How to Check Your Competition on Amazon FBA

In this article we are going to cover the top 7 ways for checking how competitive a particular Amazon niche is. 

Tip 1 Hits & Results

Head over to Amazon.com. If you search for the item you are hoping to sell on Amazon, on the top left you’ll see the number of “results” for a product.

For example, if I search for an iPhone case, Amazon shows me there are over 45 million results.If I scroll through the pages, there are literally millions of cases. In this market it’s almost impossible to stand out. There are only a few spaces in the first and second page, and if there are too many competitors it’s going to be really hard to rank against millions of products. 

So look for markets where there aren’t too many competitors already. That will make advertising and ranking your product faster. 

Tip 2 Relevancy 

After checking how many results there are for a specific niche, next you want to go through the pages on Amazon and check how many relevant products there are for the search term you used. Even though there are a lot of results, maybe only 10 or 15 will match what you are looking for.  Or there may be some products which are all the same style and just a few which are different somehow. Look for markets where there are several different items in the same niche all selling well. 

Tip 3 Price 

Price is really important on Amazon. If you go into a market that is too competitive the price will get forced down and your margins will get slimmer. For some reason, certain products seem to be in a constant price war, whereas in other markets sellers don’t fight on price. There can be the same number of sellers on both items, but on one there’s almost no margin while the other is very profitable.

When checking the competition level of a market, check that the price allows for a good margin, and check that there are not multiple competitors with very low pricing. You can also use some tools to check the price history like camel camel camel. 

Tip 4 New Listings 

Use a service like camelcamelcamel for each of the top 10 listings to see how many of them are new. If you find that many of the items are new that could mean competitors are moving into the market. It’s better to look for markets on Amazon where there aren’t many new listings. At the same time – you do not want all the top 10 to be 5 years old. Ideally – there should be one or two new items in the top 10 which shows you that it is still possible to rank for this niche. 

Tip 5 Trends 

Using the same camelcamelcamel service, check the general price trend and BSR trend of the top 10 items. Check that the BSR has been stable for a long time, and the price level is not trending downwards. The price will naturally swing up and down, but you need to make sure the prices haven’t been going down and down and down on the top 10 listings.

If the BSR jumps around a lot it could mean the item is seasonal or competitors are running a lot of promotions. 

Tip 6 Reviews 

Check the number of reviews for the top ten competitors. If the average is over 500 reviews, this market may be very competitive. Generally you want to aim for markets where the top 10 competitors have 300 or less reviews each on average. Ideally they also have a low rating score – which means there is an opportunity to optimize the listing. 

Tip 7 Listing Optimization 

Click on each product in the top 10. Check if their photos are good quality, if they have five features / bullets and if they generally look good. Ideally you want a niche where several of the top products have bad photos, maybe even just one or two photos, fewer feature descriptions, and generally poor quality listings. It will be easier for your products to stand out in these kinds of markets.

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