Finding profitable products is the number one struggle faced by new and seasoned Amazon sellers alike. And once you’ve finally landed on a brand that seems worthy of opening an account, the digging doesn’t stop.
While products may jump out to you as profitable, what about variations of that product? Do you know which size or flavor has the most five-star reviews and is ultimately selling the most? Doing your due diligence and hunting for this bit of extra information is what separates serious sellers from slackers.
So how can you determine which variation will bring you the most bang for your buck?
Enter plug-ins such as ReviewMeta and Jungle Scout. ReviewMeta is a fantastic and free tool that helps you weed through variations and make the best product bets possible. Let’s break down how to use it and why it’s one of Todd’s go-to plug-ins.
Why ReviewMeta?
While primarily used for weeding out fake product reviews, Todd uses ReviewMeta to determine which variation is a top seller. How? When comparing variations, the number of reviews a product has directly correlates with the number of sales. So if a red watch has more reviews than the orange variation, you can safely bet the red watch is a better seller. If someone left a review post-purchase, they had to have purchased the product to begin with. Basic logic.
How To Install
Let’s start with the basics. First, you’ll want to install ReviewMeta. On ReviewMeta’s website click on browser extensions and you’ll see ReviewMeta can be installed on Firefox as well as Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer. Once installed, you should notice a blue R icon in your top toolbar.
Once you’re on Amazon, ReviewMeta can start analyzing data from the page. When browsing through a product page, the R icon will show a number. This number is ReviewMeta’s calculated review score for the product. If there’s no data for a given product, you’ll see a dash instead.
ReviewMeta automatically discounts fake reviews so there’s no need to take that extra, tedious step or worry about skewed data.
How To Use
Once you’re ready to dig through a product’s variations, click the blue R button and you’ll be taken to ReviewMeta’s website where it analyzes product information.
On ReviewMeta’s website, you’ll want to check out when a product was last analyzed under “last updated.” If it was analyzed less than a month ago, click Check For Updates. Then, in a green box at the top of the page, click Begin Report.
Quick Tip – Refresh & Repeat: If you’re getting an error message try refreshing the page. Todd always recommends refreshing the page as oftentimes ReviewMeta doesn’t grab the right information that first time around.
Next, click See ___ Product Variations and you’ll see a breakdown of reviews by variation. Keep in mind, this only shows you the variations with actual reviews. You may notice a lot of reviews are missing from this results page and, unfortunately, that’s because the majority of reviews are on the parent page, or the listing that all variations fall under. In that case, you may not get the best analysis, but you can typically still see which variation overall has more reviews and therefore more sales.
How Much To Order
Ok, so you’ve found out which variation to purchase for top sales (congrats!). But how can you determine exactly how much of that product to purchase each month?
Enter JungleScout. JungleScout plus ReviewMeta plus a little basic math equals an estimate of how much product you should purchase given the rate at which a product is selling.
So, grab a calculator – it can be as simple as your iPhone app – and let’s break it down.
First, grab the number of reviews for a given variation from ReviewMeta. Next, divide that by the total reviews on the listing. That number tells you the percentage of sales on a listing that a given variation is providing.
Next, take the total monthly sales of a listing provided by JungleScout and multiply it by the percentage (in decimal form). That tells you approximately how many units that variation is selling per month. Todd recommends keeping your inventory stocked with a 30-day supply.
Also, when purchasing a product for the first time, it’s always smart to run a small test order. So if a product looks to be selling 500 per month, order half that or even just 100 units. Remember, JungleScout is just an approximation of sales. Think of test orders as your Amazon insurance.
A quick note on JungleScout: this plug-in does not work on AmazonSmile (Amazon’s charitable site).
Other Plug-Ins
Also check out RevSeller, a plug-in that estimates your profit on a given product after Amazon fees. Todd looks for products with an ROI of at least 35 percent but ideally 40 to 50 or $3.00 net. RevSeller can also break down information by variation.
