Jungle Scout and Helium 10 have been building Amazon product research tools for 8 years now.
While that may be an advantage, they have not innovated their core products for a few years. SmartScout is a newcomer to the stage and takes what they do best, and improves upon it. Some of these tools might be better for certain users.
If you’re considering whether to take SmartScout seriously and on the same level. Take a look at the top Amazon Sellers who are currently using the platform.
Instead of product research, SmartScout takes a birds eye view to do Market Research. Here’s the data coverage of SmartScout
Jungle Scout
The product database of JungleScout was the pioneer of product research. Thousands of sellers have used it to inspire their journey into selling on Amazon. There are many filters that can give you an idea of what it will spit out. In spite of that, with only top-level category filters, Jungle Scout makes an assumption that the “Toys & Games” category is one monolith of similar products. The truth could not be more different. You can get anything inside that category so it is actually hard to laser in on a type of product.
What can help here is the usage of keywords. There is a place inside their product database to include or exclude keywords. The niche finder is also a helpful tool to be a bit more creative about possible areas to explore. It is a subset of the product database so comes with
Helium 10
Helium 10’s Black Box product is their research tool. The filters are very similar to Jungle Scout’s. It’s a bit quicker than Jungle Scout in returning products. It may feel a bit random the type of products that are returned. It’s required to select a lot of filters in order to really know what you might be seeing. That’s kind of why it’s called a black box as it’s hard to orient yourself if you are seeing t-shirts alongside art books next to a toy.
SmartScout
SmartScout also has a product database. You can use similar filters. One thing a little unique about the SmartScout database is that you can filter for out-of-stock products. That’s why it’s great for arbitragers hoping to find something to resell.
What really sets SmartScout apart in this arena is its Subcategories tool. Jungle Scout and Helium 10 do not have a comparable offering here. This is why SmartScout at its core is not a product research tool, it is a market research tool. You start from the top down. Let’s say you want to research pickleball paddles. You can browse through all the subcategory nodes down to .
Every tool says they are the most accurate. Look!
Jungle Scout says they are more accurate
Helium 10 says they are more accurate
Data accuracy is critical for making good decisions. All product research tools are creating estimates from the best sellers ranking on Amazon. That’s why we are shocked that the tools that have been pioneers here have overlooked some major things. Variation pages share a sales rank. Variation pages are very popular. So doesn’t it look a bit odd when they have variants with the exact same estimated sales?
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Look at the SmartScout’s screenshot of the same ASIN. We look at each variant and look and the velocity of customer reviews to get a better understanding of how the revenue is broken out for each variant of the ASIN.
We have written an entire article on how accuracy on Amazon can be estimated. There will be a time that you see an estimate that is off. The value of SmartScout is that we show our work. We break down all the products and show how all the revenue adds up. We think this is the most important part of a research tool. That you can do the research behind the fancy revenue number that you see. Inside SmartScout you can move from one layer of data to the next. If you’re looking at Brands, you can move to individual products and then to a seller, and then to keywords.
Jungle Scout
Outside of just counting products one by one, the way to do competitor research with Jungle Scout is to get Jungle Scout Cobalt. We’ve done a full analysis of that over [link to comparison] with a head-to-head comparison. The headline is that this is an expensive enterprise tool that will set you back without as many features as SmartScout.
Helium 10
Helium 10’s Cerebro does show you some competitor advertising. They show the number of products that are seen in advertising. They do not give you visibility of what products are advertising and where they are seen.
Helium 10 has just launched its market tracker 360. This was developed primarily in response to Jungle Scout cobalt as there are a number of similarities in design and especially in pricing. It’s a great tool for understanding specific markets. One downside is that it takes up to 30 minutes to create a market and you are billed on the number of markets you are using.
SmartScout
Competitor research is a core offering of SmartScout. By giving full flexibility of all the brands on Amazon and all the categories at once, moving around and understanding what the landscape looks like is seamless. We break down every single category market based on Amazon’s tree structure. The subcategories tool doesn’t just show a single Amazon market at a time, it shows them all at once and gives the user an unparalleled browsing experience.
When you see something that you like, you can then expand and see things like all the products in a category organized by estimated revenue. You can see a brand's market share compared with other brands. Then you can see historic revenues.
If you want to create your own submarket this is done with SmartScout collections. The benefit of using collections is that you can jump inside them immediately. SmartScout’s servers are constantly building out the historic data and advanced databasing allows us to serve you any view you want immediately. The results are the top Amazon competitive research tool out there.
