For most Amazon sellers, product research follows a familiar script: find a best-selling product, identify a way to make it slightly different or cheaper, and jump into a crowded market hoping to capture a slice of the pie. But this reactive approach is a recipe for razor-thin margins and endless price wars. What if you could stop chasing trends and start creating them?

To find out, we went straight to the source.

In our conversation with Zhen Li, a Senior Technical Product Manager on the Seller Growth & Development team at Amazon, she revealed a new playbook for Amazon product research. This is a guide to using Amazon’s own data and powerful new AI tools to shift your focus from what’s already selling, to what customers desperately want but can’t find. It’s a method for discovering and validating underserved needs before you ever invest a dollar in inventory.

Key Insights

• Discover Untapped Demand: Use the new “Identify Market Demand” feature in Product Opportunity Explorer to find niches where customers are searching but not buying, signaling a clear gap in the market.
• Validate with Data: Leverage two years of historical data on search volume, product count, and click share to understand trends, seasonality, and the ideal time to enter a new niche.
• Let AI Do the Heavy Lifting: Instantly get GenAI-powered summaries of any niche, synthesizing market trends, customer profiles, and pricing strategies to cut your research time from hours to minutes.
• Design for Your Customer: Utilize AI-powered product development insights that reveal the exact features, materials, and functions customers are looking for, allowing you to build a winning product from day one.
• Think Globally from the Start: Access insights from 11 new marketplaces, including Mexico, Brazil, and Australia, to identify local customer needs and find opportunities in less saturated markets.

Watch the full conversation with Amazon’s Zhen Li to hear these strategies firsthand, or continue reading for our complete breakdown below.

The Flaw in Traditional Amazon Market Research

The biggest challenge for sellers, as Zhen Li points out, is figuring out “what could be a best seller.” Traditionally, this has involved analyzing the existing product catalog, looking at top performers, and iterating on their success. The problem is that this method forces you to enter an already established, and often saturated, market.

Amazon is pioneering a new approach that flips this model on its head. Instead of starting with competitor products, it starts with the customer.

The primary tool for this customer-first strategy is the Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer. While it launched in 2021, recent enhancements have transformed it into one of the best Amazon market research tools available, giving sellers direct access to Amazon’s deep understanding of its customers.

New Framework: De-Risking Your Next Product Launch

The enhanced Product Opportunity Explorer provides a data-driven framework to help sellers discover, validate, and design products with a much higher probability of success. Here are the key upgrades driving this new approach.

Validate Trends with Two Years of Historical Data

Guesswork is the enemy of a successful product launch. To combat this, Amazon has expanded the data within Product Opportunity Explorer to include a two-year history for metrics like search volume, product count, and brand count for every niche.

This allows sellers to move beyond a snapshot in time and understand the bigger picture. You can now analyze seasonality, identify rising or falling trends, and determine the optimal entry timing for a new product, de-risking your investment with concrete historical data.

Expand Your Horizons with Global Marketplace Insights

A product idea that’s saturated in the US might be a wide-open opportunity in another country. Amazon has now expanded its customer needs insights from seven established stores to include 11 more emerging marketplaces, including Mexico, Canada, Brazil, Australia, and countries in Europe and Asia.

This empowers sellers to conduct global Amazon market research and “learn the local customer needs in different stores,” as Li explains. This is a powerful tool for finding less competitive markets or for brands considering a global expansion by Selling on Amazon Europe.

Opportunity: Finding What Customers Want (But Can’t Find)

The most powerful new feature within Product Opportunity Explorer is called Identify Market Demand. This tool is engineered to do one thing: direct sellers to underserved customer needs.

It works by analyzing customer behavior to find niches where shoppers are actively searching and browsing for products but have a low purchase rate. This is a clear signal of unmet demand: customers are looking for something specific and leaving empty-handed.

Instead of browsing endless product categories, sellers can now go to a curated list of opportunities where they know a market gap exists. From there, they can “ideate their next product or best seller,” says Li, with the confidence that they are solving a real customer problem.

Leveraging AI to Accelerate and Inform Your Research

To make this wealth of data actionable, Amazon is embedding Generative AI directly into the research process. These AI tools for Amazon sellers are designed to deliver insights faster and with greater clarity.

From Hours to Minutes: AI-Synthesized Niche Insights

Doing in-depth Amazon product research used to mean spending hours in spreadsheets, manually combining data points to form a cohesive picture of a niche. Amazon’s new AI-powered insights eliminate this heavy lifting.

The tool synthesizes all the relevant data and provides instant insights on market trends, top-selling product features, customer profiles, and even effective pricing strategy tiers within the niche. This allows you to vet ideas with unprecedented speed. For a deeper dive on using AI, check out our insider’s guide to building customer personas.

Designing for Demand: AI-Powered Product Development Insights

Beyond identifying an opportunity, the tool also helps you design the perfect product to fill it. By analyzing on- and off-Amazon signals, the AI provides product development insights on what might be missing from the current market.

Sellers receive guidance on the specific “design or color or material or function of the product that they are looking for,” Li notes. This allows you to create a product that meets customer expectations from day one, giving you a powerful competitive advantage and informing everything from your manufacturing specs to your listing copy.

Your Pre-Launch Playbook Awaits

The journey to a winning product doesn’t begin at launch; it begins with a deep understanding of the customer. The old model of imitating best-sellers is being replaced by a more innovative, data-driven approach. By leveraging the tools Amazon provides, sellers can stop competing and start creating.With a clear strategy for pre-launch research and validation, your next product can be built on a foundation of real, unmet customer demand. When you are ready for the next step, our insider’s post-launch guide can help you ensure your well-researched product becomes a long-term success.