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How I Use Web Scraping to Find Products That Sell for 20x the Price Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

Chris Koerner on The Koerner Office Podcast · Mar 10, 2026 · Education · 35:29 · EN

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Searchable transcript of How I Use Web Scraping to Find Products That Sell for 20x the Price — Chris Koerner on The Koerner Office Podcast (35:29). Search for a phrase, then click its timestamp to jump straight to that moment in the video.

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00:00 Has anyone checked in on Amazon lately? Because  five or so years ago, all the course bros were selling Amazon FBA passive income courses. A  couple of them went to jail. Most of them have gone out of business. But guess what? Amazon's  a trillion dollar company. They're still doing great. And there's still countless people  making millions of dollars a year selling stuff on Amazon that they're just drop shipping  from China or importing from China and shipping it directly to an Amazon warehouse.

00:20 So today,  I'm going to show you how to scrape Amazon, find the best sellers, find the products that are  about to be best sellers, and just to find the most opportunity to compete because most people  when they go to sell something on Amazon, they're just picking things that they're comfortable  with or familiar with. But not today. We're going to use hard facts and data to find winning  products in three different categories: pets, household items, and books and education.

00:41 This  is a banger of a video, so let's dive right in. Okay, the first category I'm going to scrape  today is pet accessories, as in anxiety beds, calming vest, puzzle feeders, interactive toys,  all the types of stuff that Americans spend way too much money on. Okay, so I'm logged into  OxyLabs, which is the tool I use to scrape. If you go to Oxyabs.io/cris, you can get both a  free trial and 20% off any scraping credits.

01:04 Okay, so I'm logged into OxyLabs and I'm going to click  on web scraper API over here on the left and then I'm going to click explore API playground.  Okay, now here on this dropown I'm going to go to Amazon. Then under scraper I'm going to  click best sellers. Okay, now it's asking for the browse node ID. Don't freak out. Here's what  I'm going to do to get this.

01:25 You can go to Grock, Chad Gupt, Claude, whatever you want to do. Any  of the AIS I'm going to use Claude. I already have the categories that I'm interested in. And so my  prompt is right here. I'm going to scrape Amazon bestsellers, but I need the five to sevendigit  query code for each of the below categories. What are they? And by the way, I'm pasting  the outputs of this prompt into Google Docs, and I'm putting that link in the show notes below  without any payw wall.

01:48 I don't need your email address or anything. Just use that for free. That  way, you can skip this step entirely. Boom. Look at that. Gave me a spreadsheet. You're going to  go to this spreadsheet that I'm providing in the show notes below right here. And I'm just going to  pick one. I want to look up pet accessories. So, I'm going to copy that one. Boom.

02:05 Go back here.  Paste that. Okay. Now, parsing needs to be true. This just means I want it to give me structured  data and not unstructured data because I don't even know what parsing means. I want it to be able  to go in a spreadsheet so I can read it. Domain, I'm going to choose.com because I'm in the US.  If you're in the UK or a different country, then pick your own respective domain.

02:23 It would be  interesting regardless of what country you're in to scrape the same thing in different countries  and compare contrast the prices of the same bestsellers. That could be a whole other video.  And then very important that you choose local. This is where your VPN is or where the scraper  thinks that you're located. If I don't pick this and it uses a VPN in say the Philippines,  then it's going to return best sellers from the Philippines and in the Filipino pesos.

02:50 So you're  going to pick whatever currency of whatever country that you want these prices to be displayed  in. So I'm going to go United States English. Okay. Now, on location, I'm just going to put in  a zip code near me and submit request. Boom. Took about 10 seconds. We're done. I can see over here  on the right the preview. I can see it's showing the delivery location based on the zip code that I  entered.

03:12 It looks like it scraped about 50 items, which is awesome. I'm going to click export  results and then JSON. I don't know what a JSON is or how to read that data. So, I'm going to  go back to Claude over here. I'm going to upload that JSON file and I'm going to say convert this  to CSV data and make the Amazon URLs complete and clickable because I've done this before and  it gives me the URL suffixes, the endings, but it doesn't include ww.amazon.com.

03:43 I want to be  able to click it directly from Google Sheets. So, simple request for cloud. There's the export.  We're going to download it. And then I really want to put it in a Google sheet. So, I'm going  to open a blank Google sheet. I'll also include this in the show notes. I'm going to paste it.  Boom. There it is. Number of ratings. That column is irrelevant.

04:02 Price, currency, the rating on  a fivestar scale, the title of the product, the price. Again, we'll delete that cuz it's  redundant. The ASIN, which is the Amazon standard identification number, and then the URL so we  can click on it. So, this is incredible. I'm going to delete this column because we don't  need that. I want to see the ratings and the ratings count.

04:23 I'm going to drag this over  to be next to that. I want to see more of the title. And let's just look at one of these. 8,800  ratings. Bags for a cat feeder. Okay, cool. Okay, now you may be wondering like, in what order were  these scraped? We got 50 results. They're ordered in column A 1 through 50. What does that even  mean? Well, it means in that specific category with that specific 8 or so digit code that I  uploaded for pet accessories, these are the best selling products in that one specific category.

04:51 But what do we do with that data? Well, there's a few things. For starters, we want to look for a  review count and sales rank mismatch. This is the single most valuable signal that most people miss.  If a product has a very good or highseller rank, but a low review count of like under 300, say,  it means that the market is buying. The market loves this product, but it's not a lockeddown  category yet.

05:16 Nobody really owns it, right? It's not the McDonald's of the burger franchises yet.  That means there's still opportunity for you to swoop in and sell a competing product to capture  that first place position. BSR equals bestseller rank. So high BSR plus high review count equals  established market leader. That's already kind of saturated. We're going to ignore those.

