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10 Top Product Research Tools (2024)

If you sell physical goods to consumers, access to a good product research tool can be invaluable.

From developing a business idea to delivering the products your most loyal customers want, the right product research software will help you with things like:

• Monitoring product trends
• Identifying hot products for sale right now
• Conducting a competitor analysis
• Researching keywords related to top products
• Developing new product ideas

In this guide, we’re exploring 10 of the best product research tools on the market today for Shopify stores, retail merchants, Amazon sellers, dropshipping entrepreneurs, and everyone in between.

1. Exploding Topics

Exploding Topics is a trend-spotting tool that provides valuable insights about the products people are interested in right now.

We use artificial intelligence (AI) to scan the Internet and see what products, trends, and companies people are talking about. We look at blogs, news sites, social media platforms, and more, so you get a complete picture of people’s interest.

From there, our team of (human) data analysts evaluate the data and identifies the top trends online. These results go into our large trend database, where you can:

• See which topics are currently exploding in interest online
• Get information about which products are increasing in popularity
• Discover details about how top products are selling
• Learn what reviews these top products are getting

You can then use this information to do things like:

• Build profitable DTC sites
• Develop new products in line with consumer interest
• Outpace your competitors by offering trending products for sale before anyone else

Here’s an example: we identified “mushroom coffee” as a trending product category in October 2019.

While there was interest in the product at that time, organic search interest in this product really took off in early 2023.

Exploding Topics users already had mushroom coffee on their radar for almost 3 years. If this product was one that aligned with their business, they were well poised to take advantage of the explosion in interest.

You can begin using Exploding Topics to find trending products for free. If you’d really like to stay ahead of new product trends, though, an Exploding Topics Pro membership can give you that additional competitive edge. Our pro users get:

• Access to the entire trends database
• The ability to conduct trend database searches by keyword
• Every trend report we publish
• Instant trend alerts
• Enhanced details about trending products’ performance

You can give Exploding Topics Pro a try right now with our two-week trial for $1. After that, Pro plans are as low as $39 per month (billed annually).

2. Dropship Spy

Dropship Spy is a product research tool for e-commerce businesses that use drop shipping services to sell goods.

The tool works for Amazon and Shopify  sellers and can help you connect with dropshipping suppliers on Aliexpress and other sites.

When using Dropship Spy for product research, each item you view includes details on:

• Best-selling products across a variety of social media platforms
• Aliexpress sales volume
• Amazon product ranking stats and keywords
• Historical sales metrics
• Instagram influencers who promote similar products
• The services offered by each influencer, and at what rates

Dropship Spy is a comprehensive solution for dropship businesses, as you can also get access to:

• Pricing and profit calculators
• CSV files of existing product reviews
• Product videos
• Facebook ad audience segments
• Pre-written social media ad copy

If you’re trying to make your e-commerce business as hands-off as possible, then Dropship Spy’s data and library of resources could be a suitable solution.

However, because it’s only focused on products for dropshipping stores, this won’t be the best solution for anyone who plans to make, source, stock, and ship products themselves.

Access to Dropship Spy costs $39 per month, or $119 for an entire year.

3. Helium10

Helium10 is a product research platform that offers paid and free tools for businesses using Walmart or Fulfillment By Amazon (also known as Amazon FBA).

With a Helium10 account, you can:

• Use a Chrome extension to pull up details on Amazon and Walmart product listings
• Generate sales estimates for products that interest you
• Find the highest performing keywords for each product
• Identify trending products at Amazon and Walmart

The platform also offers additional insights to help you optimize existing product listings. If you’re committed to selling through Amazon and Walmart’s marketplaces, then this could be a good tool to have on hand.

With Helium10’s free plan, you can get access to the Chrome extension, keyword tool, trending products database, and PPC audit along with a few other resources.

However, this free access comes with limits. To use more of Helium10’s features, you’ll need to opt for a paid plan that starts at $39 per month (or $29 per month when billed annually).

4. TikTok Creative Center

The TikTok Creative Center has a top products list that’s free to use—you don’t even need a TikTok account to browse the data.

The Creative Center can give you insights on:

• Best sellers by region, organized by popularity
• Changes in popularity over a time period
• The standard click through rate on TikTok ads for a popular product
• The typical amount of money spent by advertisers to achieve one sale
• The total amount of money spent on ad campaigns for a popular product
• Related product categories for each popular item

While much of this data is only directly usable if you’re going to run product ads on TikTok, the ability to search top products by region can be useful for product marketers on any e-commerce platform.

