New post from The eCommerceFuel Blog:

Continuing with our series on Amazon, this week we're talking about research tools available to help those selling in niche markets. Greg Mercer, the founder of Jungle Scout, a popular Amazon market research tool for sellers, discusses how sellers can weed out saturated segments to find profits. Jungle Scout uses Amazon's Best Sellers rankings to help you make educated decisions on what to buy and sell on Amazon. Greg dives in about the pros and cons of developing products vs reselling on the Amazon platform. He also provides an in-depth review of the tools he uses to conduct market research, which helps him to identify products that are in demand. Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher (With your host Andrew Youderian of eCommerceFuel.com and Greg Mercer of Jungle Scout.) Andrew: Hey guys, it's Andrew here and welcome to the eCommerceFuel podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in today. And today we're continuing on with our podcast series about Amazon. Specifically, we're gonna be talking about niche research today in 2016. A lot has changed over the last couple of years, but we wanna find out what's working, what you should be thinking about if you're gonna be launching a product or products on the platform today. And joining me to talk about this is Greg Mercer who is the founder of Jungle Scout which is extremely popular market analysis and research tool for Amazon. It lets you go in and you can see, you know, really it gives you like a sense how much revenue certain products are making on Amazon as well as a slew of other information. And Greg's got a lot of experience working with Amazon, running his own Amazon business, and understands the analytics and the market research side extremely well. So hope you enjoy it. I had a lot of fun chatting with Greg about this as I'm a bit of a Amazon newbie myself, and hope you find it useful as well. We'll get right into it. Greg, great to have you on. Thanks for coming. Greg: Absolutely, I appreciate you having me on, Andrew. What is Jungle Scout? Andrew: For those that may not be familiar with you, can you give us a quick overview of what Jungle Scout, which is kind of your primary product, what it is and how it works? Greg: Yeah, absolutely. So it's before that you know, like just a few years ago, I used to work in a corporate job. I wasn't really happy with it. I escaped that by starting to sell on Amazon. That kind of led into Jungle Scout which is a product research tool for Amazon sellers, so it's a software product. And what we've done with this, we've gathered a whole bunch of data, analyzed different data points, and so forth to help sellers make educated purchasing decisions, and I help them find good products to sell on Amazon. Andrew: And the data, so you can actually go to a product, press the button and then it will give you a bunch of data, but included in that is the number that are sold per month as a well as the revenue generated by that product for the seller, correct? Greg: Yes, that's correct. So that's a little bit of like our secret sauce is the sales estimate. And a lot of your listeners probably know Amazon doesn't personally release that data. What they do release is something they call a Best Sellers Rank, and from that we've developed algorithms by tracking a few hundred thousand different products on how that Best Sellers Rank correlates to the unit sales on a monthly basis, We've developed those algorithms, we update them each month, and from there, you can get pretty darn accurate estimates of how much any product sells on Amazon. Using Spitly and Review Kick Andrew: And you also have a couple of other things as well, Splitly and Review Kick. Can you just touch briefly on what both of those are? Greg: Yeah. Sure thing. So Review Kick is a review acquisition management platform. So if you're looking to get reviews on your Amazon produc...