Navigating the Future of E-Commerce: How Amazon’s Product Opportunity Explorer Shapes Market Strategies

Everyone is looking for ways to give their e-commerce business an edge over the competition. However, most aren’t getting the best out of the tools that are available to them. The Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer (POE) is one of those tools when it comes to Amazon Sellers, this is a research tool on Amazon’s e-commerce platform which offers insights into evolving customer search trends, product demands, and profitable market niches.e

A product opportunity assessment prevents wasting time and resources on subpar opportunities while identifying those with the best potential to succeed. Product research is crucial in e-commerce as it identifies market demand, reveals gaps for innovation, reduces risk, informs pricing and marketing strategies, and ensures alignment with consumer needs and competitive landscapes. What better way to gain an edge over your competitors?

In the Amazon marketplace, the right product at the right time is the difference between success and obscurity. Sellers are constantly seeking that edge to decipher the complexity of consumer trends and market demands. Amidst this, tools have emerged that act as navigational aids, translating the vast sea of data into actionable insights.

These tools are more than just analytical instruments; they are the keys to unlocking market potential, offering a glimpse into unmet consumer needs and hidden market niches. For sellers, understanding these subtleties and aligning their strategies accordingly is not just about staying afloat but about charting a course to success in Amazon’s ever-shifting e-commerce waters.

Understanding and capitalizing on market opportunities is paramount for sellers. Learning more about Amazon’s algorithm and how to optimize product listings for better visibility and sales with this Amazon listings optimisation guide will support your understanding and help you identify some of those opportunities. The Product Opportunity Explorer was introduced in 2021 and is designed to navigate the complex dynamics of consumer demand, emerging trends, and competitive analysis. It serves as a digital compass, guiding sellers through the intricate landscape of Amazon’s vast product categories and consumer preferences.

By offering deep insights into market niches, consumer reviews, and detailed analytics, the Product Opportunity Explorer enables sellers to make informed decisions about product development, market-entry, and competitive strategies. This tool exemplifies the fusion of technology and market intelligence, essential for sellers aiming to identify and exploit potential gaps in the market, ultimately leading to enhanced product visibility and success on Amazon.

What is the Product Opportunity Explorer?

The Product Opportunity Explorer (POE) is a research tool on Amazon’s e-commerce platform, offering insights into evolving customer search trends, product demands, and profitable market niches. The explorer aids Amazon sellers in generating innovative products or offering ideas by deepening their understanding of customer demand. This tool provides valuable data on Amazon customer search and buying habits, enabling sellers to spot unmet needs and potential opportunities for new products or offerings. It bridges the gap between current market offerings and future desired products and services.

What is the Purpose of a Product Opportunity Assessment?

A product opportunity assessment aims to prevent wastage of time and resources on subpar opportunities while identifying those with potential for success. The opportunity assessment involves evaluating new product ideas to target fresh markets, boost market share, and enhance revenue. Additionally, it includes assessing the redesign of existing products to reduce costs, increase profit margins, and ultimately elevate profitability.

3 Key Features of the POE

1. Niches

Niches are a window into specific customer needs, defined through a collection of search terms. Updated weekly, these niches help you stay ahead of market trends and customer preferences.

Soon, you’ll be able to search for specific ASINs within the Explorer. This will provide a bird’s-eye view of where your products stand in the vast Amazon marketplace. This advancement is not just about being in a niche; it’s about dominating it.

2. Customer Review Insights

The Customer Review Insights feature is a seller’s guide to understanding what customers love and don’t love in the marketplace. It’s about seeing the gaps and filling them before anyone else does.

3. Insights Feature

The insights feature doesn’t just show you the numbers; it tells you the story behind them. High search volume, yearly growth, out-of-stock rates – each metric is a piece of the puzzle to identify the perfect niche for your product.

Secondary analysis features:

• Traffic Demand Analysis: Provides a comprehensive overview of traffic demand trends over the past year, essential for understanding market interest.
• Demand Fluctuation Insights: Offers insights into how demand has changed in recent months (3-6 months), helping to anticipate market shifts.
• Sales Volume Data: Indicates the number of units sold in the last year, giving a clear picture of the market size and potential sales volume.
• Competitive Landscape: This shows the number of competitors dominating the click share, which is crucial for understanding the level of competition in the market.
• Ease of Entry: Analyzes the influx of competitors and their success rates in your niche, aiding in assessing market saturation.
• Brand Dominance: Evaluate the click share captured by the top 5 brands or products, indicating the concentration of the market.
• Seller Level Analysis: Helps understand the caliber of competitors, allowing for the development of tailored strategies.

With the Product Opportunity Explorer, you’re not just launching a product on Amazon; you’re strategically positioning it for success. It pushes sellers one step ahead by understanding your competition, and giving customers exactly what they want. Embrace these tools, and watch your Amazon business thrive.

If you wish to look at other complimentary Amazon services that work well alongside the Product Opportunity Explorer, why not take a look at Amazon DSP advertising.