There are over 800 million people using TikTok, so it’s often a useful source for understanding what people are interested in.

You’ll just need to remember that this data is specific to TikTok users , who are typically under 40 years old—and many of them under 20. If that’s your target demographic, then it might be worth looking at the Creative Center data.

If not, or if you want a more holistic picture of what all internet users are interested in, you’ll want to pick a more comprehensive trend spotting website .

5. Thieve.co

Thieve is another dropshipping product research tool and a potential alternative to Dropship Spy.

There are four primary ways that you can use Thieve to identify products:

• Browse lists of popular products by category, such as electronics and homeware.
• Swipe through popular products from all categories to generate a list of products that interest you.
• Read about trending product niches, such as “Zoom Flex,” which refers to looking good on video calls.
• Upload an image you find online and locate potential product manufacturers and sources.

Once you’ve identified products you like, you can use Thieve’s other key features to:

• Find Aliexpress suppliers making profitable products
• See how much it costs to source particular products
• Generate product page descriptions
• Find product images
• Remove product logos and split grouped images into individual files

Thieve only works with Aliexpress products, so if you prefer to source goods elsewhere, you won’t get much value out of Thieve.

If you use Aliexpress, though, you can start browsing a limited number of products on Thieve for free. To use every feature, you’ll need a paid plan.

Thieve doesn’t make its pricing public, but they offer a two week free trial to test the service and get pricing information.

6. JungleScout

JungleScout is another Amazon market research and product analysis tool for FBA sellers.

When using JungleScout, you can:

• Look at product sales and performance
• Forecast how many products you may sell
• View Amazon product reviews
• Conduct Amazon product keyword research
• Track seasonal shifts in purchasing habits
• Verify which manufacturers your competitors use

Like Helium10, JungleScout offers a Chrome extension to help you quickly access product data while browsing Amazon.

Once you’ve found trending products to sell on Amazon , you can continue to use JungleScout to help you request customer reviews, track sales data, optimize listings, and run promotions.

JungleScout plans start at $49 per month, or $29 per month when billed annually, and include a seven-day free trial.

7. Pinterest Trends

Pinterest Trends is like the TikTok Creative Center in that it lets you see which products and niches are popular among users in your region.

You can use Pinterest Trends to research:

• Current products of interest
• Products of interest by season
• Products related to specific consumer interests or keywords
• Product interest by user age and other demographics
• The weekly, monthly, and yearly change in product interest

Clicking on any trend or product gives you an in-depth look at:

• How interest fluctuates over time
• Related trends and products
• Demographic details about the users interested in this item
• Related Pins

Because many people use Pinterest to save links from all over the web, you can use the Pinterest trends feature to get an idea of what might be popular on various e-commerce and dropship platforms.

There’s no charge to use Pinterest Trends, so you can use it by itself or as a supplement to any of the other tools on this list.

Algopix is a product research tool for Walmart, Amazon, and eBay sellers.

If you're interested in selling through more than one marketplace, then Algopix is a nice choice for building out your inventory and planning product prices.

When using Algopix, you can see a variety of product metrics including:

• The best-selling products in any category
• Who the highest-profile sellers are in a given channel
• Changes in prices, including promotions
• Sales rates by location

Algopix can also help you find products that are similar to one you're researching. If you have a product description, you can put it into Algopix and get a list of potential matches.

You'll need to subscribe to the platform for $35 per month or $336 per year in order to use every feature across all marketplace channels.

If you only sell through Amazon, you can use Algopix for free. Simply connect your seller account to conduct up to five category and 20 product searches every day.

9. eBay Terapeak

Terapeak is a database of insights about eBay sales.

You can actually access Terapeak information directly through your eBay seller account, and see information like:

• Product and category performance
• Current popular products
• Products attracting buyer interest
• Average sales prices
• Typical item condition
• Average shipping costs
• Popularity of free shipping
• Unsold inventory levels
• Most popular listing formats

Terapeak will also show you historic sales trends, so you can begin to make predictions about how your sales may fluctuate based on time of year or other factors.

All of this information is available for free to eBay sellers with a Basic Store or higher tier subscription. These plans start at $21.95 per month when billed annually.

10. Seller Assistant App

Seller Assistant App is another product insights tool for Amazon sellers.

Unlike some other Amazon tools that focus on dropshipping, Seller Assistant App can help you figure out how much you'll make by reselling products that you locate through discount stores, bin stores, liquidation sales, and more.