05:40 But high  BSR plus low review count equals a land grab is still in progress. It means this is still up for  the taking for you. So let's do some easy division real quick to find what those products are. that  show the most opportunity. How do we do that? Very simple. We're going to add a new column. We're  going to say equals. Click on the ratings count and divide it by the bestseller rank for this  category.

06:02 Boom. Click the check box. We don't want this as a monetary number. We want this just  as a number. Now, we are going to filter and sort A to Z. Let's add a couple decimal points here.  So this product is the 40th bestselling product in the category, but it only has five ratings.  Interesting. So according to this scrape and according to this logic, this could be the  biggest opportunity in this category.

06:31 Now, this is just one way of looking at the opportunity  here. This is not the end- all beall. I'm going to cover a lot more strategies or tactics for  finding winning products. This is just one. So before you go invest your life savings in an  automatic cat feeder, just wait. There's more to this story. Now, if you see here, the least  amount of opportunity is on the best seller in the category because it already has 8800 reviews.

06:59 And the percentage of people that actually leave a rating or review on an Amazon product can vary  between 1 and 5%. Let's say it's 1%. Well, we need to take this 8800 number and multiply it by 100.  So that's 880,000. It says 6,000 people bought this in the last month. So if this product has  been for sale for like 12 years, then that number would be accurate.

07:22 It's probably more like 2% of  people buying this or leaving review, which means we would have to multiply that 8,800 by 50 and  we get about 440,000, which means that one person made millions of dollars selling this one product  on Amazon, which is kind of wild. But we don't care about this one. It's already oversaturated.  And you know what? this one here at the very top.

07:45 This might not be enough opportunity. You  can't automatically assume that this is the best opportunity in the pet beds or accessories  category. There's more to the story that we're going to cover. So, I want to find outliers. Now,  how do you do that? Well, I'm going to sort them from 1 to 50 again, how they were originally, and  just look for outliers in column F, the count of the ratings.

08:04 Okay, boom. The top six all have  thousands, if not tens of thousands of ratings, but number four here only has 727, which is very,  very interesting. And number 11 here has only 463. So you can see these are outliers. And an easy way  for spotting these outliers is to go highlight the column, click format, conditional formatting,  color scale. Click that.

08:26 Click that. Actually, we're going to click that. And we're going to look  for the green. We're going to look for the green cells that are near the top of this list because  we have them sorted from number one to number 50th best seller. So, what's standing out? This  product, this product, this product, and then some of these. Now, down here, these are dark green,  which is great, but they're also not very highly ranked as best sellers.

08:56 So, you're just going to  have to do your own research on that. Now you can start to use your beautiful brain to find reasons  why this one number four is an outlier. Okay, so we'll click on it here. What's different  about this? Well, first of all, why don't we ask Claude? I'm going to screenshot this. And then  I'm going to go to the other top four.

09:11 Screenshot this. Screenshot that. Boom. And then screenshot  number one. Now I'm going to screenshot the top four in the spreadsheet. I'm going to go back  to Claude. I'm going to add all five of those screenshots to my chat window and say, now keep  in mind, I'm going to try a different prompt where I say which one of these top four show the most  opportunity to copy.

09:38 I'm going to do that in two different windows and see if I'm right because  I want to learn different things here. In one, I want to tell Claude my hypothesis so it can  confirm or deny that hypothesis or tell me reasons why my hypothesis might be true. And in the other  one, I want it to tell me in an unbiased way which of the top four are showing the best opportunity  to copy with a competing product.

09:59 So, let's start with this. Now, let's go to a different cloud  window. While we wait for that one to spit out, upload the same five screenshots. My prompt,  which one of these four products show the best opportunity for me to compete with directly  and why? I want to import a similar product from Alibaba and sell it on Amazon. Okay, so  with the first prompt, it said, "Great eye, Chris."

10:25 Here's what jumps out. I'm not going to  read this verbatim. You can pause it and read it, but it says number four is doing so well because  the twoin-one angle is doing the heavy lifting. It's the only product in the top four that bundles  a food feeder and water dispenser together. That's amazing. Now, I could have looked at it  myself with my own two eyes and learned that, but this is better.

10:44 This is faster. And it's going  to find other things that I certainly would have missed cuz my attention to detail is absolutely  terrible. Highest rating with fewest reviews. Now, that's something that I did pick out, but remember  that's only one angle here. Gravityfed equals zero complexity. No Wi-Fi, no app, no voice recorder,  no batteries. It's simplicity means fewer returns, fewer negative reviews about stop working or app  won't connect.

11:04 Amazon's algorithm rewards low return rates. This is amazing. A lot of times  we think that consumers want all the features, all the tech, everything. But if it has all  that stuff, maybe we do want it. But if it has all that stuff, that means there's a higher  likelihood that people will return that problem due to defects. And then Amazon's algorithm  knows, wo, 3% of people are returning this one, whereas only 1% of people are returning that one.

11:27 So when people search cat feeder on Amazon, we're going to rank the one that people are returning  less of much higher because Amazon doesn't make money when we return stuff and neither does  the seller. And then it also says pricing, the $29.99 sweet spot. It matches number two  exactly, but delivers more perceived value. Two products verse one. I'm like chuckling to myself  because I'm like convincing myself to go start importing cat features, but I promise I won't.

11:51 Someone watching this can. Meanwhile, number three is 50 bucks and Amazon is literally flagging it as  price higher than typical. Review velocity matters more than review count. Okay, number one isn't  even a feeder. Okay, the top seller is almost certainly an Alibaba importer. generic brand name  sold by third party fulfilled by Amazon. This is the exact playbook you'd be running.

12:13 Okay, so if  you're sourcing a competitor from Alibaba, the gravity fed two in one design is dead simple to  manufacture. It's basically two plastic containers with gravity flow. Okay, so now we got to go find  a product just like this on Alibaba. Okay, here's what we're going to do. We're going to go back to  Oxyabs. We're going to go website Alibaba scraper Alibaba.

