Understand Demand with Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer

Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer is a new feature that provides data and insights to help sellers gain a better understanding of customer demand for new product ideas. It’s currently in limited release in the US and German marketplaces and will roll out to all sellers in early 2022.

Amazon provides the details you need to evaluate new product opportunities and continue to grow your catalog. You'll get access to customer search volume, the current competitive landscape, and other details in areas of unmet customer demand. Then you can use that information to determine what it would cost to launch a product within a particular niche.

Most importantly, you'll have a way to quickly determine how successful a product that you're considering launching might be on the Amazon marketplace. The "everything store" continues to delight shoppers by expanding its overall product selection with items that current customers are already searching for.

In this article, we’ll explore how this feature works and explain what kind of insights Amazon provides.

What is the Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer?

Amazon’s Opportunity Explorer helps you evaluate unmet customer demand based on Amazon customer search and purchasing behavior. If you’re considering adding a new product to your catalog, the niche information provided by Amazon can make it easier to decide what to add.

You can access the tool by navigating to Growth > Product Opportunity Explorer in Seller Central. It is currently in limited release, so if you don't have the feature and are selling in the US or German marketplaces, you can contact Amazon to request access.

Opportunity Explorer insights are grouped by niche, which is a group of similar products that meet a customer need. Each niche includes a collection of top related Amazon customer search terms and the top related clicked or purchased items that represent a purchase need. The top-ranked search term (by search volume) is the name of the niche. Amazon organizes customer search terms into clusters based on the products that are viewed or purchased.

Customer search terms may meet more than one customer need and can be included in multiple niches. Opportunity Explorer displays the customer search terms with the greatest search volume. Products shown within a niche are those that receive the most clicks and purchases from those search terms.

Summary data is included to help you quickly compare related niches or different sizes. You can view additional data on each niche’s detail page, which includes current products, top search terms, and statistics about launch potential for new items in that niche.

What Kind of Data Does Amazon Share?

In short, a lot. You can search or browse for opportunities or choose to see suggested niches based on your previous sales history. If you’re searching, browsing, or filtering for niches, the Opportunity Explorer search results page will simply show you summary metrics for each niche that relates to your activity.

In addition to customer need, you’ll see the following details within Opportunity Explorer:

Top search terms
Amazon search volume for the past 360 days
Amazon search volume growth in the past year compared to volume from the previous year (past 360 days)
Amazon search volume for the past 90 days
Amazon search volume growth in the past quarter (0-90 days) compared to volume from the previous 90 days (90-180 days)
Units sold when customers bought products after entering one of the niche search terms in the past 90 days
Total number of products in the niche
Average selling price for all products in the niche over the past 90 days

Once you find an area that you'd like to explore, the niche details and associated tabs will provide much more detailed information.

Niche Details

Ready for even more information? The niche details page in the products tab provides more data at the ASIN level for the products included in the niche.

Parent ASIN name, which is the product title of the parent ASIN. This is a clickable link that directs you to the ASIN detail page.
Brands that are selling in this niche.
Category, including the path to the product within Amazon’s browse hierarchy, up to three levels deep.
Each product's Amazon launch date.
Click count shows the total number of clicks on the product after a customer sees it as a result of any search term in the niche.
Click share for the past 90 days is displayed as a percentage of the total click count for every product shown in the niche.
Average selling price for all products in the niche over the past 90 days.
Total number of reviews for the product; currently this only includes reviews where written details are provided.
Average customer rating by star; currently this only includes reviews where written details are provided.
Average Best Seller Rank for the product within its Amazon subcategory.
Average number of sellers and vendors with buyable offers on the product over the past 90 days. Any offer from Amazon retail counts as one offer, regardless of how many vendors the product may be sourced from.

Niche Details, Search Terms Tab

Dive deeper by exploring details at the search term level.

Search term (the term customers enter when they intended to purchase products in the niche).
Amazon search volume (past 90 days).
Quarter over quarter search volume growth.
Year over year search volume growth.
Click share over the past 90 days as a percentage of the total customer clicks from every search term in the niche.
Search conversion rate over the past 90 days, which is the number of purchases made for any product within the niche after this specific search term was entered by a customer divided by the total number of times the search term was entered.
The top three clicked products are ranked by the share of customer clicks they receive after the specific search term is entered.

Niche Details, Insights Tab

These niche-level statistics will help you assess launch potential for any new products you identify in Opportunity Explorer. All of the information here includes every product in the niche.

Number of products in the niche.
Percentage of products that are using Sponsored Products.
Percentage of products that were Prime-eligible for at least 50% of page views by customers over the past 90 days.
Combined click share for the top five products.
Combined click share for the top 20 products.
Average Best Seller Rank for every product in the niche.
Average number of reviews for all products in the niche.
Number of brands.
Combined click share by the top five brands.
Combined click share by the top twenty brands.
Average brand age.
Average number of buyable offers on ASINs from both sellers and vendors. (Again, offers from Amazon retail count as one offer regardless of the number of vendors the products are sourced from.)
Average selling partner age in the niche, defined as the product age of the first ASIN within the niche under a merchant.
Number of new products launched in the past 90 days.
Number of successful launches in the past 90 days, defined as having an annualized revenue amount over $50,000 in the past 30 days.
Number of new products launched in the past 360 days.
Number of successful launches in the past 360 days, defined as having an annualized revenue amount over $50,000 in the past 30 days.
Average review rating.
Average out of stock rate.
Average listing quality score.

Amazon is a competitive space, so you need a lot of information to evaluate new opportunities.

How to Evaluate Opportunities

There's a lot to consider when deciding to launch a new product. Will customers even be interested in the item? Are there opportunities for you to get on the first page of search results within the product niche? How will the new product align with your brand?

The Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer provides important details such as market size, average selling price, search term volume, and more. It's especially helpful to get information about existing competitors within the niche you're considering launching a product in.

Make sure to do your own research beyond the details provided in Opportunity Explorer. Check out competitive listings within the niche. What do current products offer and how can you meet customer demand more effectively?

If your brand has a standalone website or social media pages, try to get a sense of how current customers would view the product you're thinking about launching. Does it clearly meet a need? Social media can be a great tool for connecting with your existing audience to get their unfiltered thoughts.

Evaluate recent and "most helpful" reviews for products within the niche you're considering. What are customers saying and how can you use that information to meet demand? Exploring this user-generated content gives you a clear picture of what customers love and dislike about existing products. Armed with these details, you can create a new offering that includes the features or variations that consumers are most interested in while avoiding the things they don't like.

Of course, sorting through reviews can be very time-consuming unless you have review monitoring software like FeedbackFive to get the details for you. Simply enter competitive ASINs and FeedbackFive will populate review data so you can identify trends. Sort and filter reviews to identify opportunities within positive reviews and to see which issues are included in negative reviews.

Find Your Next Opportunity

If you're thinking about adding a new product, Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer makes competitive intelligence very accessible. However, you're almost certainly not going to be the only merchant who decides to dive into a potentially lucrative niche.

While it's helpful to understand the current lay of the land within a niche, Amazon is constantly evolving. In the time it takes to develop an awesome new product, other competitors may appear before you're able to launch. As always, it's good to have a backup plan and diversify your business by selling on your own site or other eCommerce channels. The last thing you want is to tie your funding up by investing in a niche that quickly becomes saturated.

Opportunity Explorer can certainly help take the guesswork out of researching a niche. Just be sure you're doing your own additional research and considering how launching a new product will fit with your brand.

What do you think about this new Seller Central feature? Will you use it for your business?