5 Amazon FBA Product Ideas for Mexican Cooking

While I’m hardly an Iron Chef, I do enjoy cooking. And one thing I love cooking is Mexican cuisine. Living just south of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in Norman, there’s plenty of inspiration for these wonderful dishes. So recently, when I was scanning the Williams Sonoma website looking for Amazon FBA product ideas, I came across this listing for Mexican Cooking Essentials: Mexican Cooking Essentials | Williams Sonoma. And as usual, when I see cool products the first thing I always think to myself is…

“Hey! These would make some great Amazon FBA product ideas!”

5 Amazon FBA Product Ideas for Mexican Cooking

Remember: While I do my best to arm you with the data you need to make good product decisions, there’s always the potential that the product may not work out. This material is meant for educational and entertainment purposes. Always do your own research.

1 – Tortilla Warmer (Opportunity 6)

What I learned with the Jungle Scout Chrome Extension Pro:

• 126 average units in sales per month. Not the highest sales in the world, but it’s nice to see a decent average among the non-outliers.
• 24 average reviews for non-outliers. So it doesn’t take a lot to combat the preexisting sellers. However, it did take a lot of sorting to get rid of some of the bigger sellers. This product is probably too competitive to get into.
• $19.22 average price. Good price, which gives us a range of about $13.50 – $24.95. Williams-Sonoma sells their version for $24.95 plus shipping, so we’re in good shape with price.
• Lot of Amazon-sold products here. We’d be competing with Big Poppa Orange here. Not a great sign, either.
• No products with “<5 sales.” So that means everyone’s selling at least a few per month. Good demand!
• FBA fees are showing $4.87. A little higher than I like for shipping fees, but not terrible.

Okay, let’s add this all up.

Demand is decent…

First, demand isn’t crazy on this, but it’s not terrible either. With 126 average sales per month, we don’t want to go crazy on a first order.

Costly to source and ship…

The Chrome Extension shows us the dimensions are about 10″ x 10″ x 6″. That means we can probably comfortably fit 200 units on a pallet according to this calculator: OnPallet’s Online Pallet Calculator.

And since we can only get 200 units (maybe 250 if we stretch) onto a pallet, we might want to try to keep that first order to 400 units to start. So right away, we have roughly $2,000 in shipping costs, or $5 per unit. Alibaba shows us we can buy these for about $3.50 each at lower order quantities. So now we’re at $8.50 per unit.

Low profit margins…

At $24.95 we’re going to lose $8.61 in Amazon fees right away. Then take out the cost of goods and leaves us with $7.84 between profit and ads. Taking a quick look at Keyword Scout, ads for “tortilla warmer” are a little pricey. And we can’t really use the 2.5 rule here, because that would make our ad costs almost 100% of that. To keep enough room for even $3.00 in profit margin (12%??? ew!) we’d have to get CPC at $0.48 per click. There’s some options to work with… but not a lot.

Verdict: Very competitive and expensive to ship. Avoid!

 

2 – Molcajete (Opportunity 5)

What I learned with the Jungle Scout Chrome Extension Pro:

• 71 average units in sales per month. Bleh! Mega low! Hope we can get low MOQs of these puppies.
• 16 average reviews for non-outliers. So it doesn’t take a lot to combat the preexisting sellers. However, it did take a lot of sorting to get rid of some of the bigger sellers. This product is probably too competitive to get into.
• $38.23 average price. Hubba hubba! These things got some room to spare in the profitability department.
• No Amazon in sight! Another good sign! Amazon isn’t selling their own version of this. There is a lot of FBM, though, which usually signifies that FBA fees are high (probably a heavy product).
• 7 became 5. Before removing the outliers with high reviews, the opportunity score was a 7. But when I took out the high review folks, it dropped to 5. That probably means there’s a lot of sellers dominating the category. My guess is that it’s hard to customize this. Looking at the search results page, almost all of these bowls are stone grey.
• FBA fees are high. Not only are these things heavy, but they’re big, too. So shipping headaches again!

Low sales, but competition isn’t terrible and the average price is awesome. Can we make money with this?

Expensive to source…

First thing’s first, I wanted to check on the cost. ’cause shipping is probably going to run us about $1000 for 150-200 units of these. Looking at Alibaba, costs are shaking out around $5-$6 per unit. So that’s going to put our landed cost at $10. Woof! BUT… don’t forget that we can sell these in the high thirties range.

Nice margins and super low PPC…

If we price it at $39.95, FBA is going to suck up about $13.50 in fees. And then we’re going to lose another $10 to costs. But that still gives us $16.50 to work with. Using the 2.5 rule, our ACoS target is about $10 and CPC target is $1.00. And that’s also awesome. Looking at Keyword Scout, top keywords are CHEAP… $0.50 for “molcajete” and “mortar and pestle” is $0.90 (that’s a 30,500 monthly search term). Get your conversions up to 10%, and you could see $11.50 in profit per sale.  That’s $816.50 in profit per month. Not super great, but still not bad, especially considering the margin.

MOQs are high…

The ONLY thing that would back me off from this product is that the Alibaba minimum order quantities are kinda high. Looks like the lowest we can do is 500 units. So we’re looking at probably $5,500ish on a first order. If we make $816.50 per month for 12 months, that’s only a return-on-investment of 278%.

Verdict: Not a terrible product… but could be costly on the front end and ROI isn’t terrific.