AdSpy is a unique competitive offering with SmartScout. SmartScout shows competitor win rates across Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands. See what brands and products are actually winning and what search terms and keywords they’re winning on. This is unique visibility offered by no other tool at the moment.
Look and feel comparison
Helium 10
Jungle Scout Cobalt
SmartScout
Jungle Scout
Jungle Scout has a listing builder. It helps you build out the copy for the title and bullet points. Gives you directions to get the length you need to build a robust product page. It does not give you target keywords in line with what you are doing. That’s where it falls short to Helium 10 and the ways it layers in the best keywords for you to use.
Helium 10
This is where Helium 10 really shines. With the keyword tools such as Scribbles, Frankenstein, Index Checker, and Listing Builder you have many keys to succeed as an Amazon Seller. It will take a few minutes to understand how to use them and to unlock their potential. The listing builder does a great job of showing you the priority keywords that you want to use in your SEO optimization and your search term fields. So as you are typing out the keywords you can see how many of the most relevant keywords you have selected. This is key for Amazon to index and understand your listing. If you are prioritizing building quality listings Helium 10 has a lot to off a current Amazon seller.
SmartScout
SmartScout is newer to the keywords optimization space. But that doesn’t mean they haven’t innovated here as well. As an analytics first tool, there are visualizations and digital shelf relevancy comparisons that are cutting edge. No other Amazon SEO tool has a direct way to see a keyword comparison between multiple products at the same time. Additionally, there’s the relevancy tool. This helps understand where to optimize your products.
Look and feel comparison
Jungle Scout
Helium 10
SmartScout
Jungle Scout
You can get a lot of information around the right Amazon keywords with Jungle Scout. There’s no tool that is built to help you understand how to perform better in your advertising. Jungle Scout recently acquired Downstream, a PPC bid optimization tool. Since it’s not embedded inside Jungle Scout we’ll leave this out but it is worth mentioning that they haven’t left this alone.
Jungle Scout cobalt does show sponsored share of voice. This can help you understand how brands are looking together. It’s done well with a good UI. Though it falls short of actionable suggestions.
Helium 10
Helium 10 launched its advertising optimization tool Adtomic. This tool allows you to build and optimize advertising campaigns. It’s an additional expense in order to utilize this but it’s the only of the three that really dives into your advertising expenses and budget. It’s also worth noting that Cerebro has some data on how many search terms overall a product is advertising on.
Since the other tools don’t have an embedded bid optimizer we are going to pronounce Helium 10 as the winner of the three in end-to-end advertising optimization.
SmartScout
SmartScout’s AdSpy and traffic graph are excellent tools in the hands of a seasoned advertiser. Seeing exactly how advertising and traffic are moving around on Amazon can help you feel like a superior marketer.
Additionally, SmartScout recently launched the rank tracker which is the only tool that helps you see exactly how your spending is influencing your organic rankings in the same window. While SmartScout does not optimize your campaigns, you can understand the effectiveness of your campaigns when you fully connect your advertising data to SmartScout
Look and feel comparison
Jungle Scout
Jungle Scout
Jungle Scout offers a free FBA calculator. You have to send them your email before you can use it. Then they send you an excel spreadsheet with which you can then start calculating your product. It’s not great that it forces you to use excel as that is a paid-for product that not everyone has and it’s a multi-step marketing process to get it. The UI of excel is great for some but we are accustomed to web apps that have a more intuitive look and feel.
Helium 10
The FBA Calculator for Helium 10 is inside the Chrome Extension. This is a natural spot to include the tool. It’s easy while browsing Amazon to pull in the relevant data and understand profitability on the spot. It does require a subscription with Helium 10 in order to unlock the full use of the Helium 10 Chrome Extension.
SmartScout
SmartScout’s calculator is for paying users only right now. We plan to make it publicly available. It’s a pure web app but what really sets it apart is the profit optimization that it does with your product. We take the dimensions of the product and find what the next pricing tier lower would be. This is an excellent way for a private label amazon seller to understand if they want to change the dimensions of their product and what that would look like.
Look and feel comparison
Jungle Scout
Helium 10
SmartScout
Jungle Scout
Jungle Scout does not have anything that helps an Amazon seller explore frequently bought together products at the time of this writing.
Helium 10
Helium 10 can give you a list of products that are in the frequently bought together section of a product page. This is a great place to start for product targeting in your advertising campaigns.
