Selling on Amazon How to do Private label

Whenever people talk about selling on Amazon, more often than not they are talking about Private Label.

And over the past year I have come into contact with people who view private label as the holy grail of selling on amazon.
Yet when asked as to why they want to move over to this, the answer boils down to basically: ”because everyone else is doing it and I feel like I miss out”.

So before we go deeper into the methodologies of  what it takes to launch a private label product, you need to understand what it is.

Private label is essentially a form of white labelling.
And a white label product is simply a product, where the manufacturer either allows you to sell their product with your own brand, or there simply isn’t a valid patent on it (anymore).

To put it in laymen’s terms, you take an existing product and build a brand around it.
There is a new variant of Private label, where you create your own product.
But this is definitely not for everyone, as it will cost you a lot of money (i.e. product designers and moulds alone will set you back $1000’s)

So we’re going to focus on the traditional Private Label product.

The first thing you’ll need to do is find a product niche and analyse listings.
And you keep track of things like pricing and changes in keywords for about 6 weeks.

What makes a niche viable, is if there are:
Not a lot of (the same) big brands on the first page, unless you think you can outperform companies like Coca cola… if so then be my guest.
The listings on the first page of your search term do not have a lot of (positive) reviews, because if they have it will be very hard to rank on the first page on amazon.

Now the next step, is to see if you can make a profit based on the prices you see on Amazon.
And for that, your best bet is to go to a site called Alibaba.
So let’s assume you can make a profit based on what you find.
What you then need to do, is to see if you can improve on the product of any of your existing competitors.
You do this by using your imagination, but more importantly, you have to read the negative reviews of your competition.
And depending of the complexity of your private label product, you really have to understand not only your audience, but have a deep understanding of the product as well.

The next step in all this, is to build your branding.
So you need to pick a name for your product, set up social media accounts, build a website and have a designer set up your company stylesheet, logo’s and images.
If you’re smart, you’ll also file for a trademark, so you can apply for brandgating over at Amazon.
This is not absolutely necessary, but advisable to prevent rogue sellers from hijacking your private label listing.

Now by my own calculations you’ll need about $10.000, to get all of this going.
And with all of this I mean; your first stock purchase and putting everything in place for you to launch.

So after you’ve negotiated a good price, it may be an idea to have someone overseas who checks on quality and makes sure your shipment goes out
Because even though the samples you got send look right, there is absolutely no guarantee that the mass produced item will adhere to the same quality.

And these people either work on a fixed fee basis or take a percentage of the value of the items you ship.

But let’s assume this all goes down without a hitch.
You have your product sitting in the warehouse, your listing is the best you could make it to be.

Yet nothing happens…your Private label product isn’t selling.
Now to get sales going, you mostly likely need a product like viral launch, but more importantly you need to set up an Amazon PPC campaign.

Now not unlike Google, Amazon search works on a keyword basis.
And in the realm of keywords you have a phenomenon which is called long tail keywords.

You see when most people look for a shoe , they rarely type in “shoe”.
So the key is to find a long tail search phrase people look for and inject this into your listing text, website text, social media profiles.
This can be something like :”fabulous red running sneakers”.

And this is what people rarely understand about private label:
It isn’t about making the best product.
In fact it all boils down to the fact if people find you , or not.

So above all things you need to understand marketing.
Which is why we tell most of the people who contact us through the chat, to start with Online Arbitrage.

Not only does this help you to learn the Amazon system, but it is also the fastest way to build capital.
Now if you want to learn how to do this properly we do offer an online course on this, where we not only teach to find and analyse products, but more importantly we teach you to run it like a business.