Avoid Launch Flops: Guide to Winning Product Opportunity Research
Product research plays a key role in determining the success of your business. As a product manager, once you have identified your ideal customer, it is important to know and understand their needs and wants. These will help you create a competitive eCommerce store. You cannot expect to sell products that are not appealing or are too expensive. You need to ensure that you know your target audience well enough before launching your product.
There are a handful of ways to do this and uncover market opportunity and profitable niche. In this article, I will share with you important key points in making your ideas into reality through product research. But before delving into that, let’s understand first what is product research all about.
What is Product Research?
Product research is the process of conducting a thorough and objective analysis of a niche to determine its strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. It is a formal and systematic activity that involves the customer and the company. It is used to identify customer needs, evaluate new product ideas as well as create and test a prototype of the product. It helps businesses understand what their customers want and need so they can develop products that meet their needs. Through this also, you can determine the market potential of a product along with its manufacturing process, design, and functions. Thus, it helps you create a strategy for your product development in order to grow your online business.
This process is similar although the medium may be different if you’re doing Amazon FBA product research or product research on Shopee, Lazada or Qoo10, or even for dropshipping. For general product research, Google Trends will give you a good insight. For product research in the Amazon marketplace, you would you use a Amazon product research tool such as AMZChart to look up the Amazon best sellers, sales volume and top keywords. If you are looking to research for a winning product for your Shopify store, you may want to use FindNiche to discover the trend of a potential product or similar product.
Product research is different from market research. Market research is a process of identifying the potential customers, the target audience, and their motivations. By conducting this, you can get data to determine the market size and how to reach out to your target audience.
However, product research and market research have in common. Both are conducted to understand customers’ needs.
Benefits of Conducting Product Research
Product opportunity research is an important process for any entrepreneur to help them come up with a better product that can be marketable and profitable. This is a valuable step to include in your business strategy. Plus, it includes the following benefits:
- Know What Your Customers Need and Want
- Gain Insights about Your Competitors
- Test if Your Product Opportunity is Profitable
Know What Your Customers Need and Want
Product research is a simple but powerful method to find out what your customers need and want in order to stay competitive. It helps you to discover the opportunities that can help you grow your business. You can ask your customers for their opinions or get their feedback on what they like and dislike about your products and services by using various tools such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, and one-on-one discussions. This way you can improve or build a winning product and win more customers.
An effective way is to install Hubalz or Google Analytics on your website to track and analyse your product listing for its performance. That way you can make informed decisions on based on the trend and
Gain Insights about Your Competitors
Product Research helps you gain insights into your competitors that offer similar products and find out what are the latest trends in your industry. It helps you to identify their strengths and weaknesses. You can also learn how they are positioned in the market and what they are doing differently from you. This process allows you to do competitive mapping in order to uncover your competitors’ market data, competitive methods, and other vital information.
Test if Your Product Idea is Profitable
If you are thinking of selling in a particular niche, one way to know if that is profitable is through concept testing. You can collect surveys from customers to find out what their thoughts about that specific product. By evaluating customer feedback according to multiple variables such as pricing choices, features, and benefits, you can get an idea of whether the demand is high or low. If the demand is high, then you can turn your ideas into profitable products.
Types of Product Research
Product research is an important step that every business owner, entrepreneur, and retail store owner should do. It helps in finding out the problems and issues that the product might face and it allows to make a list of the best possible solutions. This is done by looking at the product from all such as design, packaging, shipping, functionality, etc. This can be conducted internally or externally. The type of research done depends on the scope of your business and how you want to use the information.
Here are the various types of product research.
Brand Research
Brand research is the process of gathering information about a brand. It is a systematic process of gaining insights into a brand’s identity, positioning, value proposition, target market, product attributes, and competitors. If you are a marketer, this process helps you understand what people think about your brand. As a result, you can improve your branding and marketing strategies. You can conduct customer surveys to do this.
Consumer Insights
Consumer Insights are the process of analyzing consumer behavior, interests, and wants. It is a type of research that helps companies to understand the shoppers’ needs and expectations in order to develop new products and services. Conducting this is beneficial as it makes the products more appealing to the potential customer. This is also a way to discover and understand the willingness of buyers to purchase a particular product or service. Having high demand is likely a good indicator of a profitable niche.
Competitive Analysis
A competitive analysis is a form of research that helps you identify your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. This lets you understand the market, your business model, and the strategies that are needed to improve your position in the market. With enough data, you can come up with strategies that will allow you to gain a competitive advantage in your niche.