SmartScout
SmartScout is a pioneer in the traffic graph tools. This tool is to help you understand how traffic is moving laterally across different products. This can mimic shopper behavior. It’s interesting to see not just your complementary products, but your competitor's complementary products and see how Amazon is a web of opportunity.
You can then dive deeper and see the power of these connections with the traffic strength indicator. This is the number of estimated sales of the source ASIN. So you can target the most important products first. Since the competition doesn’t show up here, SmartScout is the leader of innovation.
Look and feel comparison
SmartScout
Jungle Scout
Jungle Scout does not have a free trial but does have a 7 day money back guarantee. The basic plans include a part of the tools. They start at $49 a month. To get all the basic features you will want to be at the $69 a month plan with professional scaling to $129 a month. Jungle Scout Cobalt’s pricing is hidden. After going through a sales demo you will get a quote for over $2k a month.
Helium 10
Helium 10 has a free tier, no trial but a 7-day money-back guarantee. The free tier is extremely limited with only a few uses a month. They then have a very basic plan at $39 a month. In our experience, most of their users prefer their platinum plan at $99 a month. They do reserve many features for the diamond plan but if you are a very heavy user of Helium 10 you will find this worth it.
To get AdTomic and Market Tracker 360 these are additional add-on expenses and can easily set you back a few thousand a months.
SmartScout
SmartScout’s has a 7-day free trial and 30-day money-back guarantee. At $97 you get nearly all of the features of SmartScout. Some features that are for heavy private label users are a part of the pro plan at $187 a month.
The enterprise plan which is a competitor to Jungle Scout Cobalt and Market Tracker 360 from Helium 10 starts at $587 as of the time of the writing. Quotes can come in higher for supporting larger teams and more data access. That said, for a truly competitive research platform, it is the least expensive (and in our opinion most robust!) of the market research tools.
Wholesale
SmartScout is by far the most valuable tool for someone pursuing the Amazon wholesale model. By taking the 1m+ brands and all at once filtering out the ones that are clearly not aligned with a wholesaler you really don’t need any sort of product finder outside of SmartScout.
There’s also the UPC Scanner tool. This takes an entire catalog of what could be thousands of UPCs and runs it against a profitability analysis in order to find the best products. SmartScout will make suggestions and show estimate revenue for those.
Retail and Online Arbitrage
SmartScout takes an entire brand of products and allows you to put in quick filters to show the best of the best products. Say for example you really want to sell Lego. It would be nice to see which Lego products are out of stock and which ones have no FBA sellers. This makes SmartScout a great way to find arbitrage.
You can also search brands that are exclusively found in stores. Brands like Equate, Kirkland and Trader Joe’s can do very consistent revenue as they are not naturally and an Amazon FBA product.
Private Label
A private label Amazon seller may have a lot of needs. We will enumerate a few of them and then give our recommendations.
Our recommendation is just that, a recommendation. Since there are many needs, it’s ok to use more than one tool.
Large Brand or Amazon Aggregator
At SmartScout, an Amazon Aggregator is an easy sell. We offer the most robust marketplace analysis at the best price. We also have data on sellers in a way that no one else has.
PPC Campaign Manager
Helium 10 has the most robust platform for someone wanting to optimize their Amazon Advertising campaigns. With a fully embedded bid optimizer, this one is in lead.
SmartScout is a powerful supplement with shows what keywords the competition is succeeding with. This is key to quickly improving marketing campaigns.
Amazon Agency
SmartScout is the quickest marketplace analysis tool. You can look at sellers and brands. Many agencies today are using SmartScout as a part of their outbound sales process. Why? Because you can easily judge a brands potential. You can send over screenshots to show the potential client that you understand their brand that perhaps they don’t even understand.
A great Amazon agency would also make good use of Helium 10. These tools currently work very well hand in hand.
There is a lot of software to help you achieve your selling goals as an Amazon Seller. These can be a major benefit to knowing how you can succeed and grow your business. The best tool for you may depend a bit on what goals you want to accomplish. Here are some final considerations.
If you are really serious with Private Label and you have achieved some scale, you may benefit from both Helium 10 and SmartScout subscriptions.
If you are reselling other branded products in either wholesale or arbitrage then SmartScout is a clear winner here as it allows you to filter the entire database of brands and avoid the competition. As a competitor research platform built upon these ideas it’s extremely powerful for any serious arbitrager.
If you are an Amazon agency or service provider, you will get more perspective on the landscape by utilizing SmartScout. If you see our logos, we have all the top Amazon Aggregators and Sellers using the SmartScout platform extensively.