12:33 Search term automatic cat feeder water  dispenser twoin-1 gravity. Okay, then we're going to click submit request. Much easier than even the  Amazon scraper. Also, in case you're wondering, anytime you're scraping on OxyLabs, you don't have  to worry about Amazon, Alibaba, or any of those companies blocking you because Oxyabs is able to  bypass all of these anti-scraping measures that a lot of these tech companies have.

12:54 It's got  over 177 million IP addresses that it rotates between to protect you. Boom. All right, there's  the results. We're going to click export results. JSON response. Gonna go back to Claude. Boom.  Add photos and files. Make this a CSV. Now, while it's doing that, we're going to go to the other  Claude prompt where I basically said, "Hey, in an unbiased way, which of these four products shows  the most opportunity?"

13:17 And wouldn't you guess it, product number four is the one that it chose.  Lowest barrier to entry, still selling well, simplest to manufacture, better margin potential.  That's one thing we really have to look at. I almost forgot. There's a chance that number four  here, this beloved twoin- one gravity feeder, has low margins. Like, what if you have to pay $20  and sell it for 30 and after fees and shipping and all that, you don't make any money?

13:42 That could  be the case. We'll find out here in a minute. Oo, I like that Claude says easy to differentiate.  The listing says plastic. You could come in with a slightly upgraded version. Stainless steel  bowls, better seal design, include a mat, and immediately position above them. Beautiful.  While we're waiting for Claude to spit out that spreadsheet version, we're going to go do this  the more low tech way.

13:59 We go to alibaba.com. Right there. Boom. Image search. So, we go back to this  lovely product of ours and we're going to save the image and we're going to search Alibaba by that  image. All right, guys. I'm not going to lie, there's a lot of really similar looking products  here. Twoin one automatic food and water feeding bowl. $3.89. It's got the water on the left, the  food on the right.

14:26 Look at this one. Water on the left, food on the right. The only difference is  this one has black P plastic around the water. This one's clear. I think the clear looks better.  Honestly, you can see the water level more easily. I mean, this is a $3 product that's selling for  $30 on Amazon. This one's $155. If you order a 100 pieces, in case you're not doing the math,  that's only $150 worth of product.

14:47 Of course, shipping is going to add a lot to that, but not  as much as you'd think. And that's coming from someone that's been ordering millions of dollars  worth of electronics and other items from Alibaba and AliExpress for the last 17 years. So, let's  look at this one here. $155. You can see the levels of each. It's gravityfed 2in1. This is  amazing.

15:07 If you want it in black, I could just reach out and say, "Hey, I want this in black."  Surely they're already making it in black. So, it looks like this is 30x 30x 30 cm, which is  give or take like 10 to 12 in of each of the three dimensions. 1 kilogram, which is 2.2 lb. So, if I  were to order a hundred of these for $155 total, keep in mind, I don't need to ship it to myself.

15:29 I can ship it directly to an Amazon warehouse and they will take it from there and ship it  out to all of their other warehouses. So for seaf freight and like 30% tariffs, you're probably  looking at about four to five dollar per unit just to get it from China to Amazon. Let's say five  to be conservative. Let's say these are $2 per unit instead of $1.50 to be conservative.

15:51 That's  $7 landed to an Amazon warehouse. But Amazon's going to take a cut per unit sold. Because of  the dimensions of this item, it pushes you past what Amazon calls its large standard size category  and into their large bulky category, which means you're going to pay between $10 and $15 in Amazon  fees. That includes everything. It includes their shipping from Amazon to the consumer.

16:15 Everything,  storage, and all that. So, your total fees, cost, imports, tariffs, taxes, everything per  unit sold is going to be between $16 and $21, leaving you a net profit of $9 per unit if you  sell it at the same price as these other guys, which is a 30% net profit margin, 30%. Which is  really, really good for Amazon. That's like what Amazon FBA fulfilled by Amazon sellers used to  make 5 to 15 years ago.

16:42 And it's only possible because of this research that we're doing. Most  people when they're selling on Amazon, they just find a category that they like. Like I like going  to the gym. Chris like gym. Chris imports. And so everyone's importing gym equipment or supplements  or clothing, shoes, whatever. Buy with data, sell with emotion. That's a Shannon Gene quote.

17:05 Now, if  we really want to get good with this, we'll order a slightly smaller version to get us away from  that bulky category and into the large category. that would save us like $3 a unit. So, if we  could sell this for $28 instead of 30 and make it just a little bit smaller, then we will net out  ahead. We'll make an extra dollar per unit and our conversion rate might even be higher because it's  a cheaper product.

17:27 Okay, I almost forgot that we downloaded all of the Alibaba scrape results.  We'll see how those differ to the image search results. We're going to take that. We're going to  start in our Google sheet. And I love how it has a column forQ, minimum order quantity, it says the  name of the supplier, how many years in business, the URL to the product here, and then we can  just do this.

17:49 We can just filter and sort by price. And let's make this look a little cleaner.  So, which one has a low price and a low minimum order quantity? Just so happens that the one we  just looked at anecdotally is the number one. It has the cheapest price and ah 100 minimum order  quantity, but with a cheap price, it's fine. And you know what? It's a brand new supplier.

18:10 So, you  could look at that negatively saying like, ah, I don't know, are they reputable? They might not be.  Or you could look that at that positively and say, "These guys are really hungry to make a name for  themselves or they're willing to sell at a very small profit margin or even at a loss so they can  get their first customers." We won't really know which is true until we test.

18:28 Okay, let's do two  more categories and I want to give you four more strategies on how to look at this to best ensure  that you make a lot of money in doing this. Okay, now what's a category that is not going to go  out of style? anytime soon. Health and wellness. Coincidentally, when Jeff Bezos launched Amazon,  he said to himself, "What are people never going to stop wanting?

