crushing it, and then it went out of stock for months, right? But I found it when it was selling in stock because I was using Helium 10.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, here you can see the exact Amazon order. I actually ordered this product. You can see right there, April 3rd, 2024, and I was all set to send it to my sourcing agent in China, Apple, and we were gonna be ready to do it, but I got super busy. Now, I wish I did go through with it, but look today at this niche, less than two years later, guys, products on page one doing almost 3 quarters of a million dollars per month from one product that I found using Helium 10, this keyword research tool, or this keyword black box tool, now is this giant niche. Man, you probably wouldn’t even be seeing me doing this episode nine because I would have made a million dollars off of that product. Now, even if I do make a million dollars, you’ll still see me at Helium 10. But anyways, guys, this just shows that, hey, this is a strategy that absolutely works. Now, could I have just done this with AI or ChatGPT or something like that? I just wanted to just do a random thing in ChatGPT that, you know, ChatGPT doesn’t have the Helium 10 data unless you’re using the ChatGPT app for Helium 10 and you connect it to Helium 10, but I was like, hey, find me a product that has this much search volume or the products on page one have less than this number of views, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then what did it give me? It gave me a few keywords here, right? Faucet mat for kitchen sink, sink splash guard, it says it had 6,200 searches, faucet water catcher mat, it says it had 3,300 searches. Where are these numbers are coming from? I have no idea. Sink faucet mat, 2,000, et cetera, et cetera.
Bradley Sutton:
Now, here’s the thing. Let’s look at that faucet mat for kitchen sink. Look how many reviews people have. People have thousands of reviews, all right? Is this a good opportunity? No, but you see, ChatGPT can’t get all the review information from Amazon, like Helium 10 or other tools can, all right? So that wouldn’t have been a good one. What about that other one, faucet splash guard, remember, or faucet water catcher mat that said it had 3,000 searches? Number of searches, actually, 30, all right? So again, if you just use raw AI, you can’t just duplicate the kind of things you can do in tools. Obviously, Helium 10 is not the only tool you can do this. I’m sure there’s, you know, you guys might be using something else. That’s gonna be superior to just using raw AI without this data, all right? Now, what if you have no tools? You can’t use ChatGPT, we just said, because it’s not connected to Helium 10 or not connected to Amazon. Guys, use free tools from Amazon. Brand Analytics, Opportunity Explorer, these are free for Amazon sellers, all right? It’s not gonna give you as in-depth. I’ve launched a product based on data from Opportunity Explorer. Once I saw Opportunity Explorer that, hey, the conversion rate for a keyword, coffin bookshelf, was like 0.5%, right? When all the other keywords in my niche were like 2%, 3%, you know, they were triple, quadruple, 400% more than what this one was. And then I looked on Amazon, like, oh, shoot, no wonder why the conversion rate is so low. There are no coffin bookshelves on Amazon, and so people are not purchasing something after searching that keyword. I launched a product, sold hundreds of those units until I just gave up on that product and moved on. It was just a nice experiment. But guys, this is a great way, and it was completely free. I didn’t even need Helium 10 for that one, all right?
Bradley Sutton:
Another one, what about going into Brand Analytics? Look for keywords that have a greater than 50% click share, but less than 10% conversion share and more than 1,000 search volume. In other words, if somebody gets 50% of the clicks, three products, what percent of the conversion should it have if all things were equal? Should be 50%, right, greater than 50%. Because if everybody had a similar conversion rate, right? But if I can find something where only, they only have 10% of the conversions, what does that mean? That means the top click products people don’t like, right? And they’re buying something else, that could mean opportunity for you, all right? Here’s an example. There’s some products, here’s some keywords on here, like baby shower decorations, I found masquerade mask for women. All of these things, the top three products have a high click share, but low share of the sales or low share of the conversions. Another thing that we’ve been doing for years, going back to Project X, checking Etsy and Pinterest for trends. You guys remember what we did with a wooden egg tray on Project X six years ago now or seven years ago? We saw on Etsy and Pinterest, everybody had, when you type in egg tray, everybody had these wooden, cool looking ones. But when you looked on the search on Amazon, it was all these plastic ones. And so we had the idea, hey, maybe just people, if they knew that there was a wooden one available, they would buy it, right? And so we were able to go ahead and launch a wooden one. We’ve still been selling it. It’s like one of the top, it’s actually outselling the coffin shelf, even now, six years later. And we found it because we were looking at trends on Etsy and Pinterest.
