The most important aspect of starting an eCommerce business is finding a profitable product to sell. Whether you want to sell on Amazon, eBay, Etsy or via your own website, knowing what to sell will go a long way into making your store a success. In this review of Jungle Scout, we will take a look at one of the best research tools for people looking to sell on Amazon.
Amazon presents one of the best opportunities for entrepreneurs to start an eCommerce business via their FBA model. It’s very similar to the dropshipping model with one major difference, you have to purchase your own products and send them into an Amazon warehouse and they will take care of the rest.
The one major stumbling block all eCommerce business owners must overcome is finding a profitable product to sell. Luckily, for people looking to sell on Amazon, there are a few research apps that will help you find a good product to sell and of those apps is Jungle Scout.
Jungle Scout Review
Jungle Scout was founded by Greg Mercer, a Maryland native who is an engineer by profession and also runs a successful Amazon FBA business. Seeing how hard it was to gather data about products to sell he decided to develop his own software and that is how Jungle Scout was eventually born.
Jungle Scout is a web-based app and Chrome extension that comes with many features and will give you access to a ton of data that will help you analyse products and see if they will be a good fit to sell on Amazon.
Now, just to be transparent, I am basing this review on the free trial version which has some limited features. Still, the features that make this software so popular are available in the free version and this is what my review of Jungle Scout will be based on.
One of the first things people will notice is how visually appealing the user interface is how well developed the front-end of the Jungle Scout app is.
I, like most other people, love web-based apps that require very little tutorial on how to best use it and this is the case with Jungle Scout. You will need to read up on what some of the metrics imply but other than that most of the data is easy to understand.
Now, this review, will not be like a tutorial on how to use Jungle Scout but I will list each feature and explain how it can help you find a profitable product to sell.
Over the years Jungle Scout has added many new features and some are not related to identifying products to sell on Amazon, I will not go too in-depth in explaining these features as I think they are unnecessary at the beginning of your Amazon journey.
Just one last thing to note, Jungle Scout provides Amazon product data for the following countries;
USA, UK, Canada, Germany, Spain, France, Italy and Mexico, so if you are planning on selling in any one of those countries, Jungle Scout will be a good investment for your business.
Keyword Scout
This is one of my favourite features of Jungle Scout, its similar to tools that analyse search data from Google and other search engines but this one is solely for analysing customer search queries within Amazon.
This will give you a good idea about what people are searching for, analyse the results of those searches and see if there are any product opportunities.
You get lots of data points to work with including the following;
Search Volume – You get data for exact search volume and related search terms. Knowing exactly what people are searching for is a good starting point in evaluating if a product idea will be successful or not.
Trend – Data for 30- and 90-day trend for that search term, so you can see if it has consistent search queries or if there are lots of fluctuations. This will allow you to plan for periods when there is a high and low demand for the product you plan on selling.
Recommended Giveaway – I didn’t know what this data implied, so I had to look it up. Apparently, one way of moving up the Amazon search results is by giving away your products at a steep discount, obviously you will make a loss initially but as you gradually move up the rankings, you will hopefully start to get a lot of organic sales. This data tells you many products you will have to sell on a daily basis at the discounted price for a couple of weeks to see your products move up the organic listings.
PPC Data – You get recommend bids for headline search ads (HAS), exact search terms and broad search terms. This data will be useful when you eventually start PPC campaigns on Amazon to scale your business, initially though you can leave this data alone.
Ease To Rank – Another very useful piece of data, just like keyword tools like KWFinder and Jaaxy will give you a rating on how hard it will be to rank for a specific keyword, keyword scout does the same by giving a rating between 1-100, the higher the rating the harder it will be to rank for that search term.
Product Database
Jungle Scout have imported the entire Amazon catalogue into their database, within it, you can search for any type of product and get the following data;
- Monthly Sales
- Number Of Sellers
- Monthly Revenue
- Amazon Sales Rank
- Number Of Reviews
- Overall Rating
With these data points you can assess how viable a product is to sell on Amazon, for example, if a product as a decent number of sales, good monthly revenue and not many sellers, it may be a good idea to do further research on this product. However, if the monthly revenue is good but there are a lot of sellers, it may not be a good idea to sell this product because of the high competition.
This feature can also be used for those who want to sell on Amazon via arbitrage deals, you can assess how quickly a product will sell and make a decision on whether or not to sell that product.
Product Tracker
A really useful feature that will allow you to see historical sales data for any product. You can track the product over a period of time and analyse how well it is selling, you get data for daily sales, average price, average ratings and average daily revenue.
