You want good data and excellent historic analytics but your budget is not infinite. In your consideration phase, you should know that these tools go head to head. Jungle Scout Cobalt pricing requires annual contracts, charges on a per ASIN, per seat with plans starting at $2500 a month. SmartScout has plans starting at 10-30% of that price. It’s also fully accessible without any caps to what you can research.
Why the price difference? For starters, look at the money raised by Jungle Scout. They have to pay off those investors. SmartScout on the other hand is bootstrapped. Does that affect the data quality? Not in the least. The founders of SmartScout have been developing software on the marketplace before Jungle Scout was even conceived. It’s a platform designed by Amazon sellers (with over $300m in sales!) that knew there was a better way. With advanced degrees in computer science SmartScout’s development team is both creative and disciplined.
You need a tool that you can rely on. You don’t want to land flat on your face. Additionally, if you see numbers you want to be able to dig in and see how they come up with their number. Users report “Sales estimates for variant ASINs aren't always that accurate.” Variations are increasingly popular especially among best sellers on Amazon. It's important to get that right. SmartScout has released a detailed report on how they get their estimates.
But what if you don’t like trusting a tool for everything? SmartScout has a data philosophy of showing our work. As you look in the image below the magic of the SmartScout platform is not the number that it shows. It’s that you can dive in and see the web of products and brands that make up a category and brand. Then you can see exactly how this strategy plays out at the keyword level.
Jungle Scout Cobalt has some nice shiny graphs. Their stacked chart is a great way to understand market share over time. Unfortunately, speed is an issue. “I prefer to use the export data feature because the UI is slow and not user friendly, specifically when trying to analyze a brand's products at a granular level.”
SmartScout also has historic charts for every brand and category on Amazon. Moving from category to category or brand to brand is seamless. It takes mere seconds. This is due to the way the data has been collected. We are learning about Amazon trends every day and store that in our database. By the time you need the data, we’ve already been doing the heavy lifting and the data is ready. Jungle Scout Cobalt on the other hand requires that you build a segment before you can even see the data. This leaves much to be desired. You don’t want to sit for minutes in front of your tool watching the wheels spin.
Jungle Scout Cobalt has built a share of voice product that helps you understand your brands position. Share of voice across various brands. You can see who’s winning across a segment. This is important for understanding the success of your brand.
SmartScout has similar Advertising Research. Unlike Cobalt, SmartScout allows you to jump in and see not only the win rates across a brand, but the specific search terms that are making up a brands strategy. The key to a good advertising strategy is to understand where your competition is investing in. That way you can either get out of the way (to ensure profitability) or go head to head to not miss a beat and win market share.
Amazon has 15 international marketplaces and every year they are launching new ones. The Amazon model is proven and more countries are beginning to trust the Prime promise of free shipping. JS Cobalt does not give any information on whether they cover all the marketplaces.
SmartScout is live in 10 international Amazon marketplaces. See what brands are winning in market share in each of these countries. With the challenges of international logistics, it’s no surprise that there are opportunities that competing brands haven’t figured out.
Jungle Scout Cobalt is a separate tool from their core offering of Jungle Scout. It’s designed for enterprise and so they have split their tools. SmartScout is a one stop shop and as we believe everyone should have all the tools immediately available. That’s whether you’re a small seller or a large seller. Here’s additional innovative tools that you get with SmartScout.
Traffic Graph: Know where traffic is moving from product to product in order to improve your advertising strategies.
FBA optimization calculator: The only calculator designed to help you improve your packing to avoid increasing fees.
Amazon SEO Tools: Tools like Keyword Detective and Relevancy Quadrant help you understand your digital shelf. SmartScout is not only a research suite competitive with Stackline. We have been busy building cutting edge tools that you have to see to believe. Take for example our Traffic Graph. Here you can see where traffic is moving from product to product.
Let’s be transparent here. The decision is yours. If you’re at the consideration phase you have to consider the punch that SmartScout offers. We have been inadvertently stealing users from Jungle Scout Cobalt for months. It’s honestly an easy sell SmartScout offers so much for an affordable price. We have done a demo of JS Cobalt in early 2021 and did a demo in 2022 and there was not much visible change. SmartScout has the development resources to keep building a mote. It’s not cocky. It’s true.
