Amazon Wholesale Deal Analysis: How to Evaluate a Supplier Price List in Under 30 Minutes

A supplier sends you a price list with 800 products. You have exactly zero idea which ones are worth buying for Amazon FBA. Checking them one by one would take you the rest of the week.

Or you could do what experienced wholesale sellers do: scan the entire list in bulk, filter aggressively, and spend your time only on the 20-30 products that actually have potential. The whole process takes about 30 minutes once you know what you're doing.

Here's the exact workflow.

Before You Start: What You Need

A supplier price list in spreadsheet format (Excel, CSV). It needs at minimum two columns: a barcode (EAN or UPC) and a cost price. If it also has product names, that's helpful but not critical — the scanning tool will match barcodes to Amazon listings anyway.

A bulk scanning tool. This is what does the heavy lifting — matching each barcode against Amazon's catalog, pulling in current Buy Box prices, sales rank, seller counts, fees, and calculating your estimated profit. Tools like Profit Scanner, Seller Assistant, or BuyBotPro can handle this. Without a scanning tool, you're stuck doing manual lookups, and 800 products at 3 minutes each is 40 hours. Not happening.

Step 1: Clean the Price List (2 Minutes)

Supplier price lists are rarely perfect. Before uploading, do a quick sanity check:

Does the barcode column look right? EAN codes should be 13 digits. If you see shorter numbers, mixed formats, or blanks, clean those up or remove them. The scanner can't match garbage data.

Is the cost price in the right currency? If the supplier is in Poland but their prices are in PLN and your Amazon marketplace is .de, make sure you know the conversion. Some scanners handle currency automatically others don't.

In our case we do handle that automatically

Step 2: Upload and Scan (5-10 Minutes)

Upload the cleaned list to your scanning tool. Most tools will:

Match each barcode to an Amazon listing (ASIN). Pull in the current Buy Box price, sales rank, number of FBA sellers, product category, and dimensional data. Calculate FBA fees (referral fee + fulfillment fee + estimated storage). Calculate your estimated profit and ROI based on the cost price you provided.

Scanning 800 products typically takes 5-10 minutes depending on the tool and the marketplace. Some tools scan multiple marketplaces simultaneously — Like Profit-scanner

While it's scanning, grab a coffee. Or check seller forums. Or stare at the progress bar. Your call.

Step 3: Apply Initial Filters (3 Minutes)

This is where you eliminate 90% of the list. Apply these filters (adjust based on your experience and risk tolerance):

Minimum ROI: 20%. Below this, your margins are too thin to absorb any pricing fluctuations, returns, or storage fees. Some sellers go as low as 15% for fast-moving products, but 20% is a safer starting point.

Maximum sales rank: 50000. This varies by category — a rank of 50,000 in Grocery means very different things than 50,000 in Musical Instruments. But as a general filter, 50000 removes products that barely sell.

Minimum estimated monthly sales: 3 units. You need enough sales velocity to turn your inventory within 2-3 months. Products selling fewer than 3 units/month mean your capital is tied up too long.

Maximum FBA sellers: 10. More than 10 FBA sellers on a listing means Buy Box rotation is split so many ways that your share of sales becomes tiny. Exception: extremely high-volume products (rank under 5,000) can support more sellers.

Minimum profit: €2.00. Even if the ROI percentage looks good, absolute profit matters. Making 30% ROI on a €3 product means €0.90 profit per unit. After a single return, you're negative. Higher-priced products with €3-5+ profit per unit give you more room for error.

After filtering, your 800-product list should be down to 30-60 products. If you're left with fewer than 10, your supplier's pricing might not be competitive enough. If you have more than 100, tighten your filters.

Step 4: Quick Eyeball Check (5 Minutes)

Scan through the filtered results and remove obvious duds:

Products you can't sell. Hazmat items (if you're not Hazmat-approved), oversized products (if you don't want to deal with oversized fees), products with age restrictions, or items in categories you're not ungated for.

Private label products. If the listing has only 1 seller and it looks like their own brand, you probably can't sell on that listing without triggering an IP complaint. Remove these.

Suspicious pricing. If your scan shows 50% ROI on a well-known brand, something is probably wrong. Either the Buy Box price is a temporary spike, or there's an error in the data. Flag these for extra scrutiny in the next step.

Products with very few reviews or ratings. A listing with 2 reviews and a rank of 80,000 is risky — there's not enough data to predict whether it'll keep selling.

This quick pass should bring your list down to 15-30 products worth investigating properly.

Step 5: Manual Verification — The Critical Step (10-15 Minutes)

This is what separates profitable wholesale sellers from people who buy inventory and pray. Every single product on your shortlist needs this check.

Open each product on Amazon (most scanning tools link directly to the listing) and check:

Keepa price history (30-90 days). Is the current Buy Box price stable, or was there a recent spike? A product showing €19.99 today that was €12.99 for the previous three months is not a €19.99 product — it's a €12.99 product with a temporary price increase. Calculate your profit based on the typical price, not the current peak.

