If you’ve been in the Amazon Influencer Program for more than a week, you already know the dirty secret: product research eats your day. You scroll the Creator Connections feed, you bounce between your storefront and the product catalog, you copy ASINs into spreadsheets, and somehow it’s 4 PM and you haven’t shot a single video. I built Oink for Influencers because I was sick of doing exactly that. Here’s how I simplify product research now, and how you can do the same without burning out before lunch.
Stop Treating Every Product the Same
The first mistake I made early on was treating every product opportunity equally. A 1% commission category looks the same as a 4% category if you’re staring at a list of ASINs. It isn’t. The single biggest lever in your daily research is filtering by what’s actually going to pay you. Inside Oink, I sort Creator Connections offers by both commission rate and category bonus before I even look at the product itself. If a brand is offering 2% on top of a 4% category, that’s a 6% effective commission and it gets pinned. A 1% offer in a 1% category? It’s noise.
Build Your Daily Research Around the 5 Pillars
I run my whole content operation off what I call the 5 Pillars: storefront health, Creator Connections cross-checks, comparison video opportunities, unavailable video matching, and net-new ASIN research. Every morning I touch each pillar in order. That sequencing is the trick. Most influencers wake up and just dive into “what should I shoot today?” — but if your storefront is bleeding dead ASINs, no new video is going to save you. Fix the leaks first, then go find new water to add to the bucket.
Use Storefront Cross Check Before You Pitch Brands
Here’s a workflow that saves me hours every week. Before I accept a Creator Connections offer or shoot a comparison video for a brand, I run a Storefront Cross Check. The tool tells me whether I already have content on that brand’s products, whether I’ve earned commissions from them in the past, and whether the brand’s ASINs are even still available on Amazon. I cannot tell you how many brands I almost shot for that turned out to have half their catalog unavailable. Five minutes of cross-checking saves a wasted afternoon of filming.
Comparison Video Schedule: Let the Tool Decide
If you’re an influencer who shoots comparison videos — and you should be, because they convert like crazy — your single biggest research bottleneck is deciding which products to compare. I stopped guessing months ago. The Comparison Video Schedule inside Oink looks at my existing storefront, identifies gaps where a comparison would slot in cleanly, and queues up suggestions ranked by likely commission impact. I just open the queue and shoot. Decision fatigue gone.
Unavailable Video Matching Is the Hidden Money Maker
This is the feature I’m most proud of and the one most influencers underuse. When an ASIN you have a video on goes unavailable, that video stops earning. Period. Most people never notice. Unavailable Video Matching scans your storefront, flags every dead ASIN, and then matches it to a live alternative ASIN that fits your existing video. You retag, the video starts earning again, and you didn’t shoot anything new. I’ve seen creators recover hundreds of dollars a month doing nothing but this.
Cut the Spreadsheet Entirely
Be honest: how many tabs and spreadsheets are you juggling right now? When I started, I had three separate Google Sheets — one for Creator Connections offers, one for storefront tracking, one for video ideas. None of them talked to each other. Half my “research time” was just keeping the sheets in sync. The whole point of Oink is that the data lives in one place, updates automatically, and surfaces what matters. If your research workflow involves manual data entry, you’re doing the work that the tool should be doing.
Set a Hard Time Limit on Research
This is mindset more than tool. I give myself 30 minutes for daily research. That’s it. If I haven’t picked my products to shoot in 30 minutes, I’m overthinking. The reason I can do that is because the system surfaces decisions instead of data. If you’re still in the data-gathering phase three hours in, you don’t have a research problem — you have a tooling problem. Solve the tooling, and the time problem solves itself.
What Simplified Research Actually Looks Like
My morning routine now: I open Oink, run the storefront health check, retag any flagged dead ASINs using Unavailable Video Matching, scan the top 10 Creator Connections offers ranked by effective commission, pull the top 3 comparison video suggestions, and pick what I’m shooting. That’s the whole process. Twenty to thirty minutes, end to end. The rest of the day is content creation — which is where the actual money is made.
If You Take One Thing From This
It’s this: research isn’t the job. Research is what gets in the way of the job. The job is filming, posting, and earning commissions. Every minute you save on research is a minute you can put into content that actually pays. That’s the entire philosophy behind Oink, and it’s why I keep building features that compress research time instead of expand it. If you want to see how this looks in practice, head over to oinkforinfluencers.com and grab the extension. Your future self — the one who’s done with research by 9 AM — will thank you.