When doing product research, data like the ones above will go a long way into determining if a product is worth selling on Amazon.
Opportunity Finder
Unfortunately, this is one of the features that is not available on the free trial version of Jungle Scout, so I couldn’t play around with it and give an honest assessment.
What I have read and seen about this feature is promising, it’s a feature exclusive to Jungle Scout and it basically allows you to search for good product opportunities in any Amazon category.
You can filter your search results by category, units sold, competition, average price, list quality score and opportunity score. Most of the filters are self-explanatory, however, terms like list quality score and opportunity score will be completely new to some people.
Fortunately, Jungle Scout have a very helpful support section where they explain what the data means.
So, the list quality score is basically a score from Jungle Scout that grades the overall quality of a product listing. While opportunity score is an overall grade on how good of an opportunity selling that product will provide, this score is based upon on things like price, competition, reviews and overall ratings.
Jungle Scout Chrome Extension
The Jungle Scout Chrome Extension is probably the most used feature of Jungle Scout. It’s basically a lite version of the main web-based app and its much easier to use and provides an overall Birdseye view of a product’s viability.
Basically, how it works is you go to Amazon and search for a particular product when the search results come up, you click on the Jungle Scout icon on your Chrome browser and you will get a table full of data like the one below.
A lot of the data is similar to what you get from the product database from the web-based app. However, the useful thing about the Chrome Extension is that you do not have to set any filters, just search for anything on Amazon, press the icon and get all the data you need to evaluate if there are any good product opportunities within your search result.
The most useful data is the niche opportunity score, this is an overall score that tells you how much potential there is to sell a product successfully within the niche, you are researching. The score is based upon several factors such as competitions, monthly revenue and number of sales in the last 30 days.
By the way, the above data is about items to do with baby Yoda, if you are a Star Wars fan (who isn’t ??), this may be a good nice idea because the opportunity score is near perfect. Of course, this just a rating and will point you in the right direction, you will have to validate the product idea through other means like checking out the keyword data and tracking the products sales history to see how well it does over a certain period of time.
Supplier Database
Finding a profitable product is just one piece of the puzzle (a very important one), once you have a product idea, you will need to find a reliable supplier to purchase these products from.
A recent feature that Jungle Scout has added is the ability to find suppliers for products you are interested in selling. You can do this via the Chrome Extension or through the web-app, in the Chrome extension, it’s a little easier, you just click on the icon that’s say’s “find suppliers for this product” when you hover over it.
If Jungle Scout has the supplier in their database, you will get their contact information as well as information regarding the types of products they supply and any other Amazon sellers who are using them.
Other data includes how many shipments they have made to Amazon warehouses in the past two years and the total number of Amazon sellers who use their services. This data will give you a good idea on whether the supplier has a good reputation or not as multiple shipments ordered by the same customers will mean that the sellers are happy with the products and supplier.
Of course, sometimes there will be no information about suppliers for many of the products you are researching, this is to be expected as this is a new feature and suppliers have to be verified and vetted before they are added to the database.
So, although this is a nice little addition to the Jungle Scout list of features, you will still need to research other ways to find suppliers because of the limited number of suppliers in the database.
Other Features
The features I have mentioned are all related to finding a profitable product to sell on Amazon and this is the core feature of Jungle Scout. However, over the years they have added plenty of other features to help both new and experienced Amazon sellers with their business.
These features include things like inventory management, email campaigns, product promotion, sales analytics, rank tracker and so much more.
In the paid subscription plan, you also get access to their FBA Academy which is a comprehensive program on how to start selling on Amazon, which will be especially useful for people who are complete beginners.
They also provide tons of free resources on everything related to Amazon FBA including informative case studies, free Books and a regularly updated blog.
Jungle Scout Market Place
This is for people who have already started an Amazon FBA business or very close to launching their first product. In the market place, you can find services for all things related to selling on Amazon, from product photography to running PPC campaigns, it’s a bit like Fiverr but focuses on Amazon FBA services.
Jungle Scout Pricing
There are three pricing plans for Jungle Scout, I think the best option for beginners is the Chrome Extension which gives you access to most of the features for product research which is what Jungle Scout is best known for.
Final Thoughts
This review is based on the free limited trial of Jungle Scout, I was very impressed by the software and probably will be even more impressed when I invest in the full Jungle Scout suite. It is the most well-known Amazon research software and is recommended by most successful Amazon sellers including those who have created courses on how to sell on Amazon.