Keepa is a great tool for showing you a product’s history (sales rank, price sold, whether Amazon is selling that product, etc.). A product’s profitability and overall status on Amazon can change month-to-month so it’s important to know what you’re getting yourself into before committing to a purchase.
Overall
Hungry for more Amazon knowledge? Check out Todd’s other videos and be sure to subscribe.
Happy selling everybody.
Links
Review Meta Plugin: https://reviewmeta.com/blog/extensions/
Jungle Scout Review: https://entrepreneuradventure.com/jungle-scout-chrome-extension-plugin-tutorial-review-for-amazon-fba-wholesale-or-private-label/
DOWNLOAD Wholesale Supplier Request Email Template & Amazon Exclusive Reseller Agreement: https://entrepreneuradventure.com/emailtemplate
ALL MY AMAZON SELLER RESOURCES: https://entrepreneuradventure.com/amazon-seller-resources/
Transcript:
00:00 Right now, I’m gonna show you how to use a plug-in called Review Meta and their website to analyze listings on Amazon, variation listings to determine which variation is selling the best and also, in combination with some other plug-in’s, how you can determine approximately how many units they’re selling every month as well. Stay tuned.
00:26 What’s up, everybody? Todd Welch here from the Entrepreneur Adventure and today, I’m gonna show you Review Meta, which is a website and a plug-in for your browser that allows you to analyze the reviews on Amazon. Now, what it mainly is for is for analyzing to see if reviews are potentially fake, but what I use it for is to help me determine which variations on a listing are selling the best.
00:52 By analyzing the reviews and determining which variations have the most reviews is gonna directly correspond to which variations are selling the most. First thing’s first, down below, make sure you click on that “subscribe” button and then click the little bell to get alerted to more videos just like this to help you and your Amazon business whether you’re doing wholesale, private label, retail arbitrage, whatever it is, subscribe and click the little bell to get notified.
01:23 Number two, there is gonna be links down below to Review Meta and this plug-in as well as some of the other plug-in’s that I’m going to talk to you about. Now, Review Meta is free, so make sure you click that down below and install that plug-in to use it.
01:39 Some of the other plug-in’s I’m gonna talk about are gonna be affiliate links, so Jungle Scout and Rev Seller as well as Keepa, those links are gonna be down below as well and if you buy those products or plug-in’s through those links, I’ll get a small cut of that at no additional cost to you and it’s gonna help me create more videos like this for free to help you and your Amazon business, so I’d really appreciate that.
02:04 But without further adieu, let’s go ahead and jump in. I’m gonna show you Review Meta. So, the first thing you’re gonna wanna do is click the link down below and install the Review Meta plug-in. Alternately, if you’re on their website, you can click on “browser extensions” and you can install that on Google Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and even Safari, so whatever browser you prefer to use and once you have that installed, it’s gonna bring up a little icon right up here in the top of your browser.
02:40 It’s a small blue “R” and when you hover over it, it says, “review meta” and when you go to an Amazon listing that Review Meta is gonna brighten up, because that’s telling you that it’s able to get information from this Amazon page. Now, right now, it shows a dash right here, which means this page hasn’t been analyzed recently, otherwise it might show a number there, which is Review Meta’s calculated review score for this product.
03:14 What it does is it’s gonna rip out reviews that it thinks might be fake, so you’re not looking at potentially fake reviews. But when you’re on a review or on a listing like this, you can see there’s 814 reviews on this product and if we click on other variations here, it stays at 814 reviews, so let’s say you open an account with Simple Mills and you’re gonna sell their product. How do you know which variation is selling well?
03:47 Is it … which flavor is it and which size is it? We’ve got a bunch of sizes down here that it potentially could be, so how do you know which one’s selling well, which ones aren’t maybe selling at all? And the best way to do that is to analyze these reviews and Review Meta is a free way to do that. What I do is go ahead and just click on the Review Meta button there and it takes you over to Review Meta’s website and it analyzes the information.