Keepa sales rank history. Is the rank consistent? A product that bounces between 5,000 and 200,000 has erratic demand. Products with stable ranks (or consistently improving ranks) are much safer bets.

Seller count trends. Keepa shows how many sellers have been on the listing over time. If the seller count recently doubled from 5 to 10, more competition just arrived and the price might drop soon. If seller count has been stable at 4-5 for months, that's a healthy listing.

Buy Box ownership. Who's winning the Buy Box most of the time? If Amazon itself is on the listing (shown as "Amazon" in the seller list), they typically win the Buy Box 70-80% of the time, and your sales will be minimal. FBA sellers generally share the Buy Box more equitably.

The listing itself. Does it look legitimate? Good images, proper title, accurate description? Are there recent negative reviews about quality issues? Is the product actually what you think it is? (I've seen scanners match EANs to wrong listings — always verify.)

Restrictions check. Can you actually sell this product? Check in Seller Central by trying to add it to your inventory. Do this before buying anything.

Spend about 30-60 seconds per product on this verification. With 15-30 products, that's 10-15 minutes. After this step, you should have 5-12 products you're genuinely confident about purchasing.

Step 6: The Buy Decision (2 Minutes)

For each surviving product, make a final decision:

How much to order? Start with 2-4 weeks of estimated sales. If the tool estimates 10 sales/month and you want to test the product, order 10-20 units. Don't order 100 units of something you've never sold before. But be careful

What's the worst case? If the price drops 15%, are you still profitable? If a new seller enters and you split the Buy Box with one more person, does the math still work? If you can answer "yes" to both, the product is resilient.

Is it worth your time? A product with €2 profit that sells 3 units/month generates €6/month. You need dozens of these to build a meaningful business. Prioritize products with higher absolute profit or higher velocity.

Red Flags to Watch For

Over time, you'll develop pattern recognition. But these red flags should trigger extra caution from day one:

The price spiked in the last 7 days. Probably temporary. Wait for it to settle before ordering.

Only 1-2 FBA sellers for months, then suddenly 5+. The deal just got discovered. Price competition is coming.

The Buy Box price is significantly higher than the lowest FBA offer. Someone's Buy Box price might be an anomaly. Check whether the lowest offer is similar to the Buy Box price.

The product has seasonal demand. Christmas decorations in March, sunscreen in November — these can be profitable but require careful timing and inventory planning. Don't accidentally buy seasonal inventory at the wrong time.

Amazon is a seller on the listing. Not an automatic dealbreaker, but expect significantly lower sales. Amazon almost always wins the Buy Box on their own listings.

The product has fewer than 50 ratings. Low review count means the listing hasn't built trust yet. Sales could be inconsistent and harder to predict.

Metrics That Actually Matter

There are dozens of data points in any scan result. Here are the ones worth focusing on:

ROI (Return on Investment). Your profit divided by your cost price. A 25% ROI means for every €100 you invest, you get €125 back. Aim for 20%+ minimum, 30%+ is excellent.

Estimated monthly sales. This tells you how fast your inventory will turn. Higher is better, but verify with Keepa — estimates are only as good as the algorithm behind them.

FBA seller count. The sweet spot is 3-8 FBA sellers. Fewer means less competition but also less validation that the product works. More means price pressure.

Absolute profit per unit. The actual euros you pocket per sale. €5+ per unit is comfortable. €2-5 is workable. Under €2 is risky because returns, storage, and price drops eat into thin margins fast.

Sales rank (BSR). Lower is better (rank 1,000 sells much more than rank 100,000). But compare within the same category — rank thresholds vary dramatically between categories.

Buy Box price stability. Not a metric most tools show directly, but you can see it on Keepa. Stable prices = predictable profit. Volatile prices = gambling.

A Real Example: Walking Through a 500-Product List

Let me show you what this looks like with real numbers.

A German distributor sends you a list with 500 products — mostly health & household items and some office supplies. Cost prices range from €2.50 to €45.00.

You upload it. The scanner runs for about 7 minutes and matches 480 products to Amazon.de listings (20 had invalid EANs or weren't listed on Amazon — that's normal).

You apply filters: minimum 20% ROI, rank under 80,000, at least 3 monthly sales, maximum 10 FBA sellers, minimum €2.50 profit. The list drops from 480 to 38 products. Already, 92% of the catalog is eliminated.

Quick eyeball pass: you remove 4 products that are Hazmat (you're not approved), 2 that are in a category you're not ungated for, and 3 where the ROI seems suspiciously high (50%+ on well-known brands — always verify these).

That leaves 29 products for manual verification.

