Success on Amazon begins with choosing the right products. If you are looking to launch new products on Amazon, the niche data given by Amazon’s Product Opportunity Explorer tool will make it easier for you to discover “unmet customer demand.”
Keep reading to learn more about this new tool and how to use it to research new product opportunities.
What is Product Opportunity Explorer?
In October 2021, Amazon launched the Product Opportunity Explorer tool, an ingenious product research tool that delivers useful insights into customer behavior and helps sellers gain a better understanding of shopper demand using real-world search data.
Straight from the horse’s mouth:
“Opportunity Explorer allows you to understand Amazon customer search and purchasing behavior to evaluate if there is unmet customer demand and an opportunity for you to meet that demand through new products. You can explore up-to-date and accurate data on customer needs and the current selection on Amazon.”
Leveraging Amazon’s accurate data, sellers can take the guesswork out of identifying high-potential products. The tool gives detailed information on what shoppers are searching for, what terms they are using for searching for a product, what they are clicking on, what they are buying and what they are not buying.
Sellers will get all the details they need to evaluate new product opportunities, expand their catalog and boost Amazon sales. The metrics they will get access to are search term volume, sales history in a given category and pricing trends.
Other metrics they can explore are how quickly gross merchandise sales in the niche have grown over time, whether a shopper’s interest in the niche is long-term or short-term, average star rating for products and the searches converted to sales.
Who can use this tool?
This new tool is available to all 3rd party sellers selling in US and DE, but it will be rolled out to other Amazon marketplaces throughout 2022.
Is there a fee?
No, this tool is available to all sellers at no charge.
Where can I find the Product Opportunity Explorer tool?
You’ll find the Product Opportunity Explorer tool in the “Growth” drop-down menu on your Seller Central dashboard.
OR
Go to this link: sellercentral.amazon.com/opportunity-explorer.
If you don’t have access to this tool, ask Seller Central support to know when you can get it or contact your Amazon marketing agency.
How does it work?
The Product Opportunity Explorer works by evaluating “niches,” – which are essentially a collection of top related customer search terms and top related clicked/purchased items. The niche will be named after the top-ranked customer search term. Search terms and products can meet more than one customer’s needs and can be in multiple niches.
Here’s what the Product Opportunity Dashboard looks like.
Amazon shows a variety of “niches” based on the current category you are selling in. In addition to suggested niches, sellers can enter a search term in the search bar or “find opportunities by categories.”
In a nutshell, the data you will be looking at won’t be for a particular category or a particular keyword, but it will be for a group of products and a group of keywords. By leveraging past data, Amazon provides data on the sales history associated with that niche over the past 90 or 360 days.
You’ll also see the following data.
Search Results page: The resulting page after searching, browsing, or filtering for niches; the results page shows summary metrics for each of the returned niches.
Image source: Amazon
Niche Details, Products Tab: This tab provides ASIN-level details on the products within the niche.
Image source: Amazon
Niche Details, Products Tab: This tab provides ASIN-level details on the products within the niche.
Image source: Amazon
How can the Product Opportunity Explorer tool help sellers?
Sellers who have no idea on what their next product would be can browse subcategories for inspiration.
Sellers can also run a search for a key term and identify how many shoppers are actually looking up for phrases relevant to that term. For example, if you’re on the fence for launching “woodland theme baby shower supplies,” you can look up the popularity of the term as well as the search volume in the past 90 and 360 days along with search volume growth percentage, average price and number of clicked products.
Sellers who aren’t looking to expand their current product portfolio can use this tool to determine a competitive price for their products. A question every Amazon seller ponders upon is, “What’s the right price for my product.” Pricing not only affects your CTR rates and conversion rates but is also a deciding factor when it comes to winning the coveted Buy Box.
By looking at the Product Opportunity Explorer tool, sellers can actually get an insight into what the market is trading at.
Is it actually better than Helium10 & Jungle Scout?
While Product Opportunity Explorer is a new tool launched by Amazon, it is not new for sellers. Amazon’s in-house product research tool is similar to third-party seller tools like Jungle Scout & Helium10. The biggest difference, however, is that while most third-party tools have to estimate the data, Amazon’s Product Opportunity Explorer tool is sharing real search data.
Besides, sellers get access to exclusive data not available on other tools. For instance, the Product Insights table shows you the number of sellers using Sponsored Ads. Analyzing this data can help sellers determine how easy or difficult it is to buy their way to the top of SERPs through Amazon PPC optimization.
But sellers who are accustomed to using sophisticated and user-friendly tools like Jungle Scout and Helium10 might find Amazon’s Product Opportunity Explorer tool a bit too tedious. We feel that the Product Opportunity Explorer should be easier to use and understand for the new sellers in the arena.
Find your next product opportunity
Sellers looking to add new products to their catalog can take advantage of Amazon’s inside data to discover new product opportunities. Until now, sellers could only guess what their customers were searching for, but with this new tool, this crucial data is now easily accessible.
Just be sure you are doing your own research and taking advice from the best Amazon consultants because the last thing you want is to tie your funding up in a product that sits in the FBA centers costing you money.
Author Bio
Tushar Kapadia has a passion for the helping customer and thrives on seeing businesses grow through the use of online eCommerce marketplaces and platforms such as Amazon and eBay and Social Media Platforms such as Facebook and
Instagram. When you speak to him, you quickly realise you get honest advice.