Someone we spoke to recently said she prefers to go to a store and look at products she wants because of the limited number available to make a decision from. Her view was that she found Amazon overwhelming especially when she wasn’t clear of a specific product she wanted. She said she spent ages and then she found she was getting hundreds of products on a search result and would just give up.

We’ve been fortunate enough to have had a little help from an expert online shopper who revels in the tens of thousands of products she finds online. Her view is the opposite – that she gets to see all these products without walking miles in shops and a choice of things she might not even have considered before. The speed at which she finds products has amazed us.

We figured if we had this problem, some of you might be facing the same issue and did a session to pick her brains on what her key tips were to finding products online.

A minute up front can save you hours later

The very first thing she said was when you aren’t clear about the exact product and brand, the thing to take a minute to do is to think about what you do know you want.

For instance, let’s take the example of a pushchair for your two-year-old when you go on holiday. Amazon has tens of thousands under the categorization pushchairs, prams and accessories and a few thousand for just pushchairs.

Pushing the example along, we realized we are clear we are looking for lightweight, easy folding (kind of one hand folding) pushchairs that occupy minimum space and don’t cost the moon.

Use Key Phrases like you do in Google

Our shopper then told us to use words like we would in Google on Amazon. So we used key phrase of travel push chair in Amazon. We found to our relief that it shortlisted the number of push chairs to a few thousand from the tens of thousands just a minute before.

Rely on Amazon’s Best seller lists

She said when it comes to things like shopping for others, where you don’t want to experiment and would like to stay safe, it’s best to rely on high positive feedback from a large number of other buyers.

Best sellers are great sellers because they get the right balance of quality and value on products. So we discovered this is a great list to look at.

There are two easy ways to find the best seller list.

1. Certain products are tagged best seller. If you click on the best seller tag, you are taken to the list that the product belongs to. You can see the whole list here.

2. If you go to the product information section, under the Additional Information section right under the ASIN, there are details of Best Sellers rank where you can see how the product ranks on the list. You can get to the list this way too.

Learn from Others

The ratings are a way to find out what others thought of a particular product. It also is a great way to filter down a large number of products.

Our policy for any products we show you is to apply the filter of 4 stars and above to every product we shortlist. Then we look at the products presented and select to look at 4 or 5 that have over 20 reviews first if possible.

If there are hundreds of reviews and the product is still highly rated it definitely means that these are not just paid reviews.

Our discovery was that when we did this on our travel pushchairs, it narrowed down our list to about a manageable number of 5 on the first page. That now is a list we could work with.

Do remember to keep your sort criteria as relevance. If you do sort by customer review, you end up with irrelevant products and will have to go through tens of pages to see the right ones. 

Something we discovered when we tried this method was that on some types of products such as car bottle warmers, no product had more than 4-5 reviews. So in this case we had to read all the reviews to make a decision.

Remember, Amazon has sponsored reviews

As we were getting ready to have to read the 4 or 5 products with reviews, our shopper gave us another tip.

She said that companies either waive the price of a product to get a review or send products to people to get them to give it a good rating on Amazon. Now while a bad product won’t make it through, her experience was that these sponsored reviews gloss over some of the issues with the product.

She showed us how to look at the most positive reviews on top and just scan and see if either at the top or bottom, there are the words that said the product was supplied at a discounted rate or free of charge for a review.

Those reviews in her view were to be given less importance or weight than ones marked by Amazon as verified buyers who were writing independently.

By skipping those sponsored reviews with a scan, we were able to settle on reading an easy number of reviews. We then looked at the most critical to see if they raised any issues relevant to us. We then picked a few of the longer positive reviews and read it in detail.

It still took us a while to do this but not as long and it wasn't overwhelming like it was before. ​