Amazon competitor analysis is a complete teardown of what makes top sellers in your niche successful. In other words its a reverse-engineering their entire strategy, from the keywords they rank for to their advertising plays and how they handle customer feedback.
When you understand the mechanics of your competitor’s success, you can build a sustainable growing brand. A proper analysis digs into several key areas:
- Listings and Branding: How are they using product offer, listing copy, images, and A+ Content to convince shoppers to click “Add to Cart”?
- Keywords and Rankings: Which search terms are they using in listing to bring traffic and sales?
- Pricing and Promotions: Competitor current and historical price trends.
- Customer Reviews: What do customers consistently like or complain about? What recurring themes pop up?
- Advertising Strategy: Where are they putting their ad dollars, and which keywords are they bidding on?
In 2024, with Amazon owning roughly 38% of the U.S. e-commerce market and hosting millions of sellers, the marketplace is more crowded than ever. Standing out requires more than a good product. A detailed competitor analysis is your starting point.
A solid competitor analysis is identifying competitors weaknesses and positioning your brand as the superior choice.
For example, spotting keywords your top competitors are not ranking on yet, can open up profitable, low-competition territory for your own products. Some of this data is even available directly from Amazon through tools like Amazon Brand Analytics.
How to Identify Your Actual Competitors
Before you dissect a rival’s strategy, you need to be sure you’re watching the right players. Not everyone selling a similar product is a direct threat to your bottom line.
Your goal is to build a targeted list of brands that are consistently generating good revenue.
1. Finding Direct Competitors
The most straightforward way to start is to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Hop on Amazon and search for your main keyword. The products showing up organically on the first page are your most immediate competitors
As you browse, look for products with special badges:
- Best Seller: This orange badge means it’s the top-selling product in its category. These are your volume leaders, and they’re doing something right.
- Amazon’s Choice: This black badge is a direct recommendation from Amazon’s algorithm for a specific keyword. It signals a well-priced, highly-rated product that’s ready to ship.
These powerful trust signals that heavily influence buying decisions. Any ASIN holding one of these badges for your main keywords should go straight to the top of your list. Of course, this process is much less manual if you’re using Amazon product research tools which can pull this data automatically.
2. Tiering Competitors
Once you have a raw list of potential rivals, sort them into categories. This step prevents you from getting bogged down in data and helps you prioritize who to analyze first.
- Tier 1: Direct Substitutes. These are the products a customer would buy instead of yours without a second thought. They solve the same problem, for the same audience, at a similar price. If you sell a 12-inch silicone baking mat, another 12-inch silicone baking mat is a Tier 1 competitor.
- Tier 2: Alternative Solutions. These products solve the same core problem, but in a different way. For a silicone baking mat, this might be parchment paper or a high-quality non-stick spray. They aren’t direct replacements, but they capture a chunk of your potential market.
- Tier 3: Adjacent Products. This group is more subtle. These are products in a related category that don’t directly compete but can influence a buying decision. For a baking mat, this could be a popular brand of cookie sheets that frequently shows up in the “frequently bought together” section.
Top Metrics You Must Analyze
Spotting your competitors is the easy part. The real work, and the real opportunity, begins when you start digging into their data to figure out what makes them tick. By focusing on a few core metrics, you can quickly uncover their strengths, pinpoint their weaknesses, and create a map for how to beat them.
1. Listing Quality
A quick audit of competitor’s product listing can tell you volumes about their strategy and sophistication.
Look at these key areas for patterns and weaknesses:
- Titles, Bullets, and A+ Content: Are they stuffing the title with high-volume keywords at the front? Do their bullet points sell benefits, or are they just a boring list of features? Weak, uninspired copy is a massive opportunity for you to do it better.
- Images and Video: High-quality lifestyle photos and slick infographics almost always improve conversion rates. If their images look like they were taken on a flip phone, or if they’re missing a video entirely, you have a clear path to creating more engaging visual content.
2. Pricing Behavior
Price is one of the biggest levers on Amazon, and how your competitors use it tells a story. Are they positioned as a premium brand with a consistently high price, or are they in a constant race to the bottom?
3. Keyword Footprint
This is how you find out what’s fueling their organic sales. A reverse ASIN lookup is one of the most powerful moves you can make. Pop a competitor’s ASIN into a tool like Helium 10’s Cerebro, and it will show you the exact keywords they are ranking for.
4. Sales Indicators
While Amazon won’t hand you a competitor’s sales report, you can get surprisingly close. The Best Seller Rank (BSR) is your best friend here. It’s a powerful, real-time indicator of sales velocity. A consistently low BSR (closer to #1) means that product is selling well.
By tracking the BSR of your top 5-10 competitors, you can use sales estimator tools to get a good idea of their monthly sales volume. This gives you a snapshot of the market share distribution and helps you understand who the real leaders are.
5. Review Sentiment
A competitor’s review section is a goldmine of unfiltered, honest customer feedback. Don’t just glance at the overall star rating. You need to read the actual comments, especially the angry ones in the 1 to 3-star reviews.
Look for recurring complaints. If five different people mention the same cheap zipper or a confusing instruction manual, you’ve just been handed a major pain point on a silver platter. This is something your product can solve and that you can call out directly in your own listing.
6. Advertising and Traffic
Finally, scope out their advertising footprint. Are they pouring money into Sponsored Products for your main keywords? Do you see their logo in Sponsored Brands ads at the top of search results?
Seeing where they spend their ad budget shows you which keywords they believe are the most valuable. This intel can shape your own PPC strategy, helping you decide whether to go head-to-head for a competitive term or focus on cheaper, long-tail keywords they’re ignoring. Understanding how to optimize your Amazon ACoS gives you the framework to compete without burning through cash.
Step-by-Step Competitor Analysis Workflow
Knowing what to look for is one thing, but having a structured process to find it is another. A repeatable workflow is your secret weapon, preventing you from getting lost in data and ensuring you’re consistently gathering intelligence you can use.
Think of this less as a one-time project and more as an ongoing system to keep a pulse on your market.
Step 1. Build Your Competitor List
First, create a focused list of your top 5-10 competitors. Precision is key here.
Start by searching for your most important keyword on Amazon. Systematically pull the ASINs of the top organic results on page one. For now, ignore sponsored placements; you want the products Amazon’s algorithm already loves. Add any products with a “Best Seller” or “Amazon’s Choice” badge to your list immediately.
Step 2. Sales and Rank Tracking
Use Helium 10 X-Ray to get monthly sales estimates for each competitor. This helps you calculate a rough share of the market and see who the true leaders are. Select the top 10 competitors.
Step 3. Reverse ASIN with Helium10 Cerebro
With your list of competitor ASINs, it’s time to do a reverse ASIN lookup. This peels back the curtain on the exact search terms driving their sales.
Pop a competitor’s ASIN into a tool like Helium 10’s Cerebro. The tool will return a list of all the keywords they rank for. From there, it’s all about filtering.
- Filter for high-impact terms: Zero in on keywords where they have a high organic rank (positions 1-25) and solid search volume.
- Make separate keyword lists: Create one list for your listing optimization (titles, bullets, backend search terms), making sure to exclude any competitor brand names. Create a second list that includes those branded terms to inform your PPC ad campaigns, especially for direct competitor targeting.
Step 4. Perform a Listing Audit
Now, manually review each competitor’s product detail page. You’re looking for patterns, best practices, and weaknesses.
I find it helps to create a simple spreadsheet to track your findings. For each competitor, note their:
- Title Structure: How do they sequence keywords? Where is the brand name placed?
- Bullets and Benefit Sequencing: Are they benefit-driven (“Enjoy peaceful sleep”) or feature-focused (“Made from 100% memory foam”)?
- Image Styles: Do they have attention grabbing main image, lifestyle images, infographics, or comparison charts? Is there a product video?
- A+ Layout: How are they using the modules? Is it a wall of text, or is it visually engaging and easy to scan?
Step 5. Review Mining
Head over to each competitor’s review section and filter for the 1, 2, and 3-star ratings. This is where you’ll find uncut, unfiltered customer feedback.
Read through the negative comments and categorize the complaints. Are customers repeatedly mentioning a specific design flaw, a packaging problem, or a misleading description? Every recurring complaint is a gap in the market you can fill.
Step 6. Pricing Breakdown
Track price movement over time to identify aggressive promo patterns. Using a tool that monitors competitor pricing history, you can see if they run discounts on certain days or holidays. This helps you decide where to position your own product.
Using a tool like Keepa, you can become a pricing detective. Track their history to spot trends. Do they slash prices every weekend? Do they run deep discounts on holidays? This kind of price fluctuation tracking helps you anticipate their moves and decide if you want to compete on price or differentiate on value.
Step 7. Advertising and Organic Rank Check
Check for sponsored placements in the search results for your most important keywords. Look for both Sponsored Products within the results and Sponsored Brands ads at the very top. This shows you which keywords they are willing to spend money on.
When you download the Helium10 keyword list, it shows the organic and sponsored ranks of top competitors that we later use in Cerebro for reverse ASIN research. If a competitor has high sponsored ranks on major keywords, it means they’re running heavy ads. But if they’re generating strong revenue with no sponsored ranks, their sales are coming purely from organic positions.
Step 8. Check Amazon PPC Competition
The screenshot below highlights a key part of PPC research: Helium10’s suggested bids and bid ranges. These values often hint at the competitive pressure behind each keyword.
- When suggested bids fall between $4 to 6 dollars, it usually signals very tough competition. Brands in these niches bid aggressively, especially in categories like beauty and skincare, where CPCs are naturally higher.
- Suggested bids around $1 to $2 dollars are more typical in beauty sub-categories where the rivalry isn’t as intense.
Even though Helium10’s numbers don’t directly reflect the exact live bid required, they give a useful snapshot of how competitive a keyword feels in the auction.
Example of PPC Cost Estimate
Keyword: face moisturizer
Suggested CPC: 1.69 USD
Conversion rate assumption: 10 percent
Clicks needed for one sale at 10 percent = Clicks = 1/Conversion Rate = 10 clicks
Cost per sale = Bid × Clicks = 1.69 × 10 = 16.9 USD per sale
How This Fits Into Profit Calculations
Once you know your estimated PPC cost per sale, plug it into your margin sheet:
Profit after PPC = Selling price − (Product cost + FBA fee + PPC cost per sale)
If you sell a product for 25 USD and your landed cost + FBA fee is 12 USD, then:
Profit after PPC = $25 − ($12 + $17) = -$4
With a PPC cost per sale of 17 USD, your net margins would be in negative $4per sales. This is why keyword-level PPC cost estimation is essential part of Amazon competitor analysis.
Tools That Make This Process Faster
Trying to run a proper Amazon competitor analysis manually is slow and guarantees you’ll miss critical data. Smart sellers use a toolkit that automates data collection and uncovers insights you can’t find on your own.
Using the right software isn’t just about saving time. It’s about gaining a strategic edge.
1. All-in-One Research Suites
These are the Swiss Army knives for Amazon sellers, bundling everything from keyword research and sales estimation to listing analysis.
- Helium 10 & Jungle Scout: These two are the top choices for a reason. Their reverse-ASIN tools, like Cerebro from Helium 10, are gold mines. You can plug in a competitor’s ASIN and instantly see the keywords they rank for. Our guide on the best keyword research tools for Amazon breaks them down further.
Here’s a peek at what you see inside Cerebro when you pop in a few competitor ASINs.
This one search can pull thousands of keywords, providing fuel for both your Amazon listing optimization and your PPC campaigns.
2. Specialized Data Tools
While big suites are great, sometimes you need to get granular.
- Keepa: For tracking price fluctuations and BSR history, nothing beats Keepa. Its charts let you see every price change, lightning deal, and rank movement over years, helping you reverse-engineer a competitor’s promotional calendar.
- Review Analyzers: A good review analysis tool automates sifting through thousands of reviews by categorizing common positive and negative themes. It’s the fastest way to find out what customers love and hate.
- ImportFromWeb: If you live in Google Sheets, ImportFromWeb is a handy extension that scrapes data points like price, BSR, and review counts directly from Amazon pages into your spreadsheet. It’s excellent for building custom tracking dashboards.
3. Amazon’s Own Tools
Don’t forget about the first-party data Amazon provides directly.
- Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer: This is your window into real customer search behavior. It shows you search volume trends, conversion rates, and average price points within a niche.
- Amazon Brand Analytics: If you’re Brand Registered, this is your secret weapon. The Top Search Terms report shows the keywords driving the most clicks and conversions across all of Amazon, not just for your products.
Turning Your Analysis into an Action Plan
Gathering competitor data is only half the battle; real growth comes from translating those insights into a clear action plan. A proper Amazon competitor analysis is about making specific, data-backed changes that directly impact your bottom line.
The easiest way to avoid getting buried in data is to categorize your findings into three core business areas. This keeps you focused on changes that will move the needle fastest.
- Listing & Product Improvements: Did you spot a recurring complaint in a competitor’s reviews? Use that feedback to improve your product or highlight your superior quality in your listing. Finding keyword gaps is another win. Weaving those untapped terms into your copy is a key part of effective optimizing product descriptions.
- PPC & Advertising Adjustments: If your analysis shows a rival dominating sponsored placements for a keyword you’re ignoring, it’s time to test a new campaign. If you see them consistently overspending on a low-volume term, you know exactly what to avoid.
- Pricing & Promotional Strategy: Noticing a competitor runs a deep discount at the end of every month gives you a strategic choice. You can either prepare to match their price or hold steady and use your listing to emphasize why your product is worth more.
A great analysis tells you not just what to do, but also what not to do. It’s about making smarter decisions with your time and money.
Question and Answer Section
How often should I do competitor analysis?
For your direct competitors in a fast-moving category, a quick weekly check-in is a smart habit. Look at their pricing, BSR fluctuations, and any new ads they’re running. For a full, deep-dive analysis covering keyword strategy and review sentiment, block out time quarterly. You should also run a complete analysis anytime a serious new player enters your space or if you see a sudden drop in sales.
What’s the biggest mistake sellers make?
The biggest mistake is “analysis paralysis.” Sellers get so buried in spreadsheets they never actually do anything with the information. The goal isn’t a flawless report; it’s finding one or two clear, actionable insights and putting them to work quickly. The second is tunnel vision on price. A competitor might be cheaper, but if their reviews are terrible and their listing is outdated, they aren’t the threat you think they are.
Can you do this without expensive tools?
Yes, but it’s much harder and less accurate. You can manually track prices and BSR in a spreadsheet and read reviews yourself. However, you will miss out on crucial data like competitor keyword research and sales volume estimation. At a minimum, a tool like Keepa is invaluable for its historical data. For serious sellers, a suite like Helium 10 or Jungle Scout is a necessary investment.
How do I find my market share?
You can’t get an exact number, but you can get a good estimate. Use a sales estimation tool (found in suites like Helium 10 or Jungle Scout) to get the approximate monthly sales for the top 10 ASINs in your niche, including your own. Add all those sales together to get a “total estimated market size.” Then, divide your sales by that total. This gives you a solid directional idea of your market share analysis.
