DataHawk Research: Sports & Outdoors

DataHawk Research is a blog series that analyze the top products in a given category on Amazon US marketplace and delivers priceless insights on product trends, ratings, reviews, sponsored and more…

Hello to you, DataHawk friends 😀👋

Let’s focus today on the best selling products in the Sports & Outdoors category on Amazon for 2019 (from 01/01/19 to 01/01/20 to be exact).

Around 53,000 brands are selling in this category, the most significant amount of brands in any Amazon given category!

To give you a product typology overview, you could find in this category:

– Exercise & Fitness equipment

– Outdoor Recreational products

– Sporting equipment

– Fan Gear

In the past 10 years, Amazon has capitalized on this constantly-growing category. The eCommerce giant even offers its line of consumer goods through it’s brand AmazonBasics.

So, Buckle-up and here we go for your Sports & Outdoors recap of 2019:

In this first part, we look at the best-selling products that dominated the BSR on Amazon. To do so, we looked at the brands that had the most extended presence in Best Seller Rank with at least one product that entered the top 10 using our Amazon Product Tracking capabilities.

With our Amazon Market Research at DataHawk, we came up with an indicator that would represent this: the Presence Rate. This indicator measures the time spent by one or more products of a brand in the top 10 of a given category. We calculate it this way:

Here are the results for the Sports & Outdoors category:

Ten brands are represented, including Amazon, BalanceFrom, CamelBak, HydroFlask, Syrinx, Physix Gear Sport, ProsourceFit, HydroCell, Letscom, and UnderArmour.

The first thing that hits you while reading this chart is the granularity of this category: not a single brand has had a Presence Rate over 15% this year! It means that no brands are completely running this category, unlike the Electronics category where Amazon & Roku completely dominated it in 2019.

Is Sports (and Outdoors) a favorable market for smaller brands to perform on Amazon? It looks like it. Nevertheless, well-known international brands are missing the top spots. Aside from Under Armour, we can legitimately wonder why is Adidas, Puma, Nike (even though they stopped direct sales through Amazon), and others are not present. It’s good news for smaller sellers: With the right data-driven mindset and the right tools, you can have a steady sales velocity and reach top spots over brick and mortar giants.

It’s also interesting to notice that half of the brands with the highest presence rate made it with only 1 product, the highest share in any research article so far.

Moving on to the brands with the most products in the top 10:

BalanceFrom, CamelBak, and Amazon Basics are dominating the charts with 4, 3, and 3 products each. BalanceFrom is a brand selling on Amazon that promises to bring the Gym to anyone’s home or office. BalanceFrom has 84 products listed on Amazon US, going from Digital Body Weight to Dumbbells: the products are all about fitness and losing weight.

Let’s now discover which products stayed the longest time in the Best Seller Ranking for the Sports & Outdoor category on Amazon for this past year:

The big winner of the year is the High-Density Round Foam Roller by Amazon Basics. The competition for the keyword Foam Roller is fierce (at DataHawk, we give it a Competition score of 24%, meaning stay away from it!). With more than 90,500 monthly search volume and only 769 products ranking for this keyword, it is nevertheless a great niche.

Amazon listed this product at the price of $8.45, much lower than the average price of $38.64 for the keyword Foam Roller, which makes it super competitive. If you add the brand name of Amazon under the AmazonBasics label and the Editorial Recommendations where this product is featured, you have the perfect recipe for a Best Seller product.

Thanks to the Amazon Keyword Tracking, we were able to rank the most sponsored products for any keyword for our given period. We picked the keywords “Sports” and “Camping” 2 broad categories that will give us the ability to explore new horizons. We found 1091 products that have been sponsored for “Sports” and 1008 for “Camping” on Amazon US in 2019.

Here are the Top 3 most sponsored products for “Sports“:

The best-sponsored product for the “Sports” keyword is the Big Sport Supersize Pong by WickedBigSport , sponsored for 130 days (36% of the year). It is followed by the Baseball Pitching Machine by Franklin Sports sponsored during 98 days and the Corn Hole Outdoor Game by Backyard Champs, which has been sponsored 55 days.

Have a look at the top 3 most sponsored products for “Camping”:

The best-sponsored product for the “Camping” search query is the UltraLight Footprint Tent by Marmot. It has been sponsored for 138 days, so 38% of the year. It is followed by Headlight Flashlight by Foxelli with 96 days and Camping Lantern by Lighting EVER with 89 days.

The average price for the Top 10 is $19, the average review is as high as 5075, and the average ratings are around 4.4 out of 5.

The product with the highest price is the Wildhorn Roca Snowboard & Ski Goggles at $64, and the product that received the highest amount of reviews is the BalanceFrom Yoga Mat with 15,454 reviews which are also one of the brands that dominate the Best Seller Rank.

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