Here’s How to Uncover Keyword Treasure with Black Box

What are we really selling on Amazon?

According to various sources, there are over 120,000,000 different products for sale on Amazon as of May 2019.  

If you listen to some of the most knowledgeable people in the eCommerce world, Amazon doesn’t sell products at all. 

It sells keywords.  

Understanding that fact is what’s going to help you use Helium 10’s Black Box to find treasure with your next great Amazon product idea.

Here’s why.  

Starting any new process is always exciting.  If we’re beginning a new school year, it’s all about getting new clothes, or a cool planner that feels like it might somehow make all that schoolwork easier.

Doing a remodel on your home?  For a lot of us, it almost always begins with a trip to the local Home Depot or Lowes to pick up a shiny new power tool or two. 

When we decide to make a life change and commit to selling on Amazon, an obvious first step is deciding on a product.  

There are a lot of great software tools to make that job easier.  I know; Helium 10’s software suite is the best in the business.  We have tools to help you filter your search for sales, reviews, competition and more.  

But Helium 10’s Black Box puts keywords at the forefront. With Black Box you’ll be able to find products based specifically on keyword criteria.   

Because, you don’t know what you don’t know. 

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On Amazon, everything always comes back to keywords. It’s what we pay for in our PPC campaigns, and it’s what we spend so much time on when we’re optimizing our listings. Keywords are king and they’re also the best way to start from scratch.  

Here’s how Helium 10’s Black Box is going to help you come up with the best product ideas:  

I’m going to start by opening Black Box on my Helium 10 dashboard. 

Then, I’ll add a few filters.  I’m going to start with a search volume of at least 1000. 

A lot of Amazon experts speak of a lucrative middle ground that has enough volume to be worth your time, but not so much as to either attract highly competitive sellers or require large PPC expenses. 

With that in mind, I’m going to filter for sales of between 10,000 and 50,000 per month. 

Lastly, I’m going to filter for less than 60 reviews per month so that I’m not doing battle against sellers that are supported by an overly passionate (review writing) group of buyers already in place. 

My search brought me a list of over 200 products that met my criteria.  This was at the top of the list: 

Let’s take a closer look.  I’ll simply go to the Actions column and select, View on Amazon.

And this . . . 

Maybe I’m late to the party or I haven’t been paying attention but, I didn’t realize that tree basket skirts were a thing.  My mom always just wrapped the base of the tree with a length of cloth.  

Sellers on Amazon are making serious money selling Christmas tree rings, or more accurately, they’re finding great success ranking for the long tail keyword, “tree basket skirt.”

With the data from the filtered results visible on the second screenshot showing more approximately 356 sellers making average monthly sales of $44,193.79, this is something we want to take a closer look at.  Is there one big seller making all the money and everyone else is struggling?

Let’s find out. Now that we’re on Amazon’s page, let’s open up Helium 10’s chrome extension and take a closer look on X-ray. 

Here’s what we get:

It looks to me that there’s more than a few sellers making a considerable amount of money selling Christmas tree rings.  The relatively low number of reviews tells me that the buyers aren’t overly passionate. Even though this is a very seasonal product, I think there’s more than enough reasons here for an Amazon seller to give this product niche a closer look. 

More importantly, this product idea came out of thin air. I literally did not know it existed before I started research for my blog post. 

Scrolling down through the list of other potential Amazon products that resulted from the initial search, let’s take a closer look at three other possibilities.  

Here’s the first:

It’s clear that these are real-time searches. I’m writing this a few weeks before Christmas and the list is full of Christmas ribbons, hooks for ornaments, and this jigsaw puzzle. 

Who doesn’t like to spend time together as a family, putting together puzzles at the dinner table while mom is in the kitchen baking something delicious? 

OK, maybe that’s from a Hallmark movie, but I’m sticking to my story. 

Now, one more from our list, and another reason why we might want to consider selling seasonal products. 

Let’s take a closer look at this. 

And now, we’ll use the Helium 10 chrome extension and filter the results through X-ray. 

Maybe this list doesn’t say that you can quit your job and sell turkey hats during the holidays, then spend the rest of the year polishing the Lamborghini. 

What this might represent to an Amazon seller, is a way to finance your next product launch.  You could possibly make enough money with a one-off seasonal product that it allows you to really get aggressive with your main product’s PPC campaign. 

The important take-away for me, is that there’s no better way to really do your initial Amazon product research than to head down this particular rabbit hole. 

With Helium 10’s Black Box, you never know where you’re going to end up. It’s the best kind of eCommerce treasure hunt. 

Here is one more example of that from the same list that began with the Christmas tree rings:

There’s money to be made selling Jeep Christmas ornaments. I wasn’t going come up with this product all by myself. 

Once again, let’s use Helium 10’s X-ray tool in the chrome extension to take a closer look.

And, since this is the internet, another (Amazon product) rabbit hole opens up. 

We started at the base of the Christmas tree, now we’re decorating the branches. It just goes to show you never know where you’re going to end up when you start your search with Helium 10’s Black Box. 

Amazon is a big playing field and experts always advise that you don’t want to be too emotionally attached to your products. 

However politically-charged Christmas ornaments might be, the sky’s the limit when you throw open the doors of Amazon product research and take a close look at what’s selling in the eCommerce universe.  

If you want to limit your search, you always have Helium 10’s advanced filters. As of yet, you cannot filter for a political party, so in the spirit of the holidays, I’ll trust that sometimes we can just agree to disagree.  

Oh, and pass the hot cocoa.