Imagine yourself as an explorer, treasure map in hand, eager to discover your personal gold mine in the vast ocean of Amazon's marketplace. Yet reality often proves harsh: countless sellers have come before you, turning the market into a fiercely competitive red ocean. Have you too struggled with product selection, investing significant time and effort only to face disappointment?
Many sellers complain about the difficulty of product selection, but closer examination reveals they've only evaluated a handful of options. Product research isn't inherently easy or difficult—the key lies in strategy and methodology. Within Amazon's product selection ecosystem, there exist three progressive tiers:
- Tier One: Product Creation. This represents the pinnacle of product selection, requiring strong R&D capabilities and innovative thinking to develop market-first products or implement disruptive improvements. However, this level typically remains the domain of large sellers with substantial capital and resources, making it largely inaccessible to small and medium-sized sellers.
- Tier Two: Product Differentiation. This tier demands keen market insight to identify shortcomings in existing products and implement improvements through unique designs, features, or services to create more competitive offerings. While requiring some R&D capability and market experience, this approach proves more feasible than Tier One.
- Tier Three: Product Replication. The most common approach for new sellers—essentially adopting a "copycat" strategy of duplicating successful products. While low-risk and requiring minimal barriers to entry, this method also means facing intense competition and limited profit margins.
The Amazon product selection journey typically begins at Tier Three before progressing toward higher tiers. However, this path proves challenging, with most sellers remaining stuck at the replication stage. While copycat selection appears simple, it also faces the fiercest competition. Therefore, for new sellers, targeting niche blue ocean products often presents a wiser strategy.
Finding Hidden Gold: The Blue Ocean Strategy
Blue ocean niche products typically feature lower competition, higher profit margins, and reduced promotional costs. But how does one locate these hidden opportunities?
The crucial factor lies in the volume of products evaluated. That seller who complained about product selection difficulty had only reviewed about 100 products over a year—an insufficient sample size for effective selection. Discovering blue ocean products requires substantial diligence—evaluating enough products to spark inspiration.
One new seller created an Excel document tracking over 1,700 promising products. Using this as a filtering baseline, they refined their selection criteria and ultimately developed several bestsellers. This experience demonstrates that effective product selection requires patience and systematic accumulation.
For those who find manual selection too time-consuming, professional product research tools offer an alternative. Below, we demonstrate how to quickly identify blue ocean products using Jungle Scout (JS) as an example.
Jungle Scout: Your Amazon Product Research Power Tool
Jungle Scout is a robust Amazon product research tool featuring comprehensive functionality and data to help sellers quickly identify promising products. Its "Opportunity Finder" function serves as an exceptional resource for locating blue ocean niche products.
1. Access the Opportunity Finder
Within Jungle Scout's toolbar, locate and click the "Opportunity Finder" function. The interface displays various filtering parameters that can be customized according to your requirements.
2. Set Product Categories
The category structure mirrors Amazon's own classification system. You can begin filtering within familiar categories or systematically explore new ones. Remember: diligence is paramount—laziness is the enemy of effective product selection.
For our example, we'll select the "Pet Supplies" category.
3. Input Selection Parameters
After selecting a category, JS displays numerous filtering options on the right side of the interface, including average monthly sales, average selling price, monthly search volume, and opportunity score. These parameters represent your product expectations.
- Average Monthly Sales: Set your desired sales range. For example, inputting 500-1500 indicates expecting daily sales between 2-50 units. Adjust according to your sales expectations.
- Average Selling Price: Combined with sales volume, this indicates the initial capital required. Balance price and volume according to your financial capacity.
- Opportunity Score: JS calculates this value based on keyword performance among top 10 listings—higher scores indicate better opportunities. Beginners may leave this blank initially.
- Competition Level: Select "Low to Medium" to exclude hyper-competitive red ocean products.
- Seasonality: Choose "Low" to exclude highly seasonal products.
- Include Keywords: Input relevant keywords to narrow results. For pet products, entering "Dog" filters results accordingly.
4. Review Filtered Results
Applying these parameters generates system recommendations for matching subcategories. Using our example parameters, the system suggests the "dog puzzle" subcategory—a relatively obscure product type primarily familiar to pet product specialists.
Clicking "dog puzzle" reveals detailed listings within this subcategory.
5. Analyze Product Details
We can now examine specific category conditions by selecting individual products. One listing launched in December has maintained a pet category ranking between 4000-5000 over eight months, with only 370+ ratings—a relatively low count for its sales volume.
Inputting this ranking into JS's sales estimator suggests approximately 2,130 monthly sales (70+ daily), generating over $30,000 monthly revenue.
6. Evaluate Seasonality
The search seasonality chart shows stable patterns, confirming our parameters successfully excluded seasonal products.
7. Examine Search Volume Trends
The search volume curve demonstrates steady growth, indicating unsaturated market demand.
8. Assess Keyword Bidding
Product research must include keyword bid analysis, which reflects category competition. JS provides detailed keyword bid data—including exact and broad match bids—plus difficulty assessments for ranking improvement.
9. Consider Intellectual Property
Note that this example product involves sensitive IP considerations. We mention this solely for demonstration purposes, not as a product recommendation.
Conclusion
Jungle Scout's Opportunity Finder enables rapid identification of suitable blue ocean products. However, product selection merely represents the first step—comprehensive market research, product optimization, and marketing execution remain equally crucial. This methodology can help sellers discover their unique market opportunities and achieve success on Amazon's competitive platform.