Importance of Product Research

Product research is crucial in e-commerce as it identifies market demand, reveals gaps for innovation, reduces risk, informs pricing and marketing strategies, and ensures alignment with consumer needs and competitive landscapes.

Here are the 10 key reasons why product research is vital:

1. Understanding Market Demand: Product research helps in understanding the current market demand. It identifies what products consumers are looking for, their preferences, and the trends they are following. This information is vital in developing products that meet consumer needs and desires.
2. Identifying Market Gaps: Through comprehensive research, businesses can spot gaps in the market where consumer needs are not being fully met. This opens up opportunities for creating innovative products that fill these gaps, thereby capturing a new customer base.
3. Minimizing Risks: Launching a new product involves significant investment and risk. Product research helps mitigate these risks by providing data-driven insights about the market, competition, and consumer preferences. This allows businesses to make informed decisions, reducing the likelihood of product failure.
4. Competitive Analysis: Product research includes analyzing competitors, which is crucial for understanding the competitive landscape. It helps in identifying what competitors are doing right or wrong, enabling businesses to develop strategies to differentiate their products and gain a competitive edge.
5. Price Optimization: Understanding the market through research helps in setting the right price for a product. It ensures that the pricing is competitive yet profitable, aligning with what consumers are willing to pay.
6. Tailoring Marketing Strategies: The insights gained from product research guide the development of effective marketing strategies. It helps in identifying the right target audience, the most effective marketing channels, and the key messages that resonate with potential customers.
7. Innovation and Improvement: Ongoing product research encourages continuous innovation and improvement. By staying updated on market trends and customer feedback, businesses can evolve their products to meet changing market demands, ensuring long-term success.
8. Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty: By offering products that are in demand and meet customer expectations, businesses can increase customer satisfaction. Satisfied customers are more likely to become loyal to a brand, leading to repeat business and positive word-of-mouth.
9. Long-term Planning: Product research provides insights that are essential for long-term business planning. It helps businesses forecast future trends, prepare for market changes, and plan product development roadmaps.
10. Legal and Regulatory Compliance: Product research also involves understanding the legal and regulatory environment related to a product. This is crucial to ensure that the product complies with all legal requirements, avoiding costly legal issues.

If you want to delve deeper into the strategy side of things why not take a look at this article which details how to build your strategy. The article delved into the various Amazon marketing strategies and approaches available to you.

How to access Product Opportunity Explorer on Amazon?

To access the product opportunities explorer on Amazon, begin by logging into your Amazon Seller Central account and navigating to the ‘Growth’ section, where you should select ‘Product Opportunity Explorer’ from the left sidebar. Within the Product Opportunity Explorer, you’re presented with various options: you can browse niches by category, search for specific niches, or take advantage of an example niche.

The latter is especially beneficial as it provides niche recommendations tailored to your current product offerings, thus enabling a more personalized and targeted approach to market exploration. If you can’t find this feature or just don’t have the time to delve into this feature, why not reach out and ask for some help and support.

To refine your search further, you can enter specific keywords into the search bar or utilize the “browse and filter” function. This allows you to explore different Amazon niches, filtering them based on criteria such as search volume or the total number of products currently available. Information about these niches is conveniently organized into three tabs: Products, Search Terms, and Insights, each offering unique insights to help guide your product strategy on Amazon.

Under the Products tab, you can view specific ASIN-level data, such as:

• Parent ASIN name
• Brand name
• Category
• Launch date
• Number of clicks
• Click share
• Average selling price
• Total number of reviews
• Average customer rating
• Avg. Best-Selling Rank (BSR)
• Total number of sellers and vendors

Data on specific search words can be found in the Search Terms tab of the interface, which contains the following columns:

• Search term
• Search volume
• Search volume growth
• Click share
• Search conversion rate
• Top 3 clicked products

The Insight tab provides data that can be used to evaluate the viability of releasing fresh listings, such as:

• Number of products
• % of products using sponsored products
• % of Prime
• Top products click share
• Average best-selling rate
• Average number of reviews
• Number of brands
• Top brands click share
• Average brand age by niche
• Number of selling partners
• Now that you know what’s under each tab, we’ll go over how to go about searching for and finding new product niches.

How to Discover a New Niche With the Product Opportunity Explorer

When looking for a new niche, the Product Opportunity Explorer tool is invaluable. To begin, simply type your desired product keyword into the search bar, or you can search by category. For instance, if you’re interested in selling tennis balls, you would type “Tennis Balls” into the search bar and hit the search button.