 

3 – Avocado Pitter (Opportunity 6)

What I learned with the Jungle Scout Chrome Extension Pro:

• 94 average units in sales per month. There’s some high sales here, but they’re taken up by big brands like Oxo (who can sell these things for less than $5 each).
• 11 average reviews for non-outliers. Low average reviews for products that aren’t, you know… Oxo.
• $10.95 average price. In the words of my favorite Sesame Street aliens… “nope nope nope nope.” Way too low.
• No Amazon in sight! Mostly FBA sellers here. Where there’s sellers, there’s profit. Maybe.
• 7 became 6. Another product that could be fool’s gold without a little research. The Oxo listings really make this look like a good product, but once you take them out it’s not so hot.
• FBA fees are low. These things are lightweight, meaning they’re cheap to ship from Amazon and probably cheap to order. Cheap enough for air freight!

Yeah, this is one of the Amazon FBA product ideas that seems good at first.

Low price point is nearly impossible to profit with…

But the thing that really turns me off is the super duper low average price point. $10.95? GUH-ross! That means after Amazon takes out their fees, we’re going to get stuck with less than $7.

Ad costs are pricey…

Taking a look on Keyword Scout, the search term “avocado pitter” doesn’t get a ton of searches. The next best thing is “avocado tool” which has a decent, but not great, search volume of roughly 3,000 per month. And then, CPC is a staggering $0.78 per month. That’ll eat up the left over $7 in a jiff.

Feel like I’m forgetting something… OH YEAH. Cost of goods!

They’re cheap to source…

You can probably air freight about 500 of these for roughly $400-$500. And the costs I’m seeing on Alibaba are about $0.75-$1.00 each. So landed we’re looking at about $2.00 per unit. The only plus side is you can get 500 for about $1,000. So there’s that.

It’s possible to make money with this product. But you’ll be pulling out your hair for months just to make a $1 in net profit a piece.

Verdict: low price means hardly any room for profit. But if you market it right, you might be able to make some money back with it.

 

4 – Lime Juicer (Opportunity 8)

What I learned with the Jungle Scout Chrome Extension Pro:

• 415 average units in sales per month. Holy moley! That’s pretty good sales, especially when you consider that I took out all the outliers.
• Tons of competitors above 100 reviews. I had to remove roughly 15 products from the list to get down to a non-outliers list. That’s a bad, bad sign.
• $13.23 average price. The high end manual juicer machines would have you believe that the average price for this niche is $29ish. But if you take out those $50+ machines, the price drops drastically.
• A lot of FBA sellers. There’s a fair amount of FBA sellers here.
• FBA fees are low. Looks like most of these lime juicers have reasonable weight and dimensions. So that’s good.

A lot of new sellers fall into this trap. They see high sales and a lightweight product and they think that they’ve hit gold. Trouble is, there’s a TON of competition on this product.

Too many competitors…

We first get a glimpse of it when we turn on the Chrome Extension (before I removed the 100+ review products, this was a opportunity 4 product). Keyword Scout further confirms this, putting click costs at $1 or more. So with just ads, you’re looking at spending $10 to get on the front page.

Price point is too low for the ad costs…

And this is a product that sells for, at most, $16.99. Amazon’s taking $5.50 of that, so we aren’t left with much for cost of goods. Alibaba’s got the nicer ones at $2-$3, and with shipping, you’re probably in the $4-$5 range.

Giveaways might work….

The only way to succeed here is through massive, massive keyword targeted giveaways. But that’s probably 300-400 units you’ll have to giveaway to even see the front page in organic ranking. So you’re talking $10,000 worth of products to start with. On a product, that even if you somehow avoid ads, probably won’t make much more than that in your first year.

Verdict: hard pass! Super duper competitive niche. You’ll lose your butt trying to compete.

 

5 – Tortilla Press (Opportunity 5)

What I learned with the Jungle Scout Chrome Extension Pro:

• 148 average units in sales per month. A lot better sales than I thought there’d be, if I’m completely honest. In fact, before I removed the 100+ review sellers, there were some sellers selling 3,000+ of these monthly!
• Some bit time competitors. You’ve got some pretty big competitors in this category. Furthermore, it’s pretty hard to customize this item.
• $48.59 average price. Wowzas in trousa’s! GRRRR-eat average price!
• A lot of FBA sellers. There’s a fair amount of FBA sellers here.
• FBA fees are high. $11.58 in FBA fees. No surprise there. It’s cast iron and it’s big.

Help me, tortilla press! You’re my only hope. So far on this list, the only thing worth getting excited about is the molcajete mortar-pestle, but even that is kind of on the pricey side. So hopefully this one can help us out.

It’s heavy…

This thing is massive. And heavy. Looking at OnPallet’s calculator, you can only get about 120 of these on a pallet. UGH. We need to have at least 450 of these, so you’re looking at almost 4 pallets. That’s going to run you probably $3,000 – $5,000 in shipping costs depending on where it’s going. Alibaba’s selling these for about $5-$6 each, and I did find some that will do lower MOQs, so that’s good. But still… that’s $14 in landed costs! That’s going to run you almost $7,000 to get started with this product.

The price point is good, but…

We’ve got the $50 price point, so that’s going to give us some room. Amazon’s going to take almost $20 out of that price first, and then we’re throwing another $14 at product costs. That leaves us with $16 for profit and ads.

Pay-per click is expensive…

So what’s Keyword Scout say? $1 per click for “tortilla press” with roughly 240 giveaways to butt our way in to the organic ranking. Not bad, but not great. That means we’re stuck with only $6 in profit on a $50 item.

Verdict: your investment is better spent on smaller products that can give you better return-on-investment.

 

See you next time with more Amazon FBA product ideas!

Hope you enjoyed this list of Amazon FBA product ideas.  Not a ton of winners this week, but they can’t always be winners. If you’ve got any questions or have a suggestion for the next 5 products I break down, leave a message in the comments below or drop me a message at [email protected]

And if you need more product ideas, be sure to grab our list of 10,000 bestselling products on Amazon.

See you soon!

NEXT: Magic: the Gathering Accessories (yeah, I’m a big ol’ nerd)