18:49 They're never going to stop  wanting fast delivery. We're only going to want faster and faster delivery forever. We're only  going to want cheaper and cheaper prices forever. We're only going to want higher and higher quality  forever, right? So, I don't see a future where humans want to be less healthy. I think that's  a trend that's only going to keep growing.

19:03 So, we'll go health and wellness next. We'll find a  winning product and then we'll round this out with my favorite category, books and education. Very  unsexy, very boring, very, very profitable. Okay, so we're going to go back to these ID codes, foam  rollers, massage guns, sports recovery products, health and household. The shorter ID numbers  are the more broad categories, and I want to go broad right here.

19:30 So, instead of going like  very niche on foam rollers, I just want to see health and household. So, we're going to copy  this. We're going to go back to Oxyabs. Hit the drop down. Amazon. We're going to go boom. Best  sellers. We're going to paste that browse node ID. Parsing is true. You probably remember all this  already. Amazon domain is.com. Location.

19:46 We'll do the same zip code that we did before. Local,  United States, English in my case. Boom. Submit request. Boom. There we go. Took about 30 seconds.  We're going to click export. You know the drill. We're going to convert the JSON to CSV. Okay,  there it is. We got a new tab here called Health Amazon. Paste that in. We got clickable URLs. And  you already know what we're going to do.

20:11 Okay, first of all, lots more ratings in the health and  wellness category. That's a good sign. Hundreds of thousands. Holy crap. Paper towels, toilet paper,  makes sense. Batteries. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. All right. Now, before you think, "Ah, this is  too crowded. Oh, this is too competitive. How am I going to compete with Bounty and Scott and Amazon  Basics?

20:31 Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. Just because something seems saturated doesn't  mean it's saturated. It just means that it's a popular category. It really has no correlation  on if there's more demand than supply in that category or not. We're going to have to learn that  for ourselves with this hard data. So, which one in the top 50 has the lowest ratings count?

20:50 Okay,  these paper towels right here. That's interesting. We're going to do conditional formatting. Boom.  Boom. Lower is better in this case. Paper plates. Electrolytes. Okay. Element electrolytes. Three  ply paper towels. Okay. So, I already know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "How can I  compete with Bounty and Dude Wipes?" And yeah, stop.

21:14 We're not going to be importing toilet  paper and paper towels from China. Obviously, that's unrealistic. But what this is telling  us is the volume of buyers coming through these categories is outrageous. So, we want to find  a tangential category that we can sell to. So, what we're going to do now, we're going to take  this scrape and scrap it. We're going to scrap the scrape and then get another ID for a tangential  Amazon category such as paper towel holders, bamboo kitchen accessories because bamboo is  so hot

21:40 right now. Stuff like that. Kitchen accessories that they can use alongside these  things. So, we can still piggyback on the amount of volume that's flowing through Amazon on these  exact products. So, I've got the node ID for paper towel holders. We're just going to find best  sellers of those. So, we're going to go back to Oxyabs, paste in that node ID.

21:59 Boom. I'm going  to keep everything else the same. And then start scraping that. Okay. Boom. There we go. 50 paper  towel holders and other kitchen accessories sorted by bestseller rank. And then we've highlighted the  green ones to look extra interesting here. This one is the eighth best seller and only has 136  ratings. So, let's look at what it is.

22:17 Paper towel holder, wall mount, self- adhesive, no drill or  drilling. I wonder if that's why. Five bucks. Holy crap. Stainless steel for five bucks. How the heck  are they getting this? So, let's go find out. Oh, man. So, here's what I did. I went to Alibaba. I  did the image search just like I did before. And what do you know? 40 cents to $1.77 for the same  item.

22:44 Amazing. And I really like this one because it's small enough that we can get it shipped much  more cheaply without having to go through seaf freight. I mean, that is the exact same picture.  So, you can apply the same magic, same strategy, same math that we did to the pet accessories  here. And it's pretty clear there's opportunity here. I mean, if you look at this 15,000 ratings,  if 2% of those people who purchased it rated it, then that's 750,000 sales for this stupid thing  right here.

23:15 Look, 8,000 people bought it in the last month. Incredible. But the question is,  what other kinds of arbitrage opportunities can we find in the Amazon scraping results? Okay,  so we've been looking at the gap between the bestseller rank and the number of ratings, which  is great, but what else is there? Well, for one, I like to look at the one star test.

23:36 That's  what I call it. You don't just want to read the negative reviews. You want to count the one star/  negative reviews by review type. What are they all complaining about? Are they all complaining  about the same thing? In my experience, about 40% is the magic number. If 40% of one-star reviews  are mentioning the same quality control problem, shipping problem, coloration problem, etc.,  then there's a big opportunity because you can just take that same item, fix the problem  that everyone's complaining about, and

24:04 sell it at the same price. And remember, if Amazon sees  that your comparable product has fewer returns than the one you're competing against, they will  boost yours in the search results. Another thing is the photo matching. If you notice on this  paper towel holder, the Amazon seller used the exact same stock photo that they got from Alibaba.  That does not signal good branding or good quality to the consumer.

24:31 It's lazy. You want this product  to look like a whole company was formed around it. People want to see the product in use, not just in  a stock photo, but in a real kitchen, even if the quality of a picture isn't as good. And I cannot  emphasize enough how important that first image is on your Amazon listing. That's what people's  eyes go to first.

24:48 The titles are a mile long. They're not reading all that. They're looking at  the image. So, you cannot be too careful or too strategic with the image that you pick. And  then don't forget the variation opportunity. You can use Oxyabs to scrape items and look at all  the variations they offer in color, size, bundles, etc. Then go scrape the Q&A section and the review  section and see where people are saying words like, "I wish, I wish, I wish, wish this came in a  bigger size.