Once you’ve searched for a term, the tool provides data related to your search, including relevant niches, associated search terms, and other key metrics that are essential for making an informed decision. These metrics include:

• Customer Needs: Identified as individual niches on Amazon that align with what customers are actively seeking.
• Top Search Term: This shows the top three highest-volume search terms within the niche, offering insight into the most popular queries.
• Search Volume (past 360 days and past 90 days): This metric reveals the frequency of searches using the term. It provides a comparison between the volume over the past 360 days and the volume in the most recent 90 days, giving an understanding of both long-term and recent trends.
• Search Volume Growth (past 360 days and past 90 days): This indicates the percentage change in search volume for the niche’s search terms. It compares data from the recent year with the previous year for the 360-day column and the current quarter with the last quarter for the 90-day column, offering insights into growing or declining interest.
• Units Sold (past 90 days): This shows the total number of products sold in that niche over the last quarter, providing an idea of market demand.
• Number of Top Clicked Products: This metric reveals the number of top products that collectively received 90% of clicks post-search in that niche, highlighting the most successful products.
• Average Price (past 90 days): It represents the average selling price of all products within the niche over the past quarter.
• Price Range (past 360 days): This shows the range between the minimum and maximum selling prices over the last 360 days for products in the niche, giving an idea of pricing strategy.

By utilizing these comprehensive metrics, you can make a well-informed decision about the potential success of selling a new product, like a yoga mat, on Amazon.

Step 2 – Filter Results

Step 2 in using the Product Opportunity Explorer effectively involves filtering your search results to hone in on products that meet your specific criteria. This stage will avoid low-quality options or those that don’t align with your business goals.

Suppose you’re aiming to avoid low-priced products and also don’t want to venture into high-end pricing. In this case, you can apply a price filter by setting $50 as the minimum and $80 as the maximum. This action will refine your search results to display only those products that fall within this price range. By doing so, you ensure that the products you consider for selling fit within your desired pricing strategy, helping to target the right market segment and maintain desired profit margins. This step is crucial in streamlining your product selection process, making it more efficient and tailored to your business objectives.

Step 3 – Identifying a New Niche

When identifying a new niche, focus on specific metrics that can help identify promising niches with potential for growth and profitability. Two key metrics to concentrate on are Search Volume and Search Volume Growth, both over 360 days and 90 days. This approach provides a dual perspective: the 360-day metrics offer a broader, long-term view of market trends, while the 90-day metrics give insights into more recent changes and emerging trends.

By analyzing these metrics, you will spot niches that are experiencing significant growth in customer interest, indicating a potentially lucrative market opportunity. High search volume growth over both periods suggests a sustained increase in consumer demand, which can translate to higher sales potential.

Additionally, paying attention to the average price of products within these niches is crucial. This information helps ensure that the products you consider have a good profit margin. By selecting products in niches with a higher average price, you can aim for a balance between competitive pricing and profitability. This strategy is particularly important if your business model focuses on maximizing revenue per sale rather than purely on volume.

Step 4 – How to analyze the data

Choose 5 niches that look suitable for your business to evaluate further. Enter the niche detail page by right-clicking on the niche and opening a new tab.

5 things to bear in mind when analyzing the niche data:

1. Keyword Selection: Use traffic demand trends to identify high-potential keywords for your product listings.
2. Market Timing: Analyze demand fluctuations to determine the best time to launch or promote your products.
3. Sales Forecasting: Utilize sales volume data to forecast potential sales and set realistic targets.
4. Competitive Strategy: Assess the competitive landscape and brand dominance data to develop strategies to stand out among competitors.
5. Market Entry Decision: Consider the ease of entry and seller level analysis to decide whether to enter a particular market or niche based on saturation and competition level.

By clicking on the selected niche in the Product Opportunity Explorer to access the niche details page you’ll find five distinct tabbed sections, each offering unique insights:

1. Products: Shows products in the niche that receive 80% of the clicks.

Review the importance and ease of entry: compare the click share to total reviews for an understanding of how important positive reviews are for a niche.

Price sensitivity: compare click share to average price to understand the importance of price.

Most ideal product type: compare images and click share to identify product type and bundles consumers want.

2. Search Terms: Shows top search terms for a niche.

• Insights: Provides a view of factors like market saturation, product launch potential, and the overall customer experience.
• Ease of Entry: Evaluate the success rate of new product launches to understand the market entry.
• Brand Dominance: The product and brand click-share will identify if the niche is brand-dominated. The lower the percentage is better, but anything over 50% identifies a brand-dominated niche.
• Seller Experience: By evaluating the customer experience insights sellers can identify how seasoned they sellers are in a niche.
• Trends: Gives an understanding of the seasonality of a product niche.
• Customer Review Insights: A detailed analysis of the positive and negative reviews of a niche.

The Product Opportunity Explorer emerges as an invaluable asset for Amazon sellers, offering a comprehensive suite of tools to navigate the complexities of e-commerce. By leveraging the POE, sellers can gain a deeper understanding of market trends, consumer preferences, and competitive landscapes. This not only aids in identifying lucrative niches and untapped opportunities but also guides sellers in making data-driven decisions.

Ultimately, the POE stands as a testament to the importance of strategic research and analysis in thriving within Amazon’s competitive environment, underscoring the blend of technology and market acumen essential for e-commerce success.