Lisa Harrington is the founder of Purrfect Portal.Courtesy of Lisa Harrington
Selling on Amazon has become increasingly more competitive and expensive.
BI spoke with elite sellers doing seven figures in sales about how they select products to list.
Key strategies include patenting products, calculating market potential, and solving problems.
Gone are the days when you could pick virtually anything to list on Amazon and make a profit.
“Every year gets harder,” seven-figure Amazon seller Lisa Harrington, who listed dog harnesses on the platform in 2013 before pivoting to interior cat doors, told Business Insider. “2013 was as easy as it comes: Make a great product, ship it in, make a listing, and just don’t break it. Don’t run out of stock.”
When Eugene Khayman, cofounder of the exclusive Million Dollar Sellers club, started listing fitness and kitchen items on Amazon about a decade ago, his product selection wasn’t based on data or metrics.
“It was just 100% feeling,” he said. “There wasn’t much research as far as what had traffic because such tools and data weren’t even available at that point, so it was very much like looking for a product and thinking, ‘Oh, that looks cool. Maybe I should try selling it.'”
BI asked elite sellers, including Harrington, Khayman, and Alex Yale, who runs two seven-figure Amazon brands, to weigh in on the keys to selecting a winning product.
“Try for some IP advantage if you can,” said Yale, whose Flip-It! Cap product is patent-protected. “I stay away from any Chinese-sourced products that don’t have a patent or any kind of IP protection, because within two months, if you see success on a product that you import from China, they’ll be selling it for 20% to 30% less on Amazon and competing with you.”
He explained that a major problem for e-commerce entrepreneurs in 2025 is competing with Chinese sellers who can cut the middleman by manufacturing their own products, then selling directly on Amazon. One way to avoid the competition outright is to sell patented products that nobody can copy.
That’s what Harrington does. A few years into selling interior cat doors, she decided to patent her product.
Harrington has designed and patented multiple interior cat doors.Courtesy of Lisa Harrington
“My gut told me that it was going to be a big deal, and I should really invest in intellectual property, so I found the best attorney I could and spent $10,000 on a patent application,” she said. She now has 10 patented products, and her brand, Purrfect Portal, is the No. 1 selling cat door on Amazon.
She doesn’t think her original product — dog harnesses, which profited enough in the early 2010s to fund Purrfect Portal — would survive today as an unpatented product.
“I wouldn’t be able to make any money doing it. In some cases, you’re competing with brands that are the factory or have a lower cost of goods, and so it’s really hard as an American brand to compete that way,” she said.
Harrington continued: “I think to really succeed on Amazon today, you need to have a moat — and the moat is either something that is sourced in the United States, something that is very difficult to make, or intellectual property, like a utility patent.”
The TAM, or total addressable market, is the total revenue potential for your product if it were to capture the entire market.
Calculating TAM, which you can do by multiplying the total number of potential customers by the average revenue per customer, will help you decide whether or not the market is worth going after. Is there enough demand?
That’s the first question Yale asks himself before launching any new products. If the answer is, yes, the market is big enough, he starts to think about how he could create something distinguishing from existing competitors: “What can I do better or differently than what’s out there today, so I can compel and convert customers?”
At the end of the day, if you’re looking to build a lasting brand, “You need to be in a market that has a TAM that’s big enough for you to grow,” added Khayman.
“Launch products that solve problems,” said Yale, who has found success selling eco-friendly cleaning products such as septic pods.
“If you start a brand and you’re chasing a fad, you might have a couple of great years, but over time, your sales are going to slide with the fad,” he said. If you want to build a brand that has staying power, “you do that by solving everyday problems with everyday consumers.”
Alex Yale is the founder of the cleaning brand Uncle Todd’sCourtesy of Alex Yale
Start by thinking about your own life and the problems, big or small, that you face. That’s how Harrington’s cat door business came about.
“I am a cat lady — I’ve always been a cat lady — and I really wanted an interior cat door. When I went online, there was only one option,” she said. And it wasn’t what she was looking for: “It was the quintessential, ‘I can do this better.'”
Yale recommends picking a product that people need to buy over and over again. All of his cleaning products are consumables — meaning, if his customers like the product, they’ll likely be returning to buy more.
“Selling a one-time product that you can’t get repeat purchases on is really difficult,” he said. That’s because acquiring new customers is challenging and expensive. “But my hope is that if somebody buys it once, then in six or 12 months, they’ll come back and buy it again, and I won’t have to keep acquiring that customer every single time.”