Product Development
Product development research is the process of developing and manufacturing a new product with the aim of creating a new and improved version of an existing product. The new product development process involves various stages and phases such as ideation, prototyping, validation, production, product testing and test marketing. You can do this by conducting marketing research into the customer’s reviews and the overall customer satisfaction score of the product.
Profitable Product Opportunities
The top profitable product opportunities for startups are determined by a multitude of factors. These include the size of the market, competition, and the stage of development of the product. The market is full of products and ideas which are not viable and profitable. In this competitive world, the first step towards success is to identify what products are going to give you high revenue and can be highly profitable.
If you are already running an eCommerce store, make use of Putler to gain great insights to your product sales. As a product research tool, it gives you in-depth analytics into the sales, orders, products, customers & visitors.
How to Do Product Research?
The way to find profitable product opportunities is through researching the current trend in the market. The market is always changing that is why it is important to be aware of the latest trends. Product research can help you identify profitable product opportunities. Here is a general way to conduct product research even if you’re not an Amazon seller for an Amazon FBA business.
1. Go to the Amazon website. Amazon has been the number one online retailer in the world. This eCommerce platform is responsible for selling a wide range of products and also serves as a marketplace for third-party sellers.
2. Change your location by clicking on Deliver to. This is a necessary step so you can get an insight into what product is really popular in your country.
3. Choosing your location can be done in two ways: a) via entering zip code and b) via choosing the country. Then, click on Done.
4. The next thing you need to do is to choose the departments or product categories for product opportunities. Click the menu icon that can be found in the upper left corner of your screen.
5. Once you choose a department, Amazon will show you the products that belong to the category you selected. List down all the potential products with a huge number of sales. You can use Microsoft Excel to do this so it will be easier for you to arrange them later.
6. When doing amazon product research, I advise you to check the customer reviews as well. Feedbacks have a huge role in the success of the product. This can be your basis and overview in knowing if customers are willing to purchase the items. This process prevents you from have costly mistakes in investing in unprofitable products. Also, when choosing, look for products that are not too common and with low competition. However, make sure that the ones you choose are sourceable so you can easily get them from China.
7. Once you are done, the next thing you need to do is to check your competitors. When checking, you can do this in two ways:
a. Via Google Search Bar
b. Via Google Keyword Planner
Via Google Search Bar
1. In your browser, type Google.com.sg.
2. Then, type the keywords + Singapore on the search bar. For example, “Massage Gun Singapore”.
3. Once you enter that, you can already see your competitors. In this process, I advise you to look only at the first page of the search results. Note that if Shopee, Lazada, Qoo10, and Amazon appear on the first page, you can just ignore these platforms because they are not your competitors. Only those eCommerce stores are your real competitors. In this example, only four are selling massage guns. Mostly, sellers use Shopee to sell this product. You can take advantage of this especially when you do Google ads. Massage gun has high search volume since 2020.
4. Repeat this process until you are done checking all the products you listed down a while during amazon product research.
Via Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner is one of the product research tools that are useful in order to get ideas about what keywords people use when they search for a product or service. This also provides you with search volume results and other historical metrics that you can use in determining whether a product is profitable or not. Aside from that, this helps you in doing keyword research to improve your SEO.
1. Go to Google Keyword Planner. You will be asked to log in using your Google Ads account.
2. Here, you have two options to know your competitors: a) Discover new keywords and b) Get search volume and forecasts. For this tutorial, I chose Discover new keywords.
3. First, you need to enter the product or services closely related to your business. You can enter as many keywords as you want to broaden your search. Then, you also need to enter the domain to use as a filter. Once you are done entering these data, click on the button to get results. In this example, I use blood pressure monitor, medical equipment, and vital sign monitor as my keywords. Then, I put the URL of my SeniorCare website.
4. These are the results. For the keywords that I entered, there are 410 new keywords ideas available that I can use to rank up in the search engine results. Each keyword has an average monthly search, so I advise using those keywords with high search volume.
Final Thought
The entire world of eCommerce is abuzz with the latest products and brands that are making waves in the market. But with so many options available, how do you know which the right product to buy? This is where product research comes in.
Though doing this is a tedious task, it is a vital process for any type of business to take into. It allows you to review market trends, compare product features to similar products, and determine the feasibility of your idea. When you do this correctly and spend time regularly, you will be able to find the products that actually sell. In a long run, it enables you to build a successful eCommerce business and earn a higher ROI than you used to get.