You open Keepa for each one. Results:

12 products have stable prices and consistent ranks — strong candidates. 8 products have recent price spikes (current price is 20-30% above the 90-day average) — skip these or wait for prices to normalize. 4 products have seen their seller count double in the past month — price competition is incoming, skip. 3 products have Amazon as a seller — your Buy Box share would be minimal, skip. 2 products have fewer than 20 ratings — too risky for a first order.

Final result: 12 products worth ordering. You place an initial order of 10-20 units each, totaling roughly €1,200 in cost. Estimated monthly revenue from these 12 products: €800-1,200 with an average profit margin of 22%.

That's a solid outcome from a single supplier list, and the whole analysis took 28 minutes.

Common Deal Analysis Mistakes

Trusting the current price without checking history. This is the number one mistake. A product that "makes 35% ROI" based on today's Buy Box price might actually make 8% ROI based on the average price over the last 90 days. Always look at the historical price on Keepa before calculating profit.

Ignoring the return rate. Certain categories have higher return rates. Electronics and clothing can have 10-15% returns. Health & household is typically 2-5%. A 25% ROI product with a 15% return rate is really an 18% ROI product (roughly) after accounting for return processing fees and lost inventory.

Not accounting for storage fees. If a product sells 3 units per month and you order 30, that's 10 months of stock. Amazon charges monthly storage fees and starts adding aged inventory surcharges after 180 days. Order for 4-8 weeks of sales, not more.

Falling in love with one product. Don't order 200 units of a single product because the numbers look amazing. Spread your risk across 5-10 products. If one underperforms, the others compensate.

Skipping the restrictions check. Always, always verify you can list the product before ordering. Nothing burns money faster than buying 50 units of a product you can't sell.

How Often Should You Analyze Lists?

Successful wholesale sellers make this a routine. When a new supplier list arrives, analyze it within 48 hours — good deals don't last forever because other sellers are scanning the same lists.

Set a weekly or bi-weekly schedule: every Monday, review any new price lists that came in. Every month, re-scan your existing suppliers' lists because prices and market conditions change. A product that wasn't profitable 60 days ago might be profitable now if the Buy Box price went up or competitors dropped off.

The more lists you analyze, the better your pattern recognition becomes. After a few months, you'll start spotting profitable products within seconds of looking at the scan results.

The 30-Minute Workflow Summary

Minutes 1-2: Clean the price list. Minutes 3-12: Upload and scan. Minutes 13-15: Apply filters (ROI, rank, sellers, profit). Minutes 16-20: Quick eyeball check, remove obvious duds. Minutes 21-28: Manual verification with Keepa (price stability, rank trends, seller count, restrictions). Minutes 29-30: Final buy decisions and order quantities.

800 products in, 5-12 validated products out. That's a normal result. If a supplier consistently gives you fewer than 3 buyable products per 500 scanned, their pricing isn't competitive and you should focus your energy on finding better suppliers.

If a supplier consistently gives you 20+ buyable products per 500 scanned, hold onto that relationship. That's gold in wholesale.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I analyze a wholesale price list for Amazon FBA?

Upload the price list to a bulk scanning tool like Profit Scanner that matches EANs/ASINs to Amazon listings. Apply filters: minimum 20% ROI, BSR under 100,000, at least 10 monthly sales, no IP complaints or restrictions. Then manually verify the top 20-30 products by checking the actual Amazon listing, competition, and price stability before ordering.

What ROI should I look for when analyzing wholesale deals?

Target a minimum of 20% ROI (Return on Investment) for standard products. For slow-moving items (BSR over 50,000), aim for 30%+ ROI to compensate for longer holding times. In EUR terms, most profitable wholesale products yield EUR 3-8 net profit per unit after all fees and VAT.

How many profitable products should I expect from a 1,000-item price list?

From a typical 1,000-item wholesale price list, expect 5-15% (50-150 products) to pass initial filters, and 0-1% (0-10 products) to survive manual verification and actually be worth ordering. This is normal — most products do not meet all criteria for profitable wholesale selling on Amazon.

What BSR (Best Sellers Rank) is good for wholesale products?

For most categories on Amazon Europe, a BSR under 50,000 indicates reliable sales velocity. Under 10,000 is excellent (multiple daily sales). BSR between 50,000-100,000 can work for higher-margin products. Above 100,000 is generally too slow for wholesale unless the margin is exceptional (40%+ ROI).

How do I check if a product has IP complaints or is restricted on Amazon?

Use tools like Profit Scanner or Seller Assistant that automatically flag IP risks and restrictions during scanning. You can also manually check by searching the ASIN in Seller Central's "Add a Product" page — if you see warnings or cannot list, the product may be restricted. Check brand complaint history on Amazon's transparency report.

What is a good profit margin for Amazon wholesale in Europe?

A good net profit margin for Amazon wholesale in Europe is 15-25% after all costs (product cost, FBA fees, referral fees, VAT, shipping). Gross margins of 30-40% before Amazon fees are typical for successful products. If your net margin drops below 10%, the product is generally not worth the effort and risk