04:19 Now, since this is a new listing that they haven’t analyzed, you see it went through there and it analyzed it and now it pulled up the information. If this had already been analyzed in the past, it’s just gonna bring you right to this page, it’s not gonna go through this little scroll bar that was going across and what you’re gonna wanna do is look at this last updated. And if that is maybe more than a month or so in the past, you’re gonna wanna have it check for updates.
04:51 Now, since this is just recently updated, there’s no way to check for updates again, but if it was an older version, it would show an update option here. So, here’s one that Review Meta already had data for saying, you can see right here is the “refresh report”, which since the last update here is February 7, that’s a couple months ago, I would wanna go ahead and click “refresh report” to get the latest data, so when you do that you click it and then you can click “begin report refresh” and it re-grabs that information.
05:30 Now, when it’s done … oh, something went wrong, so if this happens, occasionally it does this, so what you’re gonna wanna do is just go ahead and refresh the page and now it’s reinitializing again. I always like to refresh the page after you do a refresh, even if it looks like it went through properly, I always do a refresh, because for whatever reason, sometimes it doesn’t get the proper information.
05:57 Let’s go back to the one that we were looking at here. And so, once you have the information refreshed to maybe within the last month, you’re gonna wanna go ahead and click on the … gonna refresh this page. As you see, now there’s a lot of different information here, so it wasn’t getting the correct stuff. Product variations is what I was looking for, so I can click on “see the product variations” and now, it breaks down the reviews by the variations that it’s able to find.
06:33 So, you can see here that the very first one, Simple Mills Almond Flour crackers fine-ground sea salt, six count actually has 35 reviews, so that is the highest review count that it is finding and if I scroll down here, you can see it has all of the other variation listings that have reviews. If they don’t have reviews at all, they’re not gonna show up here, so this is only gonna show the variation versions that do have reviews.
07:06 So, what I can see here is that the best selling one is this fine-ground sea salt six count and then, the second-best selling one is this Rosemary and Sea Salt six count. Now, there are a lot of reviews that are not showing up here. You can see that … woops, we have a total of, oh lost that page. Let me go back to it here. So, you can see here we have 814 reviews, but the top listing here only has 35 and if we scroll down, all of these added up are not gonna equal that 835, so what’s happening here is a lot of these reviews are just on the generic listing.
07:51 So, what’s called the “parent”. The parent is the main listing that all other variations are under. Unfortunately, on this listing, the reviews are mostly on that parent ASIN, which means that we’re not gonna be able to get a really good analysis of this, but what I can see for sure here is that this 35 reviews on this sea salt, that one is definitely best selling and then, you have another one here, Rosemary and Sea Salt, another one fine-ground sea salt, Rosemary and Sea Salt, and then we get down to the Farmhouse Cheddar, so we can definitely see on this listing that sea salt sells the best.
08:36 Now, we’ve got some cheddar, so that one is selling okay. And then down from there, just a few reviews. This one is going to be rather difficult, but it’s gonna tell you for sure that sea salt sells the best, Rosemary and Sea Salt sells second best and Farmhouse Cheddar sells maybe third best. You can go off of that and at least get an idea potentially of how many you could sell.
09:03 But let’s find a listing that might be a little bit better here. Okay, so here is another listing that I found. This is for Time X Iron Man. You can see it’s got 2,948 reviews and lots of different color variations down here. So, if you open an account with this, which ones sell the best? Let’s go ahead and click the Review Meta and it brings me over here. You can see the report. We can refresh that here, so I’m gonna do that, let that refresh, get the latest information.
09:36 Again, I like to reload the page. Now, we have 16 product variations with reviews, so we’re gonna go ahead and click on that and you can see the very first one has 1,175 reviews. Then, we drop down to 417, 350, 327 and so on. This one is getting the most reviews and if you click on that, it opens up a new tab, brings you to that variation. So, you can see that variation is the black-gray-orange accent.
10:16 Let’s say you’re gonna make an order. How would you determine approximately how many of that is selling? I like to use a plug-in called Jungle Scout, which is gonna tell us how many units this is guesstimating it’s selling per month. Now, unfortunately, Review Meta opens up in smile.amazon, which is a donation version of Amazon and Jungle Scout doesn’t work on that, so I’m gonna jump back over to the main one and make sure that I get this ASIN, ASIN, that is the unique number that Amazon gives a listing.
