Understanding Amazon’s Opportunity Explorer
The Amazon Opportunity Explorer is a free tool that allows sellers to search for products to sell on Amazon. Product suggestions are pulled from an online database of millions of potential products from across all categories and brands.
The Product Explorer was built for product research and development. It offers comprehensive and specific product, search phrases, and purchase history data. The data that this tool provides will help you as a seller better understand, project, evaluate, and ultimately decide which products will be most profitable for you. Ultimately, Amazon analytics tools are the key to success for your eCommerce business.
This article will show you how you can leverage the Amazon Opportunity Explorer.
- What is the Amazon Opportunity Explorer?
- Why Should I Use The Amazon Opportunity Explorer?
- What is a Niche Product Category?
- Why is Niche Product Data Useful?
- How Does The Amazon Opportunity Explorer Work?
- Niche Data Glossary
- How Do I Leverage The Amazon Opportunity Explorer?
- Conclusion
What is the Amazon Opportunity Explorer?
The Amazon Opportunity Explorer is a tool that lets you explore the Amazon marketplace by looking at trends, product availability, pricing, and demand. It shows you the best time to list your products and offers insights into how well each performs.
Why Should I Use The Amazon Opportunity Explorer?
Amazon sellers can leverage the Amazon Opportunity Explorer to find the most profitable products on Amazon.
The tool displays data on what people are searching for, how they find your product listings and their buying behavior.
Using this data, you identify potential customers who might be interested in purchasing your products. You can also use this information to create better-targeted content, marketing initiatives, improve customer service, and increase the revenue of your business.
How does Amazon compile product insights?
The data collected includes:
- The search term
- The number of times the search was performed
- The date it was performed
- The country in which it was performed.
This data, combined with product sales data, is used to construct the market basket of each niche.
Here’s an example; If a customer enters “cable TV” and then selects “HDTVs” as a result, we know that the customer was looking for high-definition televisions. We also collect information about what other products were viewed or purchased along with the HDTVs. This helps us identify how many people searched for cable TV but did not buy any HDTVs.
The data also includes the number of times each term was searched, how often it was viewed, and whether the search term resulted in a conversion.
Products are grouped by category, subcategory, brand, manufacturer, or other attributes.
For example, a customer may search for “iPhone” and view Apple products, but only buy iPhone accessories. In this case, the search term “iPhone” is combined with the category “Apple”. Helping to categorize with as much detail as possible the customer’s purchase tendencies.
Amazon collects information from both internal and external sources to construct the data used by the Amazon Opportunity Explorer.
Internal data includes search term data collected from the search bar on the home page, product detail pages, and other places on the site. External data comes from third parties such as Google Analytics, Bing Ads, and other places that Amazon can compile the data from.
The data is aggregated at the cluster level, and it is possible for two or more search terms to belong to the same cluster.
What is a Niche Product Category?
A niche is a group of customers with similar interests and preferences who share common barriers to buying from other retailers. Niche products are often hard to find because they do not fit well into existing categories. But this can be good news for sellers as they also tend to be less competitive than mainstream products.
Niche products may appeal to a smaller market segment. They are generally targeted at a specific audience such as women, men, parents, teens, or millennials. The size of the niche market determines how much competition exists for each niche.
In short, a niche is a group of customers who share similar interests and purchase patterns. For example, people who like cooking might be interested in buying kitchen tools, while those who enjoy hiking might be interested in camping equipment.
Niche categories are based on interest rather than geography. Niche categories are grouped by size to reflect the relative size of their market segments. The larger the niche category, the greater it has potential for growth.
Each niche also has its own unique set of characteristics. This unique set of characteristics will help to ultimately determine the revenue potential for each new product in the niche.
Why is Niche Product Data Useful?
This data is collected from all regions and across all languages. Amazon uses machine learning algorithms to analyze millions of customer searches and purchase events per month to best identify customer needs patterns.
These patterns are then combined with other data sources to categorically create each niche.
Amazon owns all the data that is collected and analyzed. This includes information from customer searches, purchases, reviews, ratings, and other data that Amazon requests. The data is then used to construct niches using machine learning algorithms. Niche construction takes place in real-time, with each update taking less than one second!
How Does The Amazon Opportunity Explorer Work?
These niche groups consist of customers with similar interests and behaviors who may be willing to pay a premium price for goods or services. This is great information for a seller to know and understand their customers or potential customers.
As mentioned, the size of a niche varies. Niche size also depends on how much time and effort it takes to reach those customers.
For example, a niche with a low barrier to entry could be very small, while a niche with high barriers to entry could be larger than a niche with lower barriers.
You can also find summarized data included in the search results. This data will help you compare related niches of different sizes.
For example, if you see that a large number of people search for “toy” but only a small percentage of those people purchase toys, then you may be able to create a toy category that meets their needs. This is great data for a seller to understand.
The algorithm continually learns from historical data and as a result, is able to predict what future search terms and products may offer excellent opportunities.
This prediction helps Amazon identify the most promising niches for new products. Niche data is updated daily with new search terms and products.
If you are an Amazon Seller you can access the Opportunity Explorer by going to Seller Central. You will see the main page that will contain suggested niches based on a history of sales and listing categories.