By entering a product into the Seller Assistant App, you can see information like:

• Average sale prices over one, three, and six-month periods
• Fees and expenses incurred by selling this product on Amazon
• Whether or not anyone has made an intellectual property claim on products of this type
• Your potential profit margin
• Best seller rank over one, three, and six-month periods
• Total product stock currently for sale on Amazon
• Other variations of the product currently for sale on Amazon

You'll even be able to see how much the product is selling for on other websites including Amazon, The Home Depot, Target, and eBay.

The Seller Assistant App costs $15.99 per month, or $149 per year, to use. You'll be able to look up 3,500 products every month—and higher plan tiers are available if you find yourself exceeding this limit.

Many product research tools are platform-specific—if you know you sell on eBay, for instance, you'll likely want to give Algopix or Terapeak a try first. And if you’re a dropshipper, you’ll want to take a closer look at Dropship Spy or Thieve.

But it's worthwhile to have a broader product research tool in your arsenal as well. Services like Exploding Topics and Pinterest Trends can help you understand what's popular across the internet at large—and plan for the next big e-commerce trend.

Want to learn more about how these tools can help your online store grow? Check out our comprehensive guide to finding trending products and discover everything you need for successful e-commerce sales.

Find Thousands of Trending Topics With Our Platform

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A step-by-step guide to the product research process

A strong product research process ensures product teams maximize resources, meet key business goals, and make confident decisions that will deliver successful products and features to create customer delight.

But, how do you conduct effective product research?

Just as there’s no single way to develop a product, no single research process fits all product teams. But there are key steps that will help you balance business goals and user needs for actionable product research . 

This article takes you through the factors you should consider to tailor product research to your desired outcomes and provides a step-by-by-step guide to doing research right.

Use Hotjar to streamline your product research process

Hotjar offers product teams a rich stream of quantitative and qualitative data that keeps you connected to user needs at every stage of research.

What to consider before starting product research

Before jumping into the research process , product managers prepare their team. Take time to consider the why and determine how you can design the process to meet your unique product requirements. 

Reflect on:

Why you’re doing the research

Get connected with the deep purpose of your research: what you need to understand to create a profitable and effective product .

Determine specific outcomes of the research process.

During the early product discovery stages, generating new product ideas for innovation and getting to know your users better will serve as a solid foundation throughout the research process. At later stages, look for concrete feedback on a new product, or possible upgrades and feature updates for an existing product. The why behind the research should guide your process. 

Categorizing your users

Determining customer needs and segmenting users are crucial steps that impact the success of any product research strategy. 

You might use a random sample of potential or existing customers; or segment users according to region, industry, or other criteria to spot patterns across different demographics.

Trial users can give immediate product feedback, which is usually incredibly easy to implement (a new theme, for example) or incredibly difficult, like an entirely new functionality or platform for your product. Your long-time users can give nuanced feedback, but they overlook what doesn't work due to their expertise.

Finding that middle ground of users who like what you offer but aren't stuck to your brand is essential. These users appreciate being treated like their insights matter most—because they do.

Finding impartial user insights can be tricky since many tools track users who’ve been paid or incentivized to click through to your website or product. Product experience insights software like Hotjar can help by providing organic, unbiased user data that gives you a clear picture of your customer experience (CX) .

Pro tip: Hotjar Highlights lets you sort and curate user insights and attributes, and share them with your product team. You can also watch Session Recordings of users from specific countries or industries—or filter recordings to see only satisfied or dissatisfied user experiences, which can provide valuable information on what’s working (and what’s not).

A Hotjar Session Recording

Your core business goals 

The best product research processes overlap with the overall organizational vision, so update your research goals in line with company goals to ensure alignment. 

Designing your research process with cross-functional collaboration in mind is a great way to eliminate any communication issues, ensure all departments collect data that tests product profitability, business goals, and user satisfaction.

 Your team’s methodology

Different product methodologies emphasize different aspects of product research throughout its lifecycle, so it’s important to consider techniques that will fit your team’s working stages.

Teams who use waterfall methodologies usually rely on bursts of intense research before development and again during pre-launch. They also make a clear distinction between the product’s research and development phases. 

Teams who use agile, lean, or DevOps methods usually integrate research with the broader product development process, engaging in continuous discovery methods. 

Whatever your methodology, infuse research into every stage of the product lifecycle to achieve business goals like increased revenue, acquisitions, and user adoption.

Choosing which research tools to use

When you’re deciding how to do product research, you’ll need to consider your budget and company size to pick out your tool stack.

Manual research techniques like user interviews can be time-consuming and cost-intensive, but useful to forge a personal connection with users and ask improvised questions based on their responses.

Automated research tools (like Hotjar 👋) increase speed, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness, and reduce human error. They allow you to reach a larger target audience and ensure you’re getting clean, unbiased product feedback —in person, users are more likely to feel pressure to compliment your product or underplay their concerns, but with tools like Hotjar, you’ll get genuine, in-the-moment feedback from users as they engage with your product. 

Which team members will contribute

Involve different team members at each stage of the product workflow. For example, when you’re validating product ideas, you may want to include marketing and technical departments; and when you’re testing product usability , you may want to rely on the expertise of your engineers. 

It’s also important to consider what research other departments have done before launching your own process, so you don’t waste resources duplicating generic market research. 

8 steps for amazing product research

Amazing product research is all about doing smart research to unearth effective insights without getting lost in an information overload that derails your product workflow .  

Follow these eight steps to guide your product research strategies to achieve valuable, actionable product insights that will inform your product’s entire lifecycle, from ideation to execution. 

1. Define your research goals

First, set your high-level goals, which should test business objectives as well as customer-centric product discovery. These are often drawn directly from the product vision and strategy.

Then, create attainable, specific goals or questions for your team to focus on during each stage of their research. This might include: 

Conducting market research for the product’s adoption before its launch

Identifying areas where key features can be improved after the product launch

Evaluating the product’s performance throughout the product lifecycle

2. Understand your users

User needs are at the center of effective product research processes. 

Engage in user discovery—identify and understand your customer—as early as possible , even before you have definite product or feature ideas. Open-ended user research is a key source of product inspiration and innovation, and an essential step in determining product-market fit .

Then, when you have product proposals, prototypes, or a minimum viable product ( MVP) , you can start seeking more specific feedback. 

User research is all about interacting with your current or potential users and learning what they want and need . Developing a user-centric culture of ongoing research will help you gauge the market demand, position your product against the competition, and generate customer delight .

To create a user-centric research culture, conduct user interviews and create user personas. You can also connect more passively with your user demographic by looking at forums, Facebook groups, or sites like Reddit that are used by your customer niche. 

The more organic the research process, the better. It’s ideal to catch users in situations where they answer by instinct instead of having carefully crafted answers. It's what they say instinctively that leads to better product solutions.

Pro tip: use Feedback widgets to gather user feedback in a non-invasive way. 

Hotjar’s Feedback widgets are integrated into the product interface , so users can give quick feedback and then carry on with their tasks. This means you can survey your users and gain valuable insights by learning what they’re thinking and feeling as they interact with the product.

A Hotjar feedback widget

3. Do market research for your product 

Run thorough competitive and comparative analyses to test the business potential of your product against other solutions on the market , and engage in opportunity mapping to get stakeholder buy-in.

You can also use historical market data and trade reports to predict potential profitability and run keyword research to understand users and what potential customers are searching for to generate product ideas.

Once you’ve validated whether there’s a viable market for your product and determined how saturated that target market is, focus on your product’s unique selling points.

Pro tip: even if you already have a product established in a specific market, make sure to assess the market periodically. Markets and competitors change, and making assumptions because of your initial research processes can be a costly mistake. Work with your marketing team here to validate your ideas and avoid guesswork.

Evaluate your product regularly against the industry by creating a value curve. The value curve plots the product offerings currently available in the market on one axis, and the factors the industry is competing on and investing in heavily on the other. This can help you spot market opportunities, ensure product relevance, and get ideas for features you could add to increase user demand and open up new user bases.

Check out how Gavin increased conversions for his lead generation agency by 42% with Hotjar.

 4. Get to know industry trends

Next, combine your understanding of your users and market with research on technology trends that may affect user expectations of your product or its long-term viability. 

Stay on top of trends by regularly engaging with tech cultures —read trade magazines and news sites, listen to tech news podcasts, and follow key trendspotters on social media and specialist forums. You can also use tools like Google Trends , Trend Hunter , and PSFK . 

Another key source of tech trend information is your engineering team . Chances are, you have plenty of techies on your team who are up to speed on different aspects of technology and what’s forecasted to change.

Pro tip: rigorously analyze trends and put them into context to understand what has staying power, as you avoid jumping on every passing fad. Create a learning culture that embraces experimentation and gives team members the opportunity to share their knowledge. 

Analyze the latest trending topics and projects in mainstream open-source communities across the Internet such as GitHub. These communities are an incredible resource for identifying tech trends that are sustainable, disruptive, and have immense staying power. 

It's also important to subscribe to prominent tech publications and leading technology platforms such as Azure and AWS to get the latest tech news and new feature announcements delivered directly to your inbox. This way, your product team is always in the know about the most important tech trends that are shaping product development and product markets.

5. Validate ideas with current or potential users

Once you’ve developed a strong sense of your users, market, and technology, it’s time to start testing concrete ideas and solutions. 

Based on your early research, identify possible products, features, or upgrades that could meet user needs as well as business goals. Then, run concept testing to evaluate the user experience.

First, identify key users or user types to test. Recruit participants for customer interviews or focus groups, or deploy Hotjar Surveys , Incoming Feedback tools, and Session Recordings to test ideas with existing users. 

Then, ask questions or set tasks and observe user responses. You may just want to explain concepts to users at this stage—or you can use wireframes or mockups; or, at later stages, prototypes or MVPs. 

Make sure you account for confirmation bias and false-positive responses from users when designing the validation process. Include open- and closed-ended questions and use measures like purchase intent to determine customer adoption.

Pro tip: use fake door testing to gauge interest in new features across your existing user base. 

In fake door tests, you show users a call-to-action for a product action that doesn’t exist yet. Once they click to perform the action, they’ll be taken to a page that explains this feature isn’t available yet—you may also choose to include a short survey on this page to learn more about their interest. By reviewing answers to survey questions and the click-through rate , product teams can quickly validate ideas for new features or improvements with users.

6. Test your MVP

The next step in your product research process is to develop a Minimum Viable Product based on validated ideas and run tests to improve subsequent iterations. 

This is a critical stage in product research that you shouldn’t skip. Waiting for the fully developed product before running tests makes it harder to fix software and prioritize bug issues, causing major delays. 

Quality assurance (QA) testing, regression testing, and performance testing check the MVP’s functionality and show developers where they need to make product changes . 

User tests are also key at this stage. Different types of product testing , like tree testing and card sorting, can confirm whether users can easily navigate your product to find the functionality they need. 

A/B tests and multivariate tests , where you split your user base into groups and give them different versions of a product or feature, can help you decide which iteration to run with. Hotjar Heatmaps allow you to easily compare where users click and scroll on different versions of the product.

7. Continue research after the product launch

Consider doing a soft launch—or even canary deployment—where you release new products or features to a small group of users

Gather data to weed out bugs

Finally, adapt the product based on user responses

Then you can roll it out to all users.

But even once you’ve launched the final product, your research isn’t over. The best product teams stay connected with their users and regularly analyze market trends and tech changes.

After the product is released, either through a soft launch or a regular launch, implementing a data-driven approach to the go-to-market strategy is crucial in parsing consumer reports and validating trends and customer opinions.

Continuous research ensures that your product stays relevant and successfully meets customer needs, which will boost user metrics and business metrics alike.

So how can you continue your research throughout the product lifecycle? 

Watch session recordings to spot blockers and bugs where users are rage clicking or dropping off the product journey

Use heatmaps to understand which product elements are most popular—and unpopular—with users

Measure product analytics like click-through rate (CTR) and product conversion rate

Stay up to date on industry and market trends 

Incorporate regular opportunities for cross-team discussions to get different research perspectives

Schedule regular user and customer interviews

Use product experience insights tools like Hotjar to give you a steady stream of user feedback through Surveys and Feedback widgets

8. Turn research into action

The final step in any product research process is to organize your research and turn insights into action. 

Curate your research into specific, actionable themes to cut through the noise and gather valuable, user-centric insights.

Then, use your research to establish a strong product strategy and roadmap to guide your product development process. Make sure you compare the strategy and roadmap with new research at regular intervals and update where needed, though it’s important to strike a balance: these documents should be dynamic but relatively stable touchpoints.  

Your product research should also drive your day-to-day decisions and product backlog management , and form the basis of your product storytelling to help get stakeholder buy-in. 

Why creating a user-centric research culture is essential

Remember: at heart, all product research is user research. 

Product teams who are endlessly curious about their users—who they are, what they need, how they experience your product—can better meet the demands of an ever-evolving market, inspire customer loyalty, and increase their Net Promoter Score (NPS) . With a learning mindset and a commitment to customer-centric product discovery, you can transform research into innovation and sustainable business growth .

FAQs on the product research process

What is product research.