25:16 I wish this came in black or white or in a bundle." Then go back to your manufacturer or  go back to Alibaba and ask them to do that. Hey, can you do this in white? Can you do this in  black? Of course they can. And again, take close care to look at the shipping weight and dimensions  because there's opportunity there. If you see a winning product sold for 25 bucks and then you  look at the Amazon categories for sizes and what thresholds they have for fees for any given size  or weight, at what point do they get bumped

25:42 to the next highest fee tier? There's opportunity for you  to take that exact same product changing nothing except for the size of the product just a little  bit, shrink it down a little bit, either the weight or the dimensions to get it in a lower fee  tier because that could be the difference between $13 in Amazon fees and $10 in Amazon fees. And  that $3 difference will be pure profit to you.

26:11 I just can't help but screenshot these kitchen  accessories, send them over to Claude, and ask which ones it finds to be the most opportunistic  for us. So, I took a simple screenshot and said, "Okay, of all these products, which ones might  be the most profitable for us to copy and sell, and why?" All right, this is very interesting. It  likes number 28, this countertop stand, because the 4.8 rating at 25 bucks means almost no one's  returning it.

26:33 I love that. It likes this one, but it says $8 is too cheap. That's another  thing to consider is using Amazon ads to push some of these items. You're going to need a little  extra margin in there to pay for those ads. Okay, so it says to go after number 28 and 17 because  17 is heavy duty, higher price, and more margin. Super helpful. Now, I've got more strategies  to discuss, but first I want to scrape the third and final category, and that is books and  education.

27:02 So, we look over here at the category codes and we're going to go down to books and  education. Now, you'll notice that these ASIN's, these identification numbers are very low. That's  because Amazon started only selling books back in the '90s. So, the business and money category  of books was the third category that Amazon ever sold inside. But, we want to go niche here because  there's millions of books on Amazon.

27:24 We're going to go education and teaching because that's where  the real money's at. I don't know if you saw this video I posted back in December with Mindy. She  buys entire pallets of books for a dollar and makes thousands of dollars selling those same  books on Amazon and eBay used. And most of the most profitable books are in the education and  teaching categories.

27:44 So that's where we're going to look today. By the way, that video is linked  below. All right. So let's go copy that code. We go back to Oxyabs. We're going to keep it on  Amazon bestsellers. Change out the browse node ID. Keep the parsing at true. Keep the zip code  the same. We're keeping everything else the same except the product ID. Then we submit the request  and watch it scrape.

28:03 All right, our books are done scraping. So, let's get these back into our  Google sheet, which remember you can have this for free in the show notes below. Okay, here's what we  got. A lot of green here, lot of opportunity, but that's kind of a false flag because this first one  of 89,000 at the top is really throwing off the scale here because this range is all the way from  six reviews to 89,000.

28:23 So, that's not giving us an accurate picture. I'm going to fudge the numbers  here and change it to be like 30,000 to make this color shading a little more accurate because we're  not going to choose these top two anyway. So, I'm going to make this one 15,000 and this one  15,000 to make these shades of green more in line with everything else. So, first of all, the  six stands out, but then I see the 2.3 rating.

28:44 We can't trust that rating one way or another because  it's not a big enough sample size. Only six people have rated it. So, we'll ignore that altogether.  Now, let's go ahead and format these as well, which we've never done. So, we can see the ratings  that stand out the most. We're looking for green on both of these columns right here. So, I'm  going to drag them side by side.

29:05 And okay, $4. Don't love that. Let's also put the price  with conditional formatting so we can easily see that as well. Okay, so what we want to see  is green on all three of these columns as much as possible. Two out of three ain't bad. So, my  eye keeps coming back to this one right here. preschool paper crafts. This one, learn to read.  Now, there's another prompt you can run with Claude.

29:32 That's super super helpful for stuff like  this. So, I'm going to say I'm going to screenshot this. Go back to Claude. Drag the screenshot in.  And we want to learn from these titles, right? So, I'm asking Claude to say, "What commonalities do  you see in the titles of these best-selling books that I can learn from?" Okay, this is brilliant.  Almost every top performer falls under the same structure.

29:54 what it is, what it does, who it's  for. And you know what? You could use that same structure for selling anything. This is this is  good. So, let's say you want to sell on Etsy. Boom. Take these same first principles about  titles and sell printables on Etsy. They don't have to be books. They can be printables, word  searches, posters, coloring pages, doesn't matter.

30:12 Use the same principle in those Etsy titles. Oh,  and it just so happens I did a full tutorial on making and selling printables on Amazon and  Etsy. That thumbnail is right here, and you can also find that link below in the description  as well. It's saying stuff like specific patterns, stack the skills, lead with quantity, age gate  everything. This is good.

30:26 You'd think that like age gating in the title would exclude people, but  really what it does is hyper narrow down the type of buyer that you're looking for. Parents of  kids ages four to 8, 5 to 6 or whatever. Oh, and Claude says that learn to is the highest  intent keyword prefix. Let's go ahead and look at this one that we like right here. Learn to write  site words, yada yada yada.

30:47 We're going to open it up. And you're probably thinking something  like, Chris, this is dumb. I can't import kids books from China. And I'm going to say, of course  you can. Look at this. We're going to do an image search on Alibaba for this book. Come over here.  Boom. 85 cent books. And yes, those things are stupid cheap to ship because they're so small  and light.

31:06 33 books for $12. Brand new. I mean, look at this one right here. Oxford Reading Tree.  33 books. We go to Amazon. We type in Oxford Reading Tree. 33 books. 167 bucks on Amazon.  $12 on Alibaba. Now, keep in mind, buyer beware, okay, this is my disclaimer. We're not trying to  violate any trademarks or copyrights. China is not exactly known for caring about trademarks or  copyrights.

31:29 So, do your own research, be careful, be ethical. You're probably going to be much  safer ordering generic kids books or coloring books that don't have any copyrights or trademarks  attached to them whatsoever. Like for instance, this kindergarten workbook right here is only  80 cents. Go to Amazon, type in kindergarten workbook. Look at that one. It's the exact same  $7 with 8,700 reviews.

