Do you ever wonder what customers are searching for, or what’s trending in Amazon’s store? With Product Opportunity Explorer, you no longer have to guess.
Whether you’re a new or seasoned seller, you’re probably always keeping an eye out for new products to sell in Amazon’s 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?
Product Opportunity Explorer is a tool on Seller Central (login required) that helps Amazon sellers generate new product ideas by better understanding customer demand. The tool provides insight into Amazon customer search and purchase behavior, which you can use to identify unmet customer demand and opportunities for new products. You get up-to-date data and insights on customer needs and existing products available in Amazon’s store to help you find opportunities and expand your product offerings. Product Opportunity Explorer provides sellers with more data than ever before to help you make informed decisions as you conduct product research and expand your catalog.
“If sellers look at a lot of the external alternatives, they would have to pay hundreds of dollars a year just to get similar levels of the data,” says Xiaolong, an Amazon product manager working on Product Opportunity Explorer. “And that data is not as accurate as Amazon’s data.”
You can also use the tool to understand current product offerings available in Amazon’s store, conduct product research, or plan a product launch and go-to-market strategy for a new product offering.
“We understand that identifying a new product to launch has been a very taxing process for a lot of sellers,” Xiaolong continues. “We want to make sure we help sellers streamline and simplify that process by providing accurate and intuitive data. One of the biggest sellers in Amazon’s store, with hundreds of millions of dollars of sales every year, tells us they use Product Opportunity Explorer very often, and they use it for multiple purposes. They use Product Opportunity Explorer to find new opportunities, and to choose the go-to-market plan for new products.”
Three features of Product Opportunity Explorer
1. Niches
Product Opportunity Explorer uses niches, defined as “a collection of search terms and products that represent a specific customer need.” 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.
When you start using Product Opportunity Explorer, you can 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, and use their details to help understand the potential sales performance of a new product in that space. Each niche has a detail page that provides additional information like current products within the niche, top search terms, and statistics about new product launch potential.
A feature enhancement that will allow sellers to search for specific ASINs in Product Opportunity Explorer will become available in 2023. When available, you’ll be able to search directly for your ASIN and land on the Product Deep Dive page and see the niches that the ASIN belongs to. Keep in mind that not all ASINs belong in niches because niches include the top products receiving clicks to those search terms.
Spencer is a Amazon growth consultant who helps sellers use Product Opportunity Explorer. His team acts as a bridge between sellers and product teams, and he’s seen sellers use Niches to their advantage:
Niches are probably the best place on Amazon at the moment to get a good consolidated view of what your competition is and the products and the data around it. It’s probably the best place on Amazon that you’re going to get the click share metric which I think is probably the coolest thing we have within Product Opportunity Explorer. You might see several products fighting for the top spot, but a seller will be able to see, okay, this product has 8.6% of the clicks and think, “That’s who I should be most concerned with.”
2. Customer Review Insights
Customer Review Insights converts millions of Amazon reviews into product development insights. With Customer Review Insights, you’ll now get insights on what features customers love or don’t love about current products, how those features impact your star rating, and potential feature and performance gaps in your current selection. Leverage customer reviews during your product development process to invent product concepts and to expand product lines that customers want and love.
“When we start any new product projects, we actually start with Customer Review Insights,” says Ben Zhang, co-founder & SVP of Anker Innovation, and a seller in Amazon’s store. “Specifically, we pay special attention to the top five or top three customer pain points. Over the past 10 years, many of our product innovation ideas actually comes from our customers directly, and many of them, I’ll see from the Critical Review Insights.”
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 then look to the average out-of-stock rate metric to help understand the need for additional products in a niche. This could also indicate an opportunity to 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 FBA. You can also see how many products are currently using Sponsored Products. A low percentage of products with Sponsored Products 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, 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 continue using Product Opportunity Explorer to look for other, less competitive, product ideas.
“I personally love the Insights tab,” Spencer says. “It gives sellers a lot more contextual information that they’re not going to get on a product page or anywhere else. Especially that information about Prime percentage, Sponsored Products percentage, and out-of-stock rate. That’s data that’s really neat and actionable for sellers.”
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, and how to use it, watch our webinars on Seller University, and start using Product Opportunity Explorer today.
Leave your comment