You can also perform specific searches in a couple of ways.
- By submitting keywords in the Opportunity Explorer search bar or clicking the browse and filter buttons. This will allow you to explore Amazon niches by different categories like search volume or number of products.
- Search volume filters that niche based on keywords from the last 90 days to a year. it will also show you the analytics and change during that timeframe.
- The total number of products option allows you to see what the marketplace identifies as part of that niche and the amount of items contained within.
The top related customer search and related clicked or purchased products are included in the niche results. It’s important to mention that there is currently a cap on the number of search terms displayed based on which search terms will have the greatest search volume.
Similarly, products in a niche are limited to the majority of clicks received and the number of purchases from the search term shown.
Once you have discovered the niche that you want to go after, Opportunity Explorer displays the data in your search results dashboard. You can then click on a specific result to see the niche details.
The glossary and table below will help you better understand what to expect from your search.
Niche Data Glossary
Amazon has provided the following glossary below that will help you better understand the data presented to you and the Amazon Opportunity Explorer.
Search Results Page
The page results after browsing, searching, or filtering for niches. This page shows of summary of metrics end data for each of the returned niches.
This tab will provide the ASIN-level details on the products within the selected niche.
This tab will provide search term-level details on the search terms within the selected niche.
Niche Details, Insights Tab
This tab will provide niche-level statistics to help you assess the launch potential for new products.
Two frequently asked questions
How can I request additional metrics to be added?
On any Niche Details page, click “request a metric link” on the top right side of the page. You will be asked to provide some basic details and to submit the form. You can ask for metrics that may apply to any part of the Opportunity Explorer experience and are not just limited to the detail page you are viewing.
How do I provide feedback?
On any Niche Details page, click Provide Feedback link on the top right side of the page. You will be asked to provide feedback about the niche you are viewing and your overall satisfaction level with the niche. This feedback is very valuable and will be used by Amazon to improve the overall usefulness of niches over time.
How Do I Leverage The Amazon Opportunity Explorer?
It may sound simple, but you can use it to answer questions like, “Do my customers know what they want?”
As we’ve spoken in-depth about in this article, Amazon collects search term data from all customers who use the site. A cluster is created for each search term.
The data collected represents what customers want, but it does not represent how much they might pay for those items.
For example, a customer may search for “shoes” and then select a specific brand of shoe from among many options.
However, the customer may also have other needs such as laces, size, style, insoles, etc., and may choose to buy several “shoes” instead.
Amazon collects this information from the customer search queries along with what they ultimately purchased. The collected data is then used to create a profile of each customer’s interests and shopping habits.
This profile is now used to match similar profiles of other customers who may also want to buy the same thing.
These matches are grouped together based on the similarity of their profiles. It is possible for a single customer to belong to many niches at once.
Cluster size refers to the number of people represented by a particular niche.
The data used is constructed and is then aggregated at the level of individual search terms and products.
With this high level of predictable purchasing insights, you can better launch products that will deliver a higher value rate and revenue for your business. Also, you will have a better understanding of where your marketing efforts and dollars should go by targeting specific customer clusters or niches.
As you become more proficient with this new tool and understand its value and how to use it to increase sales on Amazon you will find many hidden opportunities.
For example, while you are looking through the different niches, you may find keywords with a very low conversion into sales rate. This could be an excellent opportunity for your product and business and something you should target.
Another great opportunity is finding products with a low percentage of pay-per-click. Also using the Opportunity Explorer you can find products with a low percentage of Prime. Both of these are great examples of opportunities for your business and area you may want to spend your energy and marketing dollars.
Conclusion
By removing identifying particulars or details from its data, Amazon believes it can push sellers to embrace categories or niches that Amazon feels need more high-quality products.
This is not a new tool per se, and several outside companies have offered tools similar to this for some time. Amazon, however, is now hoping they can bring this function in-house to better control more of the working elements within the Amazon Marketplace.
As Ian Simpson, VP Selling Partner Services at Amazon was quoted to say, “What we want is to help take the guesswork out of launching a new product.”
Simpson went on to say that among Amazon sellers, the ones that are most successful in our marketplace are the sellers that launch one or more products that resonate well with customers.
He also provided a sneak peek at updates and what to expect in the future for the Amazon Opportunity Explorer. Amazon will soon begin assigning a rating to each niche that will rate the opportunity to launch new products within their marketplace. They also hinted at several other updates as they see results and learn how to better improve the tool. All indications are that Amazon is going to do what it takes to make the Product Opportunity Explorer successful, which is great news for sellers!
In the early stages, the feedback has been great so far from most Amazon sellers who have had the opportunity to test and have been using the Amazon Opportunity Explorer. Many have stated that the ability to look up and understand relevant search terms and phrases and get better insights into what customers want to buy and are willing to spend is invaluable.
The Amazon Opportunity Explorer helps take the guesswork out of which product to Launch and where you should put your efforts.
Want more information about how to optimize your eCommerce business on Amazon and Walmart? Check out our uber-informative DataHawk blog. You can also check out a live demo of DataHawk’s eCommerce analytics software.