31:49 And what would you know? You go back here to our sheet, 8,700 reviews,  kindergarten workbook. That one has two out of three that are great, that are green. But let's  talk a few more strategies before we close this out. You're going to want to also look at the  rating distribution shape. And what is that? Well, you're going to use Oxyabs to scrape the  ratings again.

32:11 How many 5 4 3 2 1 ratings are there per product? And just think of it this  way. Consider a product with 4.0 average rating. And that could be mostly fivestar reviews and  just a couple one-star reviews, bringing it from five to four. Or it could be 50% fivestar and 50%  threest star reviews giving it a four average as well. Those could be two very different products  with very different complaints or compliments.

32:33 If it's mostly five stars and a few one stars, it's  probably a manufacturing defect, which is somewhat fixable. But if the ratings are more evenly  distributed across 1 2 3 4 5, then that's going to be a harder problem to solve because it could be  a fundamental problem with the product itself and not just a feature of the product that's defective  but fixable.

32:56 And another thing to do here, one of my favorite things to do is a seasonal trend  overlay. So one of the top books in this scrape is around ACT test prep. So, let's go over to Google  Trends and look at the ACT test prep over the last 5 years. Type it in. Look at that up and to  the right. Very interesting. And that's not just something that's unique to Amazon.

33:20 And of course,  we'll have to remember there is some seasonality to act test prep, but regardless of the season,  it's still trending up nonetheless. And don't be afraid of the word seasonal. You know that  Christmas tree vendor on the corner that shows up every November? That guy prints money. He doesn't  lose any sleep because he quote unquote only has a seasonal business.

33:43 He makes all of his money for  the year in two months. Seasonal is great. It's easy to plan for. And remember, another of the  top options in our sheet was trace letters. Look at that. Over the last 5 years on Google Trends,  the phrase trace letters is up and to the right. And that is not seasonal. That's a title wave. And  another strategy to look for is the Amazon choice badge.

34:05 You'll see that on listings, and it looks  about like this. So, anytime you scrape a category and multiple products have an Amazon choice badge,  that means that Amazon can't really make up their mind or decide who the category leader is. So,  with this product type, that means there's still opportunity for you to become that category  leader. And that's it.

34:21 I just showed you how to scrape and analyze Amazon products in three  different categories: pets, household supplies, and books. There's something for everyone in  this video. And I'm here to tell you today that there are still millions of dollars to be  made on Amazon. This is not sponsored by Amazon, but you got to be data driven. And don't be afraid  of the phrase data driven.

34:40 It's not as complicated as it sounds on the surface. I just showed  you. It's looking at numbers. And remember, as you watched this video, you probably thought of a  friend or a family member that might like to sell something on Amazon. Please share this with them.  It would mean the world to me if you did. You would help enable entrepreneurship. And remember,  please check out Oxyabs.

34:57 They support the channel. I use them on a regular basis. I wouldn't promote  them if I didn't love them and actually use them. So, go to oxyabs.io/cris and you can get up  to 2,000 scraped results for free. Remember, today we only scraped a couple hundred. With  my code, you don't even need a credit card. If you end up scraping more, you can use promo  code Chris for 20% off all Oxyabs credits and all Oxyabs plans. Thanks for hanging out in  the Kerner office and we will see you next

💡 Answer

Scrape Amazon bestsellers, identify products with strong sales signals but weak competition, then compare Alibaba sourcing costs and Amazon fees to find profitable price gaps.

🧠 AI Summary

Amazon product opportunities can be found by scraping bestseller data, comparing bestseller rank with review counts, investigating outliers, analyzing complaints and product variations, checking supplier costs on Alibaba, and accounting for shipping, tariffs, product dimensions, and Amazon fees. Strong opportunities often combine healthy sales with low review counts, simple manufacturing, fixable defects, weak branding, or a lower fee tier. Tangential products can benefit from demand in crowded categories without competing directly with dominant brands.

🔑 Key Points

  • High bestseller rank combined with a low review count can indicate strong demand in a category that is not yet locked up.
  • High bestseller rank and high review count usually indicate an established and potentially saturated market leader.
  • Simple products can have fewer defects, returns, and negative reviews than products with more technical features.
  • Product research should include negative-review patterns, rating distributions, product variations, listing images, seasonality, and Amazon Choice badges.
  • Crowded categories can reveal demand for tangential products rather than opportunities to sell the dominant commodity itself.
  • Product dimensions and weight can materially affect Amazon fulfillment fees and margins.
  • Book and printable titles can follow the structure of what the product is, what it does, and who it is for.
  • Generic products without trademark or copyright issues are safer sourcing targets than branded or copyrighted products.

✅ Actionable items

  • Use an Amazon best-seller scraper with the relevant browse node ID, structured parsing, the target country domain, local currency, language, and location.
  • Export the results as JSON, convert them to CSV, and organize product titles, prices, ratings, rating counts, ASINs, and URLs in a spreadsheet.
  • Calculate rating count divided by bestseller rank and sort the results to identify potential sales-rank and review-count mismatches.
  • Use conditional formatting to highlight products with strong bestseller positions and unusually low rating counts.
  • Compare promising products with competing listings and use image or keyword searches on Alibaba to find suppliers.
  • Estimate landed cost by including supplier price, shipping, tariffs, taxes, and Amazon fulfillment fees before committing to a product.
  • Review one-star reviews by complaint type and look for recurring problems affecting about 40% of negative reviews.
  • Inspect product variations, customer Q&A, and reviews for requests for different colors, sizes, bundles, or other changes.
  • Compare product dimensions and weights with Amazon fee thresholds and consider small size reductions to reach a lower fee tier.
  • Analyze the distribution of one-, two-, three-, four-, and five-star ratings rather than relying only on the average rating.
  • Check Google Trends for seasonal and long-term demand patterns.
  • Use product listing images that show the product in use instead of relying only on supplier stock photography.
  • Check whether generic versions of books or educational products avoid trademark and copyright issues before sourcing them.

