Are you ready to grow your business by expanding your selection to meet customer needs? In this article, I’ll explain more about how niches (as part of the Product Opportunity Explorer (OX) tool) can help you do just that.

Back in November we highlighted a Quick Tip on OX customer review insights and product deep dive page. We noticed you had questions about niches and how they work.

What’s a niche?

A niche is a collection of customer search terms and products that represent a specific customer need.

Every time a customer enters a search term on Amazon, they’re telling us what they want to purchase.

Amazon combines search terms around specific shopping needs based on customer demand. For example, customers may search for stainless-steel water bottle, BPA-free water bottle, and insulated water bottle. These search term are grouped to identify a unique customer intent and the top searched term becomes the niche title (in this example, “water bottle”). The niche includes products that cumulatively received 80% of clicks from those search terms.

Benefits of niches

You can browse or search to find niches that make sense for your business, and use their details to identify new product ideas and opportunities in that space.

You can use niches during your new product research in order to:

• Identify high search volume and low competition niches.
• Identify trending search terms and customer needs related to your catalog.
• Identify niches that have high search volume and low average quality products.
• Get seasonal insights to better plan your future launches and ads spend.

Key features of niches

Each niche has a detail page providing additional information, like current products within the niche, top search terms, and statistics about new product launch potential. You can use these details to determine if a similar product filling the same customer need would be a good fit for your business.

Keep in mind that search terms and products can exist in multiple niches. Niche metrics are refreshed at the beginning of each week, and new niches are created at the start of each month.

After you select a category, relevant niches appear on a niche results page. You can also search for niches by adding your text in OX’s search bar, we showcase all the niches based on text matching between your business’ search terms and the search terms related to niches. Alongside each niche, you’ll find the top associated search terms and other key metrics.

Ready to get started?

You can dive in and start exploring niches. To access from Seller Central, click the main navigation, select Growth, and then Product Opportunity Explorer.

From here you can select or search for a category or subcategory, and relevant niches will appear based on text matching between your business’ search terms and the search terms related to niches. You’ll then find top associated search terms and other key metrics.

Additional training resources

• Intro to Product Opportunity Explorer and niches (video) (PDF)
• Product Opportunity Explorer best practices (video) (PDF)