Welcome to Product Discovery's Category Search!
Under the Category search tab, you’ll see similar filters as each of the other methods. This is perhaps the most roundabout way of finding products to sell, and it will take a bit of playing around with this search method to really determine how you’d like to best utilize it.
Maybe you want to see sub-categories with sales on the rise and a low barrier to entry so that you can drill into the products driving that success. Or maybe you want to find a small niche that you can dominate within the category that you already sell in, extending your product line. There are tons of ways to arrive at your next product using the category search method, or you can even use it to just spy on others in a specific market, so let’s dive into some of the filters.
First, you will select the categories you want to narrow your results to. Then we’ve got Opportunity Score and Maturity Score. Opportunity Score is an indicator of the number of good product opportunities in the category. You can slide this back and forth from a range of scores from 0-10, low being not many good product opportunities and high being lots of good opportunities. Maturity Score is a score from 0-10 of the market’s maturity and relative ease of entry. More mature markets, or higher numbers, tend to be difficult to enter and provide a low Return on Investment in the first 6-12 months. For example, many supplement markets are mature, meaning they’ve been around for awhile and have established products with high review quantities.
We know that it’s hard to guess total sales and total reviews for a subcategory on Amazon, so we synthesized these metrics with the Opportunity Score and Maturity Score to hopefully help you find what you’re looking for a bit easier.
Total Monthly Revenue and Total Monthly Sales will be the revenue and unit sales across the sub-category as a whole, so including all of the products within that subcategory. We also provide an option to set the range for the Average Monthly Unit Sales for the subcategory.
You will also see an option to add a range for the Average Product Price, Average Review Count, and Total Review Count across all products within the subcategory. Finally, we’ve got the option to set a Sales to Reviews ratio range. A Sales to Review ratio of 1 means the products in the subcategory tend to have the same number of sales as they do reviews. So maybe across the subcategory, most products sell 500 units per month and on average have 500 reviews each. A Sales to Review ratio of 2, then, may mean most products sell 500 units per month and on average have 250 reviews each. And so on.
We’ve got tons of options for Advanced Filters in the category search. I won’t go through each and every one, but just know that you don’t have to fill out any of these, or you can play around with all of them. The more you customize your filters, the more personalized your list of results will be. So play around with it a bit and you will learn as you go!
Some of the filters shown here that we haven’t hit on in the other tabs include
Name Brand Market Share as a %, where you can set how much of the category you want to be made up of dominant name brands
Unique Brands, where you can indicate a range for the actual number of brands that will make up each resulting subcategory
Quick Win, Moderate Win, and High Upside Products. With these metrics, you can identify how easily you could achieve success in this market. I’ll break this down really quickly. A Quick Win product is one with a low number of reviews, a decent margin, and revenue of at least $5,000 per month. In this input, you can specify a range of how many Quick Win products you want to see in the resulting brands. Replicating the success of a Quick Win product would be relatively simple. You can also filter for a specific number of Moderate Win Products, where replicating the success would take only a few months but provide a good profit. And finally, High Upside Products are difficult to replicate but the payout is high. You can set ranges for each of these to see corresponding brands in the results.
Once you’ve entered your preferences, hit “Show Categories” and you’ll see the corresponding subcategories. We’ll show you some good high-level information here about each of these subcategories.
You’ll see the root, or high-level category, that the subcategory is within. The tools show you the total number of brands selling within that subcategory. You will also see the monthly unit sales across the entire subcategory, which will start to give you an idea about the size of the market. There is the number of total reviews and average review rating along with the average product price within that subcategory. We’ll also show you monthly revenue.
In these two columns, we have the Opportunity and Maturity Scores. Again, the opportunity score is an indicator of the number of good product opportunities within the category. Here, a high score is good for those looking to source a product within this subcategory. The maturity score measures the market’s maturity and relative ease of entry, so that means that a lower score will be better for those looking for low barrier-to-entry markets. Those are color-coded to help you easily determine which markets have a good combination of both.
Depending on the number of filters you set, you may see multiple pages of results to browse through. You can click the Amazon button to see this subcategory on Amazon. If you click the Market Intelligence button, you’ll be taken to the subcategory View Full Analysis page within Product Discovery that will give you an in-depth look at the subcategory and how it is performing.
At the top of the Category Metrics page, you'll see the date the data was last updated for this subcategory.
You will see lots of information about the subcategory to help you measure its performance, such as price and sales change numbers. The tool will show you the Sales Distribution to illustrate how evenly sales are distributed across the subcategory, along with other helpful metrics.
We’ve got a detailed Average Sales Price graph so that you can visualize how price has fluctuated within the subcategory.
The Monthly box shows total monthly profit, revenue, and sales, along with a graphic depiction of sales over the last 30 days.
You will see a Fulfillment section, which will show you how much of the subcategory is sold by Amazon, FBA, and FBM.
There is also a Review and Other section. The Review section is breaking down review metrics in the subcategory such as the Average Review Count Change and Review Rate. And then finally the Other section has some additional stats, like the number of unique brands within the subcategory, the percentage of name brand listings, and the total number of products within that subcategory.
At the bottom of the page, you can the Top Products within this subcategory. The results will show all the vital information, and you can dig in further to specific products by clicking on the Market Intelligence icon.
The Top Brands will show the actual brands making up this category, with important metrics and the ability to click into each brand’s metrics.
And lastly, we will show Child Categories, if there are any, which will be subcategories within this subcategory.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to our team by emailing us at [email protected]. Thanks for jumping into Product Discovery with us! Happy sourcing!