💡 Business ideas

Sell a competing two-in-one gravity-fed cat feeder10:25

Source a simple food-and-water feeder and potentially improve it with stainless steel bowls, a better seal, or an included mat.

For
Amazon customers buying cat feeders.
Solves
Provides combined food and water dispensing while potentially improving product materials and sealing.
Validate by
Compare bestseller rank, rating count, competitor pricing, Alibaba supplier costs, Amazon fees, and product dimensions.
  • Two-in-one gravity-fed food and water dispenser
Sell tangential kitchen accessories21:28

Use high demand in paper towel and household categories to identify adjacent products rather than importing paper towels themselves.

For
Amazon shoppers buying household and kitchen accessories.
Solves
Captures demand from popular household categories without directly competing with major paper towel brands.
Validate by
Scrape the adjacent category, identify products with high bestseller positions and low rating counts, then compare supplier costs and fees.
  • Wall-mounted paper towel holder
  • Bamboo kitchen accessories
Improve an existing product based on recurring negative reviews23:36

Source a comparable item and fix the quality-control, shipping, coloration, or other recurring issue identified in reviews.

For
Customers dissatisfied with a specific competing product problem.
Solves
Addresses a repeated defect or customer complaint.
Validate by
Count one-star reviews by complaint type and look for a complaint appearing in about 40% of them.
    Create generic educational books27:29

    Source or produce small, lightweight educational books without attached trademarks or copyrights.

    For
    Parents and educators seeking educational materials for children.
    Solves
    Provides low-cost learning materials such as workbooks and reading resources.
    Validate by
    Scrape educational book bestsellers, compare rating counts and prices, inspect title patterns, and verify intellectual-property status.
    • Kindergarten workbooks
    • Coloring books
    • Preschool paper crafts

    🏗️ Business models

    Amazon product importing and fulfillment00:16

    Source products from China, send them to Amazon warehouses, and sell them through Amazon using Amazon fulfillment.

    1. Identify a product opportunity using Amazon bestseller data.
    2. Find a comparable supplier product on Alibaba.
    3. Estimate product, shipping, tariff, tax, and Amazon fees.
    4. Send inventory directly to an Amazon warehouse.
    5. Sell the product through Amazon.
    • Two-in-one gravity-fed cat feeder
    • Wall-mounted paper towel holder
    • Generic educational books
    Used book arbitrage27:33

    Buy books cheaply in bulk and resell them as used books on Amazon and eBay.

    1. Buy entire pallets of books for a dollar.
    2. List and sell the books on Amazon and eBay used.
    • Education and teaching books
    Digital printable publishing30:03

    Apply patterns from successful educational book titles to printables sold on Etsy or Amazon.

    1. Identify title structures used by best-selling educational products.
    2. Create printables such as word searches, posters, or coloring pages.
    3. Use similar title principles when listing the printables.
    • Printables
    • Word searches
    • Posters
    • Coloring pages

    💰 Monetization

    Amazon product sales $29.99 for the two-in-one cat feeder example; $28 was considered as a lower-price alternative. 11:40

    Generate revenue by selling imported, improved, or generic products on Amazon.

    • Cat feeder
    • Paper towel holder
    • Educational books
    Amazon advertising 26:45

    Use Amazon ads to promote products, requiring enough product margin to fund the advertising.

      Used marketplace book sales Entire pallets of books for a dollar. 27:33

      Resell inexpensive books as used inventory on Amazon and eBay.

      • Education and teaching books

      📣 Marketing

      Sales

      • Use specific, narrow titles that identify what the product is, what it does, and who it is for.
      • Lead with quantity and age-gate educational product titles to target a narrower buyer.

      Branding

      • Create product imagery that shows the product in use in a real setting.
      • Avoid relying only on identical Alibaba stock photography.
      • Differentiate through materials, seals, mats, colors, sizes, bundles, or other variations.

      Distribution

      • Ship inventory directly from China to an Amazon warehouse.
      • Use Amazon fulfillment to ship products to consumers and other Amazon warehouses.
      • Use Amazon and eBay for used book sales.

      Customer acquisition

      • Use Amazon search ranking, Amazon Choice badges, and product listings to acquire marketplace traffic.
      • Use Amazon ads when the product has enough margin to support them.

      🔍 SEO & discoverability

      Mistakes

      • Choosing products based only on personal familiarity instead of data.
      • Assuming a popular category is saturated without checking demand and supply data.
      • Relying only on average ratings instead of rating distributions and complaint types.
      • Using generic supplier stock images as the primary listing image.
      • Ignoring product dimensions and weight when estimating Amazon fees.
      • Ignoring trademark and copyright risks when sourcing branded or copyrighted books.

      Strategies

      • Use Amazon bestseller rank and Amazon Choice badges to identify discoverable product categories.
      • Use product title patterns from best-selling educational products.

      Other channels

      • Use Google Trends to evaluate long-term and seasonal demand.

      Content strategy

      • Use titles structured around what the product is, what it does, and who it is for.
      • Use specific patterns, quantity, and age targeting in educational product titles.

      Keyword research

      • The phrase “learn to” was identified as a high-intent keyword prefix for educational products.

      🧭 Frameworks

      Bestseller rank and review-count mismatch04:57
      1. Scrape bestseller rank and rating counts.
      2. Find products with strong bestseller positions and low review counts.
      3. Calculate rating count divided by bestseller rank.
      4. Investigate the most promising outliers.
      5. Validate supplier cost, fees, and product quality.
      One-star test23:36
      1. Collect negative reviews.
      2. Group complaints by type.
      3. Identify recurring quality, shipping, coloration, or other issues.
      4. Look for a complaint affecting about 40% of one-star reviews.
      5. Improve that issue in a competing product.
      Rating distribution analysis32:05
      1. Scrape the counts of five-, four-, three-, two-, and one-star ratings.
      2. Compare the shape of the distribution rather than only the average rating.
      3. Distinguish isolated manufacturing defects from fundamental product problems.
      Fee-tier optimization25:03
      1. Check the product's shipping weight and dimensions.
      2. Identify Amazon size and weight fee thresholds.
      3. Test whether a slightly smaller or lighter version fits a lower fee tier.
      4. Recalculate margin using the lower fee.

