Spy On Your Competitors with SmartScout With Michael White

Here at Ritz Momentum, speed is king, and by using the right research tools, we as sellers can gain a huge advantage by moving faster than our competition in one particular phase: product research.

Join Izabella Ritz, CEO of Ritz Momentum, in her discussion with Michael White, Chief Strategy Officer at SmartScoutwhere they cover how to spy on your competition by finding which products are bringing the most revenue for brand wholesale and private label sellers on Amazon, and how to target high demand, low-competition niches.

What is SmartScout?

SmartScout is a software platform that allows us to analyze brand performance, individual products, entire customer journeys, and individual sellers on Amazon.

There are many places to start on the platform, but the one that everyone in the community has talked about is THE MAP. SmartScout has developed a map feature that shows the location of all Amazon sellers as well as their REVENUE. That’s right. You can find individual businesses and discover their performance on Amazon.

But just like any tool, it is best employed when you already have a strategy in mind: a carpenter doesn’t just start using a hammer unless he knows what he is building. Just as we do for our clients at Ritz Momentum, we highly encourage that sellers use the powerful software at their disposal to help them develop and refine their selling strategy, and NOT as some holy grail that will magically produce the business answers for them.

While we don’t want to limit anyone into thinking that they should become either a wholesaler OR a private label seller (because anyone can be both), we will explore SmartScout through these two lens so that we can better understand the tool’s application in finding products that best first our selling strategy. However, one principal certainly applies to both selling types: targeting high-demand, low-competition niches is the only way to gain a lasting competitive edge on Amazon.

Let’s dive in.

How does SmartScout help me find which wholesale products to sell?

1. Targeting by Brand Size.A good place to start deciphering with what brands to work is by using the Monthly Revenue Estimate filter to dial in on the brands whose size fits just right for our business. Additionally, we can filter for sellers that have at least 15 brands and 50 products in order to find those strictly wholesaling accounts. The first page will show the highest grossing 1000 brands, so depending on business size, one can skip to the page that’s in the sweet spot.
2. Avoid Competing with Amazon.If you really want to go head-to-head with an ecommerce behemoth, go for it…but we highly recommend against it. Using the Amazon In-Stock filter sellers can avoid trying to sell brands that already have a close wholesale relationship with Amazon.
3. Remove the FBA Competition.The Average Number of FBA Sellers is our key to finding those competition niches. By setting its maximum to 2, we pinpoint where FBA representation is low, and thus, where competition doesn’t exist.
4. Do not target dominant sellers.With the Dominant Seller property, we can filter out any sellers that control more than 50% of a brand’s sales, a clear indication that they have an established relationship with that brand, making competition very difficult, especially for individuals just starting out. Before we build momentum, we have to gain
5. Don’t lose your profits in shipping fees.Protect your margins by using Average Product Size to get rid of brands whose product size would cause your shipping and FBA fees to destroy your business model.

*Inside Scoop from Ritz Momentum – We heard that soon SmartScout will include Item Weight into their platform so that we can not only filter by size, but also by weight!

6. Target Brands by Product Pricing.By inputting our product’s (or potential product) price into the Average Selling Price filter, we can target brands whose products most closely align with our selling strategy.

This 6-step process may sound tedious and time consuming, but Michael and Izabella were able to go through it simply and clearly in just under 16 minutes. Thanks to SmartScout, research that would previously take hours if not days now takes minutes.

Private Label is where the money is at! How can I use SmartScout to find product opportunities?

Private Label is all about NICHE, and finding high-demand, low-competition products is especially crucial for those establishing their own brands. We can always fix a good product’s bad marketing, but no amount of good marketing will fix a bad product (cough…CNN+…cough).

SmartScout is already set up to help us dive into the depths of Amazon’s entire marketplace.

1. Start with Subcategories. In this feature, we can use several filters previously mentioned jointly to isolate the private label sellers that could be our direct competition. When we input our price point into the Average Selling Price, and we enter “2” as the maximum Number of Sellers, we find which private label sellers in the subcategory are selling at the same price point as our selling strategy. While you may be tempted to use the Monthly Revenue Estimate to identify the top performers, remember that the number you see does not tell the whole story: it only shows you the revenue for the subcategory. That brand may have products in other subcategories with varying sales performance, so we need to explore how the whole puzzle fits together if we are going to truly understand our competition.
2. Beware of the Shark: Amazon. Remember that Jeff Bezos’s big bad shark lurks everywhere. As we drill down into subcategories, we have to check Amazon’s revenue share percentage to see whether they smell blood in the water; SmartScout makes it easy by displaying the number at a glance.
3. Easily make research connections across Amazon. The creative process is iterative: it’s a lot of back and forth, jumping between ideas, and making connections. On SmartScout we can easily navigate and explore Amazon’s 40,000+ subcategories, leaving interesting brands and products open in tabs, connect directly to Amazon with each ASIN’s hyperlink, all while staying organized with their category directory.
4. Get the raw product research data. Some people are nerds when it comes to product research, and even though everyone has access to the data, most don’t know how to use it or where to start. At Ritz Momentum, we are guilty as charged when it comes to being #NumberNerds. Once we find our target products, we can export them as an Excel file for even deeper analysis.

How can I spy and take traffic away from competitors?

In our next Amazon Made Simple episode with SmartScout, Izabella will cover how we can use Traffic Graph to figure out where our competitor’s organic traffic is coming from so we can target those products with our own ads. We can then double down on our strategy using AdSpy to gain insight into what keywords our competitors are using in their Pay-Per-Click campaigns, and more importantly, which ones are WINNING.

Where do I go next?

If you want more content like this, subscribe to our podcast, Amazon Made Simple, with Izabella Ritz, and follow us on Instagram.

Click here and use BELLA50 at checkout to get a 7-day free trial AND $50 off your first month’s subscription with SmartScout.

Get out there and make it happen! Happy Amazoning!