When your account has less than 1,000 listings, understanding product research and knowing what items to pick can give you a massive edge against your competitors. As your account grows to have more listings, you can become less reliant on product research but it is a great skill to have to get any account you create receiving consistent sales.

Competitors
A great way to find popular products and categories is by looking at what your competitors are selling. The easiest way to find these are by searching for the brand "AmazonBasics", almost everyone selling this will be using Amazon as their source. To find what they are selling a lot of you want to go to their seller profile and look at both their feedback and active listings. With their feedback, if you go onto "left for others", as long as they have auto feedback on, you'll be able to see the name and item number for every single item they are selling. You can also use their active listings to find out what they are selling, most sellers just leave one in stock of each item and the ones which have been sold at least once will shop up with "last one." Using both of these methods, you can start to get a really good understanding of what is being sold, we recommend to create a spreadsheet with the most popular products so you track the trends easily ready for picking off Amazon.

Research Tools
If you like the idea of using analytics to find products, using research tools is a great way to do this. There are a number you can use, some free and some paid. Terapeak is great start as it is free with any business account with a shop. Here are some of the things you can do using Terapeak:

See how products and categories are performing across all marketplaces.
Search by keyword or product and use the filters to get the information you want.
View clear, easy-to-understand statistics, graphs and charts.
Get an overview of which products and categories are popular, successful strategies for attracting buyers and potential areas to improve.

Amazon
Using Amazon itself for product research works really well as Amazon gives out so much information on what is selling right now. Amazon categories are automatically sorted to show their best selling products first. So one way is to use your information that you gathered from either of the methods above, to then work your way through the categories which look popular. We would advise to go 5-10 pages in, as these first pages will always be the ones most picked by your competitors.

The other option you have is to go to Amazons "best sellers" page. Here you will find 5 options you can select:
Best Sellers (Our biggest gainers in sales rank over the past 24 hours. Updated hourly)

Hot New Releases (Our best-selling new and future releases. Updated hourly)

Movers and Shakers (Our biggest gainers in sales rank over the past 24 hours. Updated hourly)

Most Wished For (Our products that are most often added to Wishlists and Registries. Updated daily)

Most Gifted (Our most popular products ordered as gifts. Updated daily)

This way is more time consuming as you have to work through each sub heading and you only get a maximum of two pages of products, but for small sellers it is a great way to find popular items. From this list, our personal favourite to use is "Most Gifted" and work your way through the sub-categories using your prior research. Drop shippers make up a big part of the people who send their items as gifts, so a lot of these products will in fact be ones which are selling well with your competitors.