      🧰 Tools & AI usage

      • OxyLabs — Scrape Amazon bestseller listings, Amazon ratings, Amazon variations, Amazon Q&A, Amazon reviews, and Alibaba supplier data.01:00
      • Claude — Retrieve category codes, transform scraped files, and analyze product screenshots and titles.01:24
      • Google Sheets — Organize scraped product data, calculate opportunity ratios, filter results, and apply conditional formatting.03:53
      • Alibaba image search — Find visually matching supplier products and compare sourcing prices.14:04
      • Google Trends — Check seasonal and five-year demand trends for product keywords.33:08

      AI is used for

      • Find Amazon browse node IDs for product categories. — Provide the category codes required for bestseller scraping.01:24
      • Convert scraped JSON files into CSV data and complete Amazon URLs. — Make scraped data usable in Google Sheets with clickable links.03:03
      • Compare screenshots of competing products. — Identify product differences and opportunities to copy or improve.09:11
      • Evaluate which products offer the best opportunity to compete. — Assess manufacturing simplicity, margin potential, differentiation, and barriers to entry.10:17
      • Identify commonalities in best-selling book titles. — Extract reusable title structures and keyword patterns.29:23
      • Assess the profitability of kitchen accessories. — Prioritize products using ratings, price, weight, and margin potential.26:26

      📊 Numbers mentioned

      Costs

      • Estimated sea freight and about 30% tariffs for the cat feeder were approximately $4 to $5 per unit to Amazon.
      • The estimated landed cost used in the example was $7 per unit.
      • Estimated Amazon fees for the large bulky cat feeder were between $10 and $15 per unit.
      • Total estimated per-unit costs including fees, imports, tariffs, and taxes were between $16 and $21.
      • Moving the cat feeder into a lower fee category could save about $3 per unit.

      Growth

      • The cat feeder example was estimated at a $9 net profit per unit and a 30% net profit margin.
      • An Amazon review rate was described as varying between 1% and 5%.
      • An example used 8,800 reviews multiplied by 100 to estimate 880,000 purchases at a 1% review rate.
      • An example used 8,800 reviews multiplied by 50 to estimate about 440,000 purchases at a 2% review rate.
      • A paper towel holder example used 15,000 ratings and a 2% review rate to estimate 750,000 sales.

      Pricing

      • $29.99 was identified as a potential sweet spot for the two-in-one cat feeder.
      • $50 was described as higher than typical for another feeder.
      • A paper towel holder sold for $5 on Amazon.
      • A comparable paper towel holder cost $0.40 to $1.77 on Alibaba.
      • A cat feeder supplier listing showed $3.89.
      • A cat feeder supplier listing showed $155 for 100 pieces.
      • A 33-book set was described as $12 on Alibaba and $167 on Amazon.
      • A kindergarten workbook was listed at $0.80 on Alibaba and $7 on Amazon.

      Revenue

      • One seller was estimated to have made millions of dollars from one cat feeder product.

      Traffic

      • One paper towel holder listing showed 8,000 purchases in the last month.
      • One cat feeder listing showed 6,000 purchases in the last month.

      ⚖️ Advantages, risks & lessons

      Advantages

      • Data-based research reduces reliance on personal preferences when selecting products.
      • Simple products can have lower manufacturing complexity and fewer defect-related returns.
      • Small and lightweight products can reduce shipping costs.
      • Tangential products can benefit from demand in large categories without directly competing with dominant brands.
      • Product improvements based on recurring complaints can support differentiation.
      • Lower returns may improve Amazon search ranking.

      Risks

      • A high bestseller rank with few reviews is only one opportunity signal and does not guarantee profitability.
      • Shipping, tariffs, taxes, and Amazon fees can eliminate apparent product margins.
      • Large bulky products can incur higher Amazon fulfillment fees.
      • New suppliers may be less proven or reputable.
      • Branded and copyrighted products can create trademark and copyright risks.
      • Seasonal demand can affect product sales.
      • Low review counts can make average ratings unreliable.
      • A product with evenly distributed ratings may have a fundamental problem that is difficult to fix.

      Lessons

      • Buy with data and sell with emotion.
      • Popular categories are not automatically saturated.
      • Review velocity can matter more than total review count.
      • The first product image is especially important because shoppers often focus on the image rather than long titles.
      • Seasonal businesses can still be highly profitable when demand is concentrated in a short period.

      💬 Quotes

      Buy with data, sell with emotion.

      Summarizes the recommended approach of using quantitative research to choose products.17:05

      What it is, what it does, who it's for.

      Summarizes the title structure identified among best-selling educational books.29:54

      👤 People & companies

      Chris

      Video creator demonstrating Amazon and Alibaba product research.

      00:00
      Jeff Bezos

      Amazon founder referenced in a discussion of enduring consumer preferences.

      18:43
      Mindy

      Person referenced as buying book pallets for a dollar and selling books on Amazon and eBay used.

      27:33
      Shannon Gene

      Quoted for the phrase “Buy with data, sell with emotion.”

      17:05
      Amazon

      E-commerce marketplace and fulfillment platform analyzed for bestseller rankings, reviews, fees, and product sales.

      00:00
      OxyLabs

      Scraping service used to collect Amazon and Alibaba product data.

      01:00
      Alibaba

      Supplier marketplace searched for comparable products and sourcing prices.

      10:20
      Google

      Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Trends are used for organizing data and checking demand.

      01:48

      🔗 Links mentioned