Whether you’re a new or seasoned seller, you’re probably always keeping an eye out for new products to sell in the Amazon store. Enter Product Opportunity Explorer, a tool that uses Amazon data to help identify what Amazon customers are looking for, how they’re searching for it, and what sellers can do to meet that demand.
What is Product Opportunity Explorer?
Identifying new products to sell can be an overwhelming process for many sellers. But Product Opportunity Explorer on Seller Central (login required) is here to help. The tool lets you see up-to-date data on what customers want, and zero-in on products to sell based on customer demand, search terms, product trends, and profitable niches. With this tool, you can do the following:
Understand customer search and purchase behavior
Product Opportunity Explorer provides insight into customer search and purchasing behavior. It can identify search terms you can target in product descriptions to maximize product listing visibility. You can also track sales trends to determine whether top-selling products sell well year-round or during certain timeframes (such as holidays, or summertime). This is helpful for positioning your products for success.
Identify unmet customer needs
Use this tool to analyze customer and competitor data, as well as reveal in-demand, profitable, and low-competition products. Using this along with the customer search and purchase data allows sellers to identify unmet customer demand and opportunities for new products.
Improve existing products
Product reviews help inform shoppers’ purchase decisions, and give you valuable insights about ways you could improve your products. The Customer Review Insights tool (found within Product Opportunity Explorer) provides a snapshot of customer sentiment for a particular product or niche. Use this to understand customer needs and continue to improve your catalog. You’ll find more on this tool below.
Bottom line—Product Opportunity Explorer is an accurate and affordable way to get aggregated data that can guide your sales strategy.
Four features of Product Opportunity Explorer
To start using Product Opportunity Explorer, hover over Growth in the main menu of Seller Central and click Product Opportunity Explorer. You can browse by category, search keywords or specific ASINs, or use example niches provided on the landing page.
While there are many things that Product Opportunity Explorer can do, here are some ideas to get you started.
1. Search by niches or ASINs
Product Opportunity Explorer provides you with two different ways to explore product opportunities:
- You can discover broader customer needs by searching for niches, such as dog beds.
- Search directly for ASINs and get detailed information on the product you are looking for.
Niches
Niches are defined as “a collection of search terms and products that represent a specific customer need.” Niches provide a consolidated view of what your competition is and the products and data around it.
Customers show their purchase needs by searching for products, and we create niches by grouping these search terms based on the types of products customers view or purchase. The same search terms and products can exist in multiple niches. Niche metrics are refreshed at the beginning of each week, and new niches are created at the start of each month.
Explore the example niches suggested by Amazon, or you can browse or search within the tool to find niches that make sense for your business. Each niche has a detail page that provides information like current products, top search terms, and statistics about new product launch potential.
A “niche” is a collection of customer search terms representing a customer need. The “dog bed” niche shows which top clicked products when customers search for “dog bed.”
ASINs
You can also search for specific ASINs within Product Opportunity Explorer to see the niches that the ASIN belongs to (in ASIN Details). Keep in mind that not all ASINs belong in niches because niches include the top products receiving clicks for those search terms.
2. Customer Review Insights
Reviews are not only important in establishing trust and credibility with customers, they can also provide helpful insight about gaps in your current catalog. Customer Review Insights helps you understand customer feedback at a glance by aggregating customer reviews for a specific product or niche.
It buckets themes into positive and negative review snippets and shows you how the review topic impacts the star rating. Use these insights during your product development process to invent product concepts and expand product lines that customers want and love.
3. Insights
Not to be confused with Customer Review Insights, the Insights feature can help you understand specific dynamics in a niche, including how many products are already available, the launch potential for new products, and overall customer experience.
For example, if search volume is high and yearly growth is trending up, you can look at the average out-of-stock rate metric to help understand the need for additional products in a niche. You can also look out for niches with a low percentage of Prime offers, as this can indicate an open space to quickly gain momentum by selling a product using Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA). FBA lets you outsource fulfillment to Amazon and offer Prime members free, two-day shipping.
You can also see how many products are currently using Sponsored Products ads. A low percentage of products with Sponsored Products ads can indicate a less competitive niche and an opportunity to launch a product with less advertising investment.
If you already have a new product idea, you can use the Insights feature to see the number of reviews for similar products, the number of products, the average rating, and so on. For example, if you discover that there are already many products with positive reviews that are similar to your product idea, you may want to look for other, less competitive, product ideas.
Within a niche, such as the “dog bed” niche, you can use the Insights feature to see how many products are in the top 80% of clicks, as well as number of reviews, number of products, average rating, and other metrics.
4. Returns
The Returns tab within the tool shares the most common reasons why customers return products in the specified niche. It also shows the percentage of how often a theme is mentioned as compared to all returns for products in that niche. A line graph illustrates the trends for each topic over time.
This information can help you identify gaps you may be able to fill with your new product, pitfalls you want to avoid, or could steer you away from certain niches if you’re looking to deal with fewer returns.
Ready to try out Product Opportunity Explorer?
We have barely scratched the surface for all that Product Opportunity Explorer can do to help you discover new product ideas. To learn more about the tool, watch our webinars on Seller University and start using Product Opportunity Explorer today.
