What shoppers searching for your brand actually buy
If you’re not on Amazon, people are still searching for you there. Here’s how to see what they buy instead.
Maybe you’ve decided to stay off Amazon. You sell on your own site, the margins work, and you don’t want Amazon pulling customers away from it.
Fair enough. But people who’ve heard of you still search for you on Amazon, because that’s where they shop. And when you’re not there, they buy something.
What they find
When someone searches Amazon for a brand that doesn’t sell there, they usually find one of three things:
- A reseller selling your product. At a price you didn’t set, with a listing you didn’t write.
- A knockoff. Something that looks close enough.
- A competitor. Another brand in your category that is on Amazon, showing up for your name.
Either way, the sale happens. It just isn’t yours.
How to see it
Amazon’s Product Opportunity Explorer, in Seller Central, lets you look up any search. Type in your brand name and you’ll see how many people search for it and which products they click on.
That tells you two things: how much demand for your brand already exists on Amazon, and who’s getting it.
What it means for your own site
The usual worry about Amazon is that it’ll take customers from your website. For these shoppers, that isn’t the choice. They’re already on Amazon, searching for you. They’re choosing between you and whatever shows up.
So selling to them isn’t moving business from your site to Amazon. It’s taking back business that’s already going to someone else.
And if you want to protect your site, you can choose what you sell on Amazon. Different pack sizes, bundles or add-on products give Amazon shoppers something to buy without giving your direct customers a reason to switch.
What it looked like for Untamed
Before Untamed launched on Amazon UK, Product Opportunity Explorer showed it had the most branded search of any premium cat food brand on Amazon. It wasn’t selling there yet.
Untamed sells on subscription, so we launched add-on products only and kept the subscription as the main way customers buy. It made five figures in its first month.
A subscription brand customers were already searching for on Amazon. We helped hire its in-house Brand Manager, built the launch plan with her around add-on products only, and run the channel together.
Read the full case →Fifteen minutes, no call required
If you have a Seller Central account, open Product Opportunity Explorer and search your brand name. Note how many people search for it and which products they click on.
If the products they click aren’t yours, that’s what those shoppers are buying instead.
No Seller Central account? We can show you an estimate from our own research tools on a call.
If the numbers are small
Sometimes hardly anyone is searching for your brand on Amazon yet. That’s useful to know too. It means Amazon would be about finding new customers, not taking back existing ones, and that’s a different decision.