🪦 The death of traditional Amazon product research

This is the Billion Dollar Sellers Podcast, your go-to source for cutting-edge strategies and success stories from the world of Amazon and e-commerce. Buckle up and get ready to take your Amazon business to new heights. Don't forget to subscribe to the Billion Dollar Sellers newsletter. Welcome your host, Kevin King. Hey everyone, and welcome to the Billion Dollar Sellers Podcast. I'm your host, Kevin King, and today is August 4th, 2025. We've got a lot to cover, so let's jump right in. First off, I've got a question for you. Google Lens, that feature where you can circle an object to search in a photo on mobile, grew 70% year-over-year. How many Android phones have the ability to do this now? Think about it, and I'll give you the answer at the end of the show. And before we get started, I wanted to tell you about an upcoming live webinar which will cover the best of BDSS in 2025. There's prompts, hacks, strategies, and a bunch of cool free tools. The webinar is on August 7th, 2025, and starts at 2 p.m. Eastern. There's a link to sign up in our show notes. Now, let's talk about the death of traditional product research. Sarah stared at her Jungle Scout dashboard, watching another high-opportunity product she'd launched six months ago continue its slow descent into mediocrity. Despite perfect keyword research, competitive pricing, and solid PPC campaigns, sales were flat. Does this sound familiar to you? Meanwhile, across the e-commerce world, BDSS Dream 100 member Josh Hadley, an eight-figure Amazon seller on his way to nine figures, was having a very different experience. He turned off his Amazon ads during Prime Day for his most viral products and still doubled his closest competitor's sales. His secret? He'd completely abandoned traditional Amazon research tools. The old way is broken. At a presentation last week in the billion-dollar Sellers Club, Josh said, "We're no longer looking at Datadive, Helium 10, or Jungle Scout for opportunities. We're just looking at TikTok Shop." Think about it. Traditional tools show you what's already working on Amazon, meaning you're entering a crowded battlefield where everyone has the same data. You're fighting for scraps in an oversaturated market. Here's Josh's exact process for finding his next million-dollar products using the new playbook of TikTok First Product Research. Step one is to use CaloData. Instead of Amazon keyword tools, Josh uses CaloData to analyze TikTok Shop performance. This tool reveals which products are generating the most GMV, or gross merchandise value, top-performing creators for specific product categories, real-time viral product trends, and competitor analysis showing exactly who's selling what. Step two is to identify viral patterns. Josh asks one simple question. What's going viral on TikTok Shop right now? If a product can generate massive organic reach through creators, he knows it will crush on Amazon, too, without needing to rely on expensive PPC campaigns. Step three is to skip the Amazon validation. Here's the paradigm shift. Josh said, "I don't even have to look at the PPC data. I don't have to look at the competition. I don't have to look at the reviews, because, frankly, it doesn't matter." Why? Because he's bringing his own demand through creator networks, making traditional competitive analysis irrelevant. The results speak for themselves. Using this approach, Josh turned a struggling business that was down 25% year-over-year into more than 100% growth. He achieved break-even on TikTok Shop while increasing Amazon sales by five times for viral products. He regained Amazon best-seller badges lost to overseas competition and maintained prices double his competitors while outselling them. Your action plan should include getting access to Calo data, as this is your new product research engine. Monitor TikTok Shop trends and look for products generating consistent GMV. Test first on TikTok Shop to validate demand before heavy Amazon investment. Then scale to Amazon once proven viral, launch on Amazon with confidence. And, if you want to learn more, don't miss Wednesday's live expert panel with three top TikTok Shop experts inside the billion-dollar Sellers Club. Next, let's look at some Amazon quarterly stats. Looking at Amazon's Q2 statement for the 2025 financial year, we can see some impressive numbers here. Amazon generated about $167.8 billion in revenue. Representing a 13% year-over-year growth. Their online stores continue to be the biggest revenue driver at about $61.6 billion, followed by their third-party seller services at just over $40 billion. And what's really impressive is that their advertising revenue has grown to about $15.8 billion. If we zoom in on the advertising revenue, we can see steady quarterly growth from the third quarter of 2020 through to the second quarter of 2025, with advertising revenue reaching new highs of about $17 billion in recent quarters. You can find the full graphic showing Amazon's complete income statement breakdown in the written version of today's newsletter. Now, let's talk about Amazon launching revolutionary custom analytics. It's about to revolutionize how sellers analyze their business data. Amazon's new custom analytics feature is essentially a full-scale business intelligence platform built directly into Seller Central. Think Tableau or Power BI, but designed specifically for Amazon sellers and packed with every metric that matters to your business. For years, sellers have juggled multiple third-party analytics tools, each offering fragments of the data puzzle. Amazon's custom analytics