It might seem like a shortcut to success: find an influencer who’s doing well, look at their storefront, and make videos for the same products. But this strategy is actually one of the most self-defeating approaches you can take in the Amazon Influencer Program. It caps your earning potential from day one and fundamentally misunderstands what makes successful influencers successful in the first place.
Table of Contents
- The Problem with Copying
- Timing and Saturation Have Changed
- It Was Always About Opportunity, Not Products
- Learn Their Strategies, Not Their Products
- Find the Empty Room
- Watch the Full Video
The Problem with Copying
When you go to another influencer’s storefront and start picking the same products they’ve chosen, you’re voluntarily walking into a crowded room. You already know other people are promoting those products. You’re intentionally giving away clicks and commission by targeting items where the competition is guaranteed. Every click that goes to the influencer who was there first is a click that’s not going to you.
This approach cuts you off at the kneecaps before you even start. You’re not building something new—you’re trying to extract leftover value from someone else’s strategy, and there’s very little left to take.
Timing and Saturation Have Changed
The influencer whose storefront you’re copying chose those products at a specific moment in time. Back then, the product may have had low video saturation, strong sales numbers, and wide-open carousel spots. The opportunity was there, and they seized it. But by the time you discover their storefront and start replicating their picks, the landscape has completely shifted.
The carousels are more crowded now. More influencers have discovered the same products. The click share is being split among more people than when the original influencer got in. You’re arriving late to a party that’s already winding down, expecting the same experience the early guests had. It doesn’t work that way.
It Was Always About Opportunity, Not Products
Here’s the fundamental mistake most people make: they think the successful influencer is doing well because of the specific products on their storefront. That’s not what’s happening. That influencer is doing well because they identified opportunity at the right time. The product itself doesn’t generate commissions—the opportunity surrounding that product does.
A leaf blower doesn’t convert into commissions on its own. It’s the fact that the leaf blower, at the time it was selected, had strong sales, low competition, and open carousel space. Those conditions made it a winner. By the time you show up and copy it, those conditions no longer exist. The product is the same, but the opportunity is gone.
Learn Their Strategies, Not Their Products
If you genuinely want to replicate another influencer’s success, stop looking at which products they picked and start studying how they found those products. The real value isn’t in their inventory—it’s in their product research methodology. They have a system for identifying opportunity: products that are selling well, have low influencer saturation, and have open carousel spots.
That’s what you should be learning. Don’t pick their products—adopt their process. When you learn to search for opportunity the way they do, you’ll find your own products with the same favorable conditions they found. You’ll be operating from a position of strength rather than scavenging from someone else’s already-picked field.
Find the Empty Room
The most successful Amazon influencers share one common trait: they’re skilled at finding products that nobody else has discovered yet. The harder a product is to find, the better your chances of earning meaningful commissions from it. That’s the exact opposite of copying—it’s pioneering.
Instead of walking into the most crowded room you can find, invest your time in finding empty rooms. Products with open carousel spots, strong sales, and minimal competition are out there. They require real product research to find, but that’s the work that pays off. If your strategy relies on piggybacking on other influencers, you’ll always be eating scraps. Do the research, find the opportunities nobody else has found, and build something that’s truly yours.
Watch the Full Video
Watch the original video from Oink for Influencers on YouTube:
