What is Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer and How Does It Work?

The Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer is the latest—and perhaps most impactful—addition to FBA sellers’ arsenal we’ve seen in a long time. It allows you to validate product ideas by researching and identifying niches with unmet customer demand. 

There’s a lot of buzz and excitement about the release  given how game-changing this new feature can be! 

However, having just been announced at the Amazon Accelerate conference in late October, the tool is still in its beta stages. This means that not every seller has access to it yet and those that do are still trying to figure out if it lives up to the hype. 

In this post, you are going to learn how to gain access to Amazon’s Product Opportunity Explorer tool (if it doesn’t appear inside seller central), the full extent of its features, and how to use those features to uncover ideal product niches! 

Let’s not waste any more time and get straight into it!

What is Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer?

Finding and launching new  products to sell on Amazon is key to retail success. But, it can require considerable time, effort and money.

The Product Opportunity Explorer tool removes the guesswork and lengthy analysis stage by giving data insights into what buyers are searching for, clicking on, and buying, as well as not buying!

The tool helps sellers identify products that have unmet customer demand and opportunity to launch a product in that niche by providing data on sales history, pricing trends, and search volume.

Amazon has released a range of tools and services to give sellers a boost with their product research and launch. Once sellers find new products to launch on Amazon, the FBA New Selection Program is available for benefits on advertising and storage costs to start sales on a high from the get-go.

Sellers on the Brand Registry program can take advantage of Vine to build a web of strong customer reviews for just $200 per product enrolled. The Product Opportunity Explorer is currently on a Beta program with plans to extend to more sellers throughout 2021 and 2022. Until the full release this means that, for quite a few sellers, the tool will not appear in the Seller Central account. 

Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer – How to Gain Access

As the Amazon Product Explorer was only released in October, not every seller has access to it yet. The plan to roll it out slowly means that for quite a few sellers, Product Opportunity Explorer will not appear within their seller central account. 

Currently, Amazon Opportunity Explorer is:

• Only available within Amazon US and German marketplaces (as time goes on, more marketplaces will gain access to the tool)
• Only available to Brand Registered sellers
• Not available to every Amazon.com and Amazon.de seller. 

If Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer does not show in your seller central account, request access by sending an email to opportunity-explorer-request@amazon.com along with your merchant ID. Based on the experiences sellers have shared up till now, it takes approximately 2 weeks for the tool to appear inside your seller central dashboard.

To open Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer, go to the Growth tab in your seller central account and click on Product Opportunity Explorer from the dropdown menu.

Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer – A World of Insights

The Product Opportunity Explorer has a simple layout, including a search bar and a suggested niche section just below that. Within this section are various products unique to each seller based on their previous and current selling activities. 

Amazon goes over your selling history and recommends similar product niches. The intent here is:

1. To eliminate the time it takes to research different niches
2. Recommend products sellers are already familiar with
3. Suggest items that have the potential to become best-selling private label products

To illustrate how Opportunity Explorer works, let’s take the good old garlic press as an example. After searching for “garlic press,” the algorithm pulls up multiple product niches related to the query. But before we get into that, what happens when you click on the “Browse and Filter” option on the right-hand side of the search bar?

The Browse and Filter allow sellers to narrow down the search results based on set parameters. Here’s what it looks like:

With this feature, you can look up product niches for every category on Amazon. See the extra filtering options highlighted in red? Leverage those to remove unrelated products and make your search results more specific. Available filters include:

• Search volume: Search for desired niches based on the minimum and maximum search volume for the past 90 or 360 days
• Percentage change in search volume: The variance in demand for niche(s) of interest. Setting a low percentage limit eliminates products with fluctuating demand 
• Units sold: The number of units sold within a niche. Shouldn’t be too high (indicative of high demand but also high competition) or too low (not enough profits to make the business worthwhile)
• Total # of Products: Specify the minimum and maximum number of competitors for a particular niche (i.e. the total number of products closely related to your keyword)
• Average Price: The average price of products within the niche

The situational use of each filter deserves a separate section, but for now, let’s focus on understanding each feature the Product Opportunity Explorer has to offer. 

After typing in “garlic press,” we’re presented with 131 matching niches for our keyword.

Had we set filters beforehand, the number of recommendations would have gone down significantly. Once you find a product niche that matches your criteria, click on it to view more details. Let’s go with the top search result: “garlic press”. 

Now, things get interesting. For each niche that Amazon recommends, it categorizes data points into three main sections:

• Products
• Search Terms
• Insights

The product section ranks products (parent ASIN name) within the niche based on several metrics. 

The table here shows the top-ranking product for the “garlic press” keyword. Product Opportunity Explorer breaks down the ASIN’s performance and how it stacks against the competition. The ranking factors include:

• Brand name, Category, and Launch Date: self-explanatory.
• Click Count: The number of times this visitors click on the ASIN for the last 90 days
• Click Share: The number of clicks in relation to the total click count within this niche
• Average selling price: The average price at which products are sold
• Total Reviews: The number of reviews each ASIN has racked up since its inception
• Average customer rating: A high average customer rating count equals low customer returns on average
• Average BSR: How high each ASIN ranks
• Average # of Sellers and Vendors: The number of new entrants within the niche for a set period

The products section provides a glimpse into how competitive a targeted niche is and how well sellers perform in general. Next, we have Search Terms.

Remember, a niche is a collection of related keywords or search terms. Different words can refer to the same product. Your objective here should be to utilize this data and uncover high-performing keywords. Use complementary search terms in both the front and back-end sections of your product listing to bring in the maximum amount of traffic.

The Search Terms section ranks products based on:

• Search Volume: The most-searched terms are usually root keywords (i.e. generic words or sentences used to describe the product)
• Search Volume Growth – Quarter on Quarter (QoQ) and Year on Year (YoY): The percentage increase in search volume compared to the last quarter and the previous year. 
• Click Share: Which search terms received the most clicks. Ideally, you should select primary keywords that have a high click share percentage and search conversion rate. 
• Search Conversion Rate: The percentage of people who search for products using this keyword and end up making a purchase
• Top 3 Clicked Products: The ASINs receiving the most attention from potential customers

Using this data, you’re able to identify product opportunities within a niche and pick high search volume keywords to best describe your product. The last section of Amazon’s Product Opportunity Explorer tool is called Insights.

True to its name, Insights opens up a world of information for sellers looking to launch their first product or add new ones to their product lines. The Insights section lets you find out:

• Percentage of Amazon prime products and products using sponsored ads to gain visibility
• The percentage click share the top 5 and top 20 ASINs receive (also helpful for knowing how evenly the demand is spread throughout the niche)
• Data regarding brands and selling partners. Let’s you know how easy or difficult it is to break into the top ranks (and assign ad spend accordingly)
• The number of new products launched and successful launches within this niche. A low number of new product launches coupled with a high number of successful launches for the previous quarter is always a good sign

With the help of Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer, sellers need not rely on third-party software to fulfill their product hunting needs—or do they?

Drawbacks of the Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer Tool 

As great as Amazon’s Product Opportunity Explorer tool may be, there are a few drawbacks that are difficult to spot, especially for new sellers. To begin with, the information provided is too generic—even the Search Terms section doesn’t allow you to explore and uncover super-niche products, which is crucial for new sellers to succeed. 

Note: Super-specific product niches feature average to high demand and a relatively lower launch and ad spend budget. This makes them ideal for new sellers to dive straight into and start an Amazon business

Secondly, the latest figures you can pull up are for the past 90 days. Making judgements based on 90-day old data can prove to be disastrous. To explain this point further, let’s assume you used Opportunity Explorer and identified a product that ticks all the right boxes: high-demand, low competition, low barriers to entry, etc.

After your product goes live, you realize  no matter how well-optimized you’re listing is or how much money you pump into PPC campaigns, sales aren’t picking up. Turn’s out you went for a seasonal product and since the data was three months old, the product is now out of season and demand is virtually dead. That’s thousands of dollars and countless hours down the drain.

Finally, since the product is only available to Amazon USA and Germany (as of writing this blog), sellers in other regions need to find alternatives to carry out product research. 

Don’t get us wrong; Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer is a wonderful tool. With it, Amazon sellers are able to:

• Obtain snapshots of entire product niches 
• Avoid the grind of researching and sourcing quality suppliers as the list of recommended niches are based on users’ past and current selling activities

Despite these benefits, considering the tool’s limitations, Product Opportunity Explorer is best used as a supplementary resource while relying on holistic and powerful third-party Amazon seller tools like Zonguru.

Amazon’s Product Opportunity Explorer is the Perfect Compliment to Third-Party Amazon Seller Tools

Like Opportunity Explorer, Zonguru’s Niche Finder tool lets you explore product niches across every category on Amazon. In addition, it unveils search volume and customer demand every month and eliminates the risk of relying on outdated figures. 

Just take a look at all the filters available to users when using Advanced Mode within the Niche Finder tool.

Using these filters, you can dive deeper into desired niches, something that Amazon Opportunity Explorer cannot do. Niche Finder covers the shortcomings of Product Opportunity Explorer by enabling you to:

• Set a launch budget and research niches accordingly
• Find viable products according to your total budget
• Understand how well or poorly optimized listings are for stated keywords
• And much more!

Also, Niche Finder is just one of 16 different seller tools that help build an Amazon business from scratch. 

Zonguru is operational across Amazon NA, EU, and even the smaller marketplaces like Australia and India. Use Niche Finder to discover viable products and then validate your search results using Amazon Opportunity Explorer!