eliminates that complexity by centralizing everything in one powerful dashboard. Here's what makes it remarkable. First, there's comprehensive data access. You can choose from hundreds of metrics spanning every corner of Seller Central, including inventory performance, coupon effectiveness, search query data, advertising metrics, and much more. Second, there's ultimate flexibility. You can create completely customized dashboards tailored to your specific business needs or start with Amazon's pre-built templates and modify as needed. Third, it offers professional-grade visualization. The interface rivals enterprise-level BI tools, making complex data analysis accessible to sellers of all technical backgrounds. Amazon has essentially handed sellers a professional-grade business intelligence tool for free. If you're not already exploring custom analytics, you're missing out on insights that could significantly impact your bottom line. Ready to get started? Head to your Seller Central dashboard and look for the custom analytics option in your report section, or you can check it out using the link in the show notes. Now, if you're struggling to get product reviews, Get Reviews has helped hundreds of Amazon sellers worldwide collect real and honest reviews by designing review funnels and generating unique QR codes for package inserts. You can add these inserts to your packaging to get customers to leave genuine reviews. They also offer giveaways such as warranties, promo codes, e-gift cards, or digital products. What's the win for you here? It's compatible with Shopify, TikTok Shop, Walmart, and more. It's set up to be compliant with Amazon terms of service, and you can schedule a call today to learn more. Don't wait, improve your review strategy today. Use code BDS15 to get 15% off your first three months. Next, let's talk about TikTok plus Amazon integration. This is big news for sellers. Amazon just made their smartest strategic move in years. Instead of trying to beat TikTok at social discovery, they're partnering with them. TikTok ads now support buy with Prime checkout. Users can see a product on TikTok, buy it with Prime, and never leave the app. Here's the key difference between social discovery versus keyword intent. Amazon excels at capturing customers with purchase intent, like when they search wireless headphones. But they struggle with discovery. TikTok excels at viral product discovery, but lacks trusted checkout. This partnership combines TikTok's viral discovery engine with Amazon's trusted fulfillment, giving you the best of both worlds. Amazon tried social commerce for years. Amazon Inspire was a disaster. Amazon Live remains underutilized. They kept forcing entertainment onto a utility-first platform. Meanwhile, TikTok's shop is exploding with brands generating $40,000 to $50,000 per livestream. Amazon's solution? Become TikTok's back-end infrastructure. This changes the traditional launch strategy. The old approach was, "Amazon first, then expand." The new approach is, "TikTok first, Amazon fulfillment." We're now in the "Creator to Checkout" era. If your product has viral potential, this is your new playbook. Here are the requirements. You need an active TikTok advertising account, Amazon buy with Prime service configured on your website, and a direct-to-consumer website URL. For the technical TikTok ad setup, you should delete auto-generated catalog video formats as they're not supported yet. Use catalog carousel formats with static images. Select "Show now" as your call to action. Make sure you allow 24 to 48 hours for the initial catalog synchronization. Your campaign strategy should target products with viral potential and leverage TikTok's content discovery capabilities. You can use a flow with TikTok buy with Prime first, connected to Shopify, and finishing with Amazon MCF fulfilled. And focus on creator partnerships and influencer marketing. Next, if you want to reach page one on Amazon, simply by sending free products to micro-influencers, you can use the platform Stack Influence to automate micro-influencer product seeding collaborations at scale. You can get thousands of collaborations per month and increase your Amazon ranking, generate UGC, and boost up your recurring revenue like never before. Top Amazon brands like Magic Spoon, Unilever, and Mary Ruth Organics have been able to get to number one page positioning on Amazon and increase their monthly revenue as high as 13 times in as little as two months. You can pay influencers only with products, so you can stop negotiating fees. You can increase external traffic Amazon sales to get to top page rankings. You get full rights image and video user generated content to build your brand with authentic content. It's 100% automated management, so you don't lift a finger to get influencer collaborations at scale. Don't believe it? Check out the results from the Blue Land micro-influencer campaign which generated a 13 times ROI scaling up influencers on Amazon. After successfully raising investment on Shark Tank, Blue Land turned to Stack Influence to boost their Amazon sales and become a top-selling listing using micro-influencer marketing. You can increase your Amazon listings ranking for targeted keywords and multiply your organic recurring revenue in 2025. Get 10% off by signing up this month. There's a link in the show notes. Now let's talk about Govee's Glow Up. They were born at Anker and are now booming on Amazon. Chinese sellers has an interesting story on how Govee is crushing it on Amazon following in Anker's famous footsteps. Here's how Govee got to $250 million on Amazon by dominating