2024 Amazon Seller Practical Tips: How to Expand Product Categories
Many Amazon sellers have to endure numerous challenges like low ad conversions, hijackers, negative reviews, and platform issues before achieving small successes and experiencing the joy of seeing increasing profits. However, once we taste that initial success, the next question that arises is how to expand into new categories. The author of this article Cathy has been selling on Amazon for nearly five years, with over 200 orders per day. The following insights might be of some reference value to fellow sellers.
In this article, I use backpack as the example. Other categories might fit as well since the method is interlinked. The first thing is to expand “horizontally”. It is not hard to understand the meaning. After all, you have successfully gathered experience from the certain category already, and become familiar with product selection and analysis. Let’s say bags by different styles, it can be categorized into backpack, recreation bag, computer bag, school bag etc. Bags can also be categorized by functions into water resistant, anti-theft, USB interface, etc. By using the combination of different functions might create new business opportunities for you.
The second thing is to deeply analyze user’s demands, and develop new products according to the needs. For instance, the most you have sold for backpacks were from $19.99 USD to $29.99 USD, and you found that most of your clients are students. They care about the product cost performance very much, as well as the functionality and practicability. Aiming at this type of users, you will naturally think of pen cases/bags or water bottles might be what they want. Then, those can be your potential new product categories. functions might create new business opportunities for you.
The third thing is to have longitudinal in-depth development. Most consumers love the new and loathe the old. In China, there's a popular saying: “Technology advances through cosmetic changes.”. This means that no matter how the function upgrades, the consumers won’t have intuitive image if the appearance did not change. Similarly, we can upgrade what we are selling, based on different functions like USB charging interface, organizing bags, water resistance to bring out the first, second, and third generations. A very important point is to change the appearance, at least having a little difference on color match.
Lastly, I recommend a highly effective tool for conducting competitive analysis — tool4seller. As we all know, when researching product selections, it's crucial to collect reviews from competitors. By examining the review, particularly negative reviews, we can pinpoint the product's pain points and enhance our own offerings accordingly. However, products with high sales often accumulate hundreds or even thousands of reviews, making it incredibly time-consuming and labor-intensive to gather all the necessary data. With tool4seller's product research Chrome extension, you can directly analyze all review information on Amazon's product listing pages. Using AI-powered review analysis to automatically summarize the strengths, weaknesses, and buyer profiles of this product is a highly efficient and time-saving process.
For instance, the image below shows an analysis of a backpack using tool4seller's AI Review Insights feature. We can see that 'Zipper issues' is the most frequently mentioned drawback, and the size being too small is also noted. By understanding the issues with competing products, we can make targeted improvements and highlight our advantages in our own listing description.
Additionally, the Variation Review Insights feature allows us to easily see which variant is more popular with buyers.
I hope this information is helpful to all the sellers reading this. Wishing everyone great success in becoming top sellers soon!
About Tool4seller
A best-in-class Amazon seller tool that is specialized in sales& profits analytics, PPC optimization, keyword research, competitor tracking, instant alerts for listing hijacking, price changing, and inventory updates, etc.