10:55 And we want the black-gray-orange accent, which is the one that I opened up. The ASIN is the same, so now if I open up Jungle Scout and if you wanna learn how to use Jungle Scout, I’m gonna have a link down below from my review that I’ve done of Jungle Scout, so go ahead and check that out, but you can see Jungle Scout here is telling us that on average, or its guesstimate is this is selling the entire listing, not just the variation, the entire listing is selling 3,634 units per month.
11:34 So, what I’m gonna do is get a calculator here and use that number in conjunction with the reviews, so I’m gonna bring this over here, see if I can get all of this to show on the screen here. We’ve got 2,948 reviews here, right? And this one variation is getting 1,175 reviews. If I divide that by the total reviews on the listing, which is 2,948, that is going to give me a percentage number. This is .39, I’m gonna round down, I like to be conservative, so .39, which is 39 percent of the sales on this listing are being sold for this one variation.
12:36 Now, if I take the total monthly sales, 3,634 x .39, that is going to tell me that this variation is selling approximately 1,417 per month. And that is this one variation here. So, that’s how I would figure out approximately how many units that one is selling per month. Now, let’s go to the next one here. One thing that I like to do is if you put your mouse over the link or the image, down in the bottom left down here, you’re gonna see it shows the ASIN.
13:23 PZM and that will help you which one you’re looking at as well or you can just click on it and bring it over to the variation, but what happens sometimes, if this was a color and size variation, Amazon would not bring you to the exact size. For whatever reason, the link does not select the size, so in that case, you would have to use the hover method and look in the bottom left hand corner to see what the ASIN is to find the correct size that you’re looking for.
13:58 But in this case, it brought us right to it. The second best variation selling is black and dark blue. So again, we can use that same method with the calculator that I just did. Clear that and we are … we’ve got how many was that? 417, so 417 reviews divided by the total amount of reviews, which you’re gonna find right here, 2,948, so that one is selling approximately 14 percent. Jungle Scout, again, is saying we’re selling approximately 3,634 units.
14:48 So, 3,634 x the .14, the 14 percent, so that one is getting an estimated 508 sales per month. In that case, you have a better idea on how many units you need to order if you wanted to have a rolling 30 days. Usually, I try to keep about 30 days worth of inventory in Amazon. Now, if this is your first order, you’re probably not gonna wanna order 508, maybe order half that like 250 or maybe even 200 or 100 if you wanna be on the conservative side to make sure that when you get it in there, everything is selling properly, because these are all guesstimates.
15:33 You’re gonna wanna be conservative and make sure you’re ordering the proper amount, but that is how I use the plug-in Review Meta to analyze approximately how many units particular variation is selling. Now, some other plug-in’s that you can use, if you see this here, this is a plug-in called Rev Seller, which gives you some information here, like if I can buy this watch for $20, it’s gonna tell me that my profit after Amazon fees here is $6.83 and you can see the breakdown down below when you hover over this for the different fees.
16:12 It gives you the ROI percentage, which I usually look for at least 30 percent ROI, preferably 40 or 50 percent and at least $3 net, so this is a really good plug-in for analyzing. Also has this variation breakdown here, which you can view the different variation information as well with Review Meta and then, also you may have seen this Keepah graph, which I’ll have a link for my review of Keepah down below as well, but great graph to give you historical information on sales rank, price that it’s been sold at, whether Amazon’s selling on it and things like that.
16:54 Check that out as well. So, that is Review Meta, a great plug-in for analyzing reviews and helping you determine how much a variation is selling. Again, all those links are down below as well as reviews for Keepah, Review Meta, Jungle Scout and lots of other stuff while you’re down there, make sure you subscribe and click the bell to get notified. Or you can click right here to subscribe and check out some other awesome videos that I think you’re gonna like right over here. This is Todd Welch with the Entrepreneur Adventure signing off, happy selling everybody.