a boring niche. When Wu Wenlong left his CTO position at Anker in 2017 to start a lighting company, most people probably thought he was crazy. After all, who gets excited about LED light strips? But by 2020, Govee had generated over $200 million in sales, proving that sometimes the most overlooked niches hold the biggest opportunities. Today, SmartScout estimates their total annual revenue on Amazon at $251 million, including a floor lamp doing over $1 million per month. Let's look at the setup from 2017 to 2018. Wu Wenlong departed Anker just six months after the company filed for IPO. He leveraged his Anker equity selling $34 million worth over three years to fund Govee. He identified a massive gap. China produces 90% of the world's LEDs, but few companies were making IoT-enabled products. He launched on Amazon US in 2018 with music-synced RGB light strips. Here's a key insight. Wu didn't just leave Anker, he maintained strategic relationships. Anker invested $5.6 million in Govee in 2021, proving that burning bridges isn't always necessary. Let's look at what Govee did right with their winning formula. First, they chose niche domination over category spreading. While competitors chased crowded markets like smart speakers and robot vacuums, Govee focused laser sharp on lighting. Their H601X music-synced RGB light strip became the number one Alexa-compatible LED strip on Amazon within three years. The numbers are impressive. One LED strip alone generates $12 million in monthly sales. They had consistent 300% annual growth for three consecutive years. They have over 870 patents focused on lighting innovation. Second, they used an Amazon-first strategy. Govee followed the Anker Playbook, dominate Amazon before expanding elsewhere. Multiple products consistently top Amazon's best-seller charts. Their website generates 1.6 million monthly visits with 40% direct traffic. They have strong organic search presence with 33% of traffic. Third, they built community through technology. The Govee Home app became their secret weapon. It had over 30 million users by December 2024. It acts as both control center and feedback forum. It enables real-time customization and music-sync features. 16 million customizable colors created viral social media moments. Fourth, they used strategic co-branding. Smart partnerships amplified their reach. Their collaboration with the second Dune movie sold 33,000 units for $3.58 million in six months. Aquaman and Pantone partnerships drove app engagement. They positioned products as lifestyle accessories, not just lighting. Now, what could they have done better? First, profitability lagged behind growth. Despite massive revenue growth from $58.7 million in 2019 to $200 million plus in 2020, profitability remained a challenge. The company prioritized market share over margins, which is a common Amazon seller mistake. Second, they had late manufacturing integration. Initially relying on contract manufacturers before building their own facilities may have limited early profit margins and quality control. Let me share the key numbers. The market size for the smart home sector was $31.2 billion in 2017, growing 25% annually. Their product range spans $20 to $490 price points across two brand lines. Revenue growth went from $58.7 million in 2019 to $200 million plus in 2020 to more than $250 million in 2025. They have a patent portfolio of over 870 patents protecting innovations. They have 30 million app users by December 2024. Their top product generates $12 million in monthly sales. Here are the key lessons for Amazon sellers. First, find the unsexy opportunities. The biggest opportunities often hide in boring categories. While everyone chases trending products, patient sellers can build empires in overlooked niches. Second, dominate before you diversify. Govvy became the lighting king before expanding to small appliances. Master one category completely before spreading thin. Third, build community, not just products. Their app created a platform for user engagement beyond simple product control. Think about the ecosystem, not individual SKUs. Fourth, leverage strategic relationships. Woo's maintained connection with Anchor led to crucial funding and support. Your network remains your net worth. Fifth, content creates categories. Govvy didn't just sell light strips. They created a lifestyle around ambient lighting that resonated with Gen Z's desire for personalization and mood setting. Sixth, patent protection pays. With more than 870 patents, Govvy built genuine barriers to entry rather than relying on first mover advantage alone. Govvy's rise from zero to more than $250 million wasn't about finding the next hot trend. It was about deeply understanding an underserved market and executing flawlessly within it. They proved that with the right strategy, even light strips can light up your bank account. Before we wrap up, here are a few more hot picks for you. First, why most TikTok agencies fail to scale e-com brands. Second, a former Amazon staff member says Chinese seller verification is flawed. Third, the rise of AI shopping agents, differentiate or die. You can find links to all these articles in our written newsletter at billiondollarsellers.com. And here's your parting shot for today from Aristotle. To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing. Oh, and remember that question I asked you at the beginning? Well, the answer is that over 300 million Android devices have Google Lens. Pretty interesting, right? That's all for today, folks. I'll see you again on Thursday. This is Kevin King, signing off from the billion dollar sellers podcast.