3 Steps to Start Your Online Customer Research

To succeed as a seller on Amazon, you must first understand your target audience. In today’s day and age, it’s never been easier to conduct customer research from the comfort of your own home. Mayan shares our top three best practices for beginning online customer research.

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1 - Identify product demand

You have an idea for your top selling product. Great. Now you need to confirm that there’s demand for that exact item. A simple way to do that is by conducting keyword research through Google or Amazon.

There are a handful of free keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner and KeywordTool.io. If you want to take your keyword research to the next level, you can also pay for a premium tool like SEMRush for some deeper insights, or hire a freelance digital marketer to prepare the research for you.

2 - Check out your competition

Once you’ve determined that there’s demand for your product, you can learn a lot more about the market by analysing your future competition.

The first thing to do is identify who your competitors are in that space. Once you have a list of the key players in your industry, you should take time to better understand each business:

- Business Model: Do they dropship or store inventory? Do they source their product domestically or overseas? What is their return policy? 

- Website: How is their overall user experience? What type of ecommerce platform are they using? How many other products do they offer? Does the site have a professional design?

- Sales Funnel: How are they attracting new customers to their site? What is their marketing strategy? How do they use email marketing to keep leads warm?

Find out as much as you can about how they run their business to identify any gaps where you can offer something unique. This research should help you understand what is currently on the market and working, what isn’t working, and what could stand to be updated.

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3 - Research market trends

Even when there is interest in your product selection, that doesn’t mean it’ll stay for the long term. It’s important to look into the latest consumer trends to help you understand these questions:

- What is the seasonality of this product? Is it temporary or does it remain the same throughout the year?

- Is the interest in this product declining, stable, or growing?

Have you identified an up and coming trend? Make sure you’re analyzing it from every possible angle. You may be even more successful if you identify a small niche within a new trend, rather than attempting to cover all aspects of it. It’s great when you can get ahead and capitalize on a new trend, but don’t rely on those for the long term success of your business.

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