Bradley Sutton:
Another thing you can do, take your competitive product, like something that’s saturated, and apply it to a different niche, all right? That’s kind of what we did with that egg tray. We took a, egg trays were saturated, but we applied it to a different niche and made it wood. So you can do that with like this, with the material, right? Something different material. But you can also do that with other things. Here on the screen, I’ve got this brand called Pup Roar. They’re in the latest season of Outsource to Optimize by Helium 10. And here, Pup Roar, this guy, we had a podcast about him, you know, look him up, Jason Ross. And at first he was making pickleball products, but it was too saturated. But then he was like, you know what? A lot of people have dogs. Pickleball owners have dogs. Maybe they would want their dogs to have a dog toy that looks like a pickleball paddle, right? And so he’s like, he became the first person on Amazon to sell, not pickleball rackets, because that was saturated. He was doing that and he didn’t do well. He was the first person to sell like pickleball racket shaped dog toys. And then he just, you know, went and, you know, went and was like, wait a minute, golf bags are saturated, but nobody’s making a toy or a dog that looks like a golf bag. What about all the golf owners might want that? And he’s just been killing it. He works full time in another job. Only does Amazon by himself in his off time, he’s selling a million dollars a year of these kinds of products where he took something that’s saturated, came in with from a different angle and was able to absolutely kill it.
Bradley Sutton:
We did that back in Project X. Coffin shelf, you know, shelves are saturated, but nobody was making coffin shaped ones. Bath mats are saturated, but we saw a trend. And hey, there’s people who like bat shaped things. Let’s make a bat shaped bath mat. Started crushing it. Another product research thing. Take advantage of quick trends. I’m showing something on the screen here that you guys can see. Does anybody know what these are? For those of you just listening to this, I’ve got paper plates that are pink and then another set of paper plates that are like black and green checkered. What do you think of when you think of black and green checkered? All right. This is Demon Slayer. This is like a popular Japanese animation. Anybody who looks at these color scheme, you know exactly what it is just by seeing the colors. And so last year when this movie was about to come out, I’m like, hey, let me take advantage of this quick trend. I don’t have time to get a license, but if I just have something that’s black and green checkered, let me take something that’s saturated and do something that people automatically relate to Demon Slayer. And so I was just crushing it with like these Demon Slayer type fans and straws and paper plates and all this stuff, taking advantage of a trend that is dead or not dead completely, but it’s like nothing compared to what it was. But I had a nice little run where I had zero competition because I was the only one with it. So it’s another great way to find product.
Bradley Sutton:
Another thing that’s kind of a unique way to find product is look for zombie listings. Zombie listings are listings that for whatever reason, the brand or the seller has decided to give up on it. All right, so they’re like, hey, we’re not gonna sell this anymore. Maybe they got suspended. Who knows what the reason is, all right? Now, in Helium 10, in this tool Black Box, you type in or you click on find out of stock products and you could enter a date range. Like, hey, show me something that was last active sometime a year ago or more, right? And it had this number of sales for the full year and you can find products that were out of stock, right? This is something I did. We found this product that was crushing it two years ago, a coffin makeup shelf. They were selling thousands of units. For whatever reason, they just disappeared off the face of the earth and the product is dead. You cannot find this product on Amazon now, right? You can see this on the screen that it went out of stock like last year and just never came back, right? It’s currently unavailable. You literally cannot find this on Amazon, like even if you searched because something that has no stock is not gonna show up in the search results. Found it in Helium 10 and what did we do? Like right now, I’m actually doing a launch for a coffin makeup shelf and I use Cerebro, the historical feature in order to get all of its old keywords and using the brand analytics tool. So I knew all of the keywords that drove sales to this product one, two years ago plus and now are trying to like make up and steal their market that they just abandoned on their own, right? So this is another unique way to find product opportunity.
Bradley Sutton:
Old school product research still works as well. You know, the traditional one that Helium 10 didn’t create this, you know, like back in the day, other tools that were around before Helium 10 had this where you can enter in different aspects of a product and get results. Like for example, I can enter in product characteristics. Hey, show me something that has greater than $10,000 worth of sales, less than 100 reviews, less than four images, less than two sellers, right? This is a common one that I used to do back in the day. I just did that a couple months ago, came up with this college basketball national tournament dry erase board. Here’s a product so new, it had zero reviews guys. It was doing $10,000 in its first 30 days, less than the first 30 days. I found it in Helium 10. If I had jumped on it, I could have done this, but guys, this product research method still works as well. All right guys, so here we talked about AI, how it has changed e-comm, but not in the way that some people might think. We talked about different ways to find products. So let’s say you do find a product. How do you launch? What’s working for launch nowadays? Is there a such thing as the honeymoon period? How do you find the keywords? Now that we know that keywords and search are still super important, how do you find this? Well, go right now guys, to the Serious Sellers Podcast, right? Episode 750.
Bradley Sutton:
So whatever you’re listening to this on, type in Serious Sellers Podcast, go to episode 750, hit the subscribe, make sure to put the notifications on. It should be the latest episode that just came out today. And you’re gonna get part two of this episode where we go how to find the best keywords and then how do you launch. And I’m gonna show you an example of how I got everything to page one within days of my launch. If you’re watching this on YouTube, same thing. Type in Serious Sellers Podcast, episode 750, and we’ll see you there.
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