A bird’s eye view. A complete picture. All your hopes and dreams. These are just some of the things that SmartScout tries to provide to Amazon sellers. The last one is the hardest, but we think we’re doing a pretty good job with the first two. Nothing presents that complete picture quite as well as the Subcategories tool.
What’s So Great About Subcategories?
It’s all our product research tools in one, allowing you to see sales and brand data across an entire category and down to the tiniest subcategory. This is critical to understand your place in the Amazon market. Any tool can tell you the sales estimate of one product, but how many can stack you up against all your competitors at the brand level, or show you a niche where no one is satisfying customer needs?
Even if they don’t realize it, everyone on Amazon has the same goal: to have control of a successful brand. That can come in several forms: it can be a brand you’ve made (private label), one you sell through a partnership (agency), or just one you know you have reliable access to (reseller). All of these goals overlap in that they must find an opportunity, then develop it once they’ve found it.
Find the Opportunity
To be able to find or create a brand hitting all the right spots, you can’t just look at one top selling item, or even several. You need to be able to look from every angle. For creating your brand, find subcategories where most products are not satisfying customers (low average reviews), or there is a wide distribution of brands that are spread across a lot of market share. You can easily see what top products and brands are doing, whether to get ideas or to know what to avoid.
You can also pick a brand that’s struggling, contact them, and offer your services.
Expand the Opportunity
This is essentially the same as the first part, but you’ve already taken your first step. You can copy the direction other top brands have gone, or chart your own path. Do you have a strong hold on your subcategory? If not, will a variation or similar product type help improve your position? If yes, what other direction should you move? You can get ideas of similar products people are buying in the traffic graph, then examine those markets in subcategories to pick the best option.
Conclusion
Individual product research is great, which is why we include our Product tool, but there are so few ways to quickly look at and understand what’s happening across Amazon. Being able to see whatever section you happen to need is even harder. That’s what makes Subcategories so great: getting the data that’s most relevant to you.
To go a level deeper and see real examples of how brands dominate specific subcategories (and how to benchmark your own brand), check out “How to Know Amazon Market Share by Category: What Brands Are Winning on Amazon and Why.”
If you need a walkthrough, you can watch one on our Education page or schedule a demo of the tool.
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