Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer: How to Find and Validate Niches

Adding a yoga mat to your range? Before you order, check how often customers search for it, which products get the clicks today and what bothers buyers about them. Amazon’s Product Opportunity Explorer gives you Amazon’s own data for that.

The Product Opportunity Explorer is a tool in Seller Central. It groups search terms and products into niches and shows demand, competition, reviews and returns for each niche. Amazon introduced the tool in October 2021 and has added several sections since then.

This article shows who can use the Product Opportunity Explorer, how it is built, what the sections of a niche show and how to use it to prepare a product launch. The example throughout is the niche “yoga mat”.

Access: who can use Product Opportunity Explorer

According to Amazon, the Product Opportunity Explorer is available only to sellers on the Professional selling plan. Amazon does not list Brand Registry as a requirement, and it does not list a separate fee for the tool either.

You find the Product Opportunity Explorer in Seller Central in the new menu under Products › Research products, and in the classic menu under “Growth”.

Amazon is rebuilding the tool. The new view offers eleven stores, in Europe Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the UK. For other stores, a link at the top takes you to the previous view. There you choose the marketplace in “Find opportunities in”, which also includes the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Belgium and Ireland (as of October 2026). The following sections describe the previous view.

By default only the primary user of the account has access. The primary user grants access to other users under Settings › Manage Global Permissions: there the user needs view access for “New Product Opportunities”. If the primary user gets an error message, first check the selling plan, then contact Selling Partner Support.

Vendor Central also has a Product Opportunity Explorer menu item under “Growth”. Amazon has not documented which rules apply to vendors.

Category, niche, search term: how the tool is built

On the start page, the tool shows sample niches from the categories you sell in and a search bar. There you search for a search term, such as “yoga mat”, or for an ASIN. If you don’t want to search for a term, you browse categories and subcategories instead.

The difference between category, niche and search term, with an invented example: in a category such as “Sports & Outdoors” sits the niche “yoga mat”. Customers search for it with different search terms, such as “yoga mat”, “non slip yoga mat” or “exercise mat”. All these terms belong to the niche if customers click and buy the same products for them.

If you search for an ASIN, the tool shows the niches the product belongs to and similar ASINs.

How current are the numbers? Amazon creates new niches at the start of each month and updates the metrics at the start of each week. If a niche shows extreme growth, according to Amazon this usually means customer interest suddenly increased.

The tabs of a niche

When you click on a niche, you see the niche details page: general figures at the top, such as search volume, average price and return rate, and five tabs below: Insights and trends, Products, Search terms, Customer Review Insights and Returns (as of October 2026). Amazon’s help also names a Purchase Drivers tab; in the niche we checked, it was missing.

At the top right you open the metrics glossary, which explains each metric. It is worth a look before you compare numbers.

Products

This tab lists the products customers click and buy most often after a search in the niche. For each product you see, among other things, the launch date and the click share. A click on a product shows more details: price and offer data, the average Amazon fees, clicks and trends.

The tab shows how competitive the niche is. If the top three yoga mats get almost all the clicks, a new product will have a hard time.

Search Terms

Here you see the search terms of the niche with search volume, click share, conversion rate and the three most clicked products per term.

A reading tip: a high search volume together with a low conversion rate suggests that many customers search but don’t find the right product. That can be a sales opportunity.

Insights and Trends

This tab sums up the niche in 20 data points, each for today, the last 90 and the last 360 days. The number of products and the products with the most clicks show how saturated a niche is. If the share of Prime products is low, an offer with Prime can be an opportunity.

Here you also follow metrics of the niche over time. The chart shows up to two metrics at once, and you can keep up to five in the selection. Each point sums up the seven days before its date.

Customer Review Insights

Amazon groups the reviews of the niche by topic and shows what customers mention positively and negatively. A chart shows how each topic affected the star rating over the last six months, separately for the top 25% of products and for all products in the niche. If complaints such as “the mat slips” or “the smell is annoying” pile up, you know what your yoga mat must do better.

Purchase Drivers

Amazon’s help describes this tab. In the niche we checked it was missing (October 2026). It shows up to ten features that have a positive or negative effect on the units sold in the niche, such as “Color: Blue”. Amazon derives them from the title, description and bullet points of the products.

Returns

Here you see the most common reasons why customers return products of the niche, with their share of all returns and the trend over time. The reasons come from what buyers stated.

Together, the tabs show demand and supply in a niche. Unlike in the search terms report, you don’t research single search terms here, but whole niches with all their search terms and products.

Find unmet demand

According to Amazon, the Product Opportunity Explorer also shows opportunities with unmet demand. These are groups of similar search terms whose conversion rate is below the benchmark. Customers search, but buy less often than usual. Amazon calls them the top unmet demand opportunities for your brand.

In the previous view, you find it in its own tab for unmet demand (beta), with a section on the top unmet demand for you. We did not check which marketplace data it is based on.

Export the data

For your own analyses you often need the numbers outside the tool. The Search Terms tab of a niche has a download button for this. With the column settings you choose beforehand which columns the table shows.

If you have data as a CSV file, our article on how to analyze Amazon data in Excel helps you.

How to use Product Opportunity Explorer for a product launch

Before you order a new yoga mat, check the niche in five steps:

As a brand owner, you have even more detailed search term data in Amazon Brand Analytics. The Search Query Performance report, for example, shows how your own products perform for single search queries.

Check competitor keywords with AMALYTIX

The Product Opportunity Explorer shows which yoga mats get the most clicks in the niche. But it does not show, for each single competing product, which search terms bring it its clicks. That is exactly what you need in step 3, when you position your listing against the strongest competitor.

In the Brand Analytics module of AMALYTIX, you enter a competitor’s ASIN in the Search Term Report. AMALYTIX searches the stored search term reports and shows for which search terms customers click on this product. Next to it you see the products that get attention for the same searches.

The limits: this only works with data from Brand Analytics, so for brand owners. You decide which terms go into your listing.

Conclusion

The Product Opportunity Explorer gives sellers on the Professional selling plan Amazon’s own data on niches. Before a launch, check demand, competition and customer feedback from reviews and returns. Amazon sees the numbers only as guidance, and they change every week: compare them over time instead of overrating a single value.

Frequently asked questions about Product Opportunity Explorer

Is the Product Opportunity Explorer free?

Amazon does not list a separate fee for the tool. But it requires the Professional selling plan, which has a monthly fee.

Do I need Brand Registry?

No. Amazon does not list Brand Registry as a requirement, only the Professional selling plan.

Can vendors use the Product Opportunity Explorer?

Vendor Central has a Product Opportunity Explorer menu item. Amazon has not documented which rules apply to vendors.

How current is the data?

Amazon creates new niches at the start of each month and updates the metrics at the start of each week.