kpetar ... if just starting out do you think it's too risky to go right into PL? Do you think it's necessary to do arbitrage first? Also, can you offer any advice or tips on how you find products? What services (if any) do you use?
Well, "risk" is always a factor in starting a new business. You can try with arbitrage, spend some $$$ and learn the ropes. Trust me, you’ll learn more from doing it than you will from any course out there.
Finding profitable products to sell on Amazon is the most overwhelming, the most difficult step of the process and probably the No. 1 thing people getting stuck with. If you don’t have a product, you are DEAD in the water. It’s the first step to a successful Amazon business, or ANY business really. If you don’t have a product to sell, you have no FBA business. At start you should check product with sourcing price $10-15/unit and needs to come in via Ocean Freight to be competitive. You are not going to find the same amount of competition because people aren’t willing to “risk” that much on a private label when there are cheaper investments. If you search for light and small product that can be shipped by air and with sourcing price between $1-$5 then you will see small profit margin and tons of competitors. All of those things that made it easy for you are also easy to others too. For a new competitor, there is very little risk of investing $1000 on product+marketing in the hopes of finding a winner.
And of course - you have to differentiate. Hard? No. Example: toothpicks. There is no simpler product, but still, you can introduce toothpicks out of an almond tree, pay some bloggers to write how are they better for your teets etc. and boom you have a different product that you can price higher than regular toothpicks.
I use Jungle scout and Unicorn smasher but the issue with this kind of program (Jungle scout) is the more users it has, the higher chance there is that another seller is seeing the same products as you. Use it just for idea validation.