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Top 7 Product Research Tools for eCommerce Websites
Does your eCommerce store need to pivot? Maybe you’re ready to expand into new product lines, or attract new target audiences. Or, perhaps you’re starting an eCommerce store for the very first time.
Whatever you’re planning, it’s time to brainstorm.
Fortunately, brainstorming is easy with an online product research tool. Get inspiration for the next product to sell on your eCommerce store with one of these trend-hunting applications.
1. Kickstarter
From the Pebble watch to the Exploding Kittens card game, Kickstarter is where many of today’s popular products got their start.
With Kickstarter’s Discover feature, you can find which projects are the most popular at the moment:
Kickstarter makes searching for popular products very accessible. It’s important to remember that popularity on Kickstarter doesn’t necessarily translate to real-world popularity. Kickstarter projects are built on crowdfunding, and people’s excitement about a product they’re helping bring to fruition is different from a product they’re buying from any online store.
When using Kickstarter, we recommend leveraging the filters to make the results more relevant for you. You can search by category or location:
You can also search by parameters like “Most Funded or “Most Backed.” The “Most Funded” filter looks for Kickstarters that raised the most money — this is an important filter for more high-end items.
2. TrendHunter
If you want to emulate big name brands like Adidas, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, and others, TrendHunter is for you. With their proprietary AI, a network of 200,000 contributors, and 400,000 “cutting edge ideas,” Trend Hunter aggregates the world’s top trends for you to discover the next big thing.
TrendHunter is designed more for browsing and gaining inspiration, rather than typing in a keyword and gut-checking your idea (use our next tool, Google Trends, for that).
Here’s what we mean. The Ideas screen brings up the latest articles from TrendHunter contributors. From today’s trending topics, a restauranteur could read up on the latest in food trends, while an electronics e-retailer might check out what’s on the horizon for mobile products.
If a particular product announcement catches your eye, you can click on it to read an overview, along with key insights into why this product is so popular:
3. Google Trends
The beauty of Google Trends is that it’s powered by the searches the majority of the world is performing online (at last count, Google owned 87.5% of the global search market share).
Here’s a look at how it works. If a furniture retailer searches for “standing desk,” they’ll notice a noticeable uptick in searches since the COVID-19 outbreak, indicating that this product is growing in popularity:
Google Trends also shows whether your keyword is trending up or down (so you know not to chase after a product waning in popularity). You can also filter by location, time period, and more. Finally, Google shows Related Queries so you can check out your competition, or gain content ideas:
Google Trends does have a few downsides, however. For one, it’s limited to what people are searching, so if they don’t know they need your product yet, they won’t be searching for it. It also doesn’t get too granular, so this is better for brainstorming broad product categories vs. a super niche product.
4. Exploding Topics
Exploding Topics uses an algorithm to identify exploding topics “before they take off.” The tool crawls social media networks, websites, and more to discover topics that are set to experience a meteoric rise in popularity.
Exploding Topics isn’t very helpful if you’re trying to gauge interest among a specific persona for your product. Rather, it’s there to help you plan ahead so you can create something that’s about to be huge.
Having said that, Exploding Topics will also save you from wasting time. When we narrowed our search to health products, for example, we see that “CBD Gummies” are still on the rise, but “CBD for dogs” has already peaked.
5. Pinterest Trends
Pinterest Trends is a new tool that shares the top US search terms from the past year. This can obviously help you develop your Pinterest marketing strategy, but more than that, it can help you identify new trends, observe what people are interested in and planning for, and develop your product line accordingly.
Grocery chain Albertsons used the tool to identify that grocery shoppers want pumpkin alcoholic drinks, Friendsgiving party ideas, and holiday grazing tables during the holiday season. They boosted sales by creating a marketing campaign around those themes for their private label brands.
6. Jungle Scout
Jungle Scout offers a suite of software designed to help Amazon sellers sell more. One of those tools is their Opportunity Finder, which identifies product trends with a focus on “profitable product niches.” This helps hopeful store owners decide on the first product for their Amazon store, or determine how to expand their brand with new unique products.
Filters allow you to narrow in on a product that will work for you, based on capacity and budget:
Jungle Scout’s Opportunity Finder doesn’t just stop at product opportunities; it also helps you find the right keywords to sell your product on Amazon:
Jungle Scout is built for Amazon, so its insights may not be as applicable for an eCommerce site that exclusively sells through their own site. But, if you currently sell, or plan to sell on Amazon, this tool’s definitely worth checking out.
7. Uber Suggest
Developed by marketing expert Neil Patel, Uber Suggest is designed to help you “reverse engineer” your competitors’ online marketing strategy.
Enter a keyword, and you’ll be served a rich list of related keyword ideas, search volume, competition, plus seasonal trends—helping you identify the right times to launch your product.
Enter a domain, such as your competitor’s, and you’ll see key SEO metrics like the keywords they’re ranking for and an estimate of their traffic. From a product research perspective, the popular pages report is particularly valuable, as you can see which products are most popular. You can also take a look at their backlink data to see if they picked up a lot of press mentions at launch time.
Which Tool Is Right For You?
There are a lot of tools out there for you to use when researching your next big thing. That’s the easy part. The hard part is marketing. That’s where we come in. Contact Your Marketing People to discover how we can make sure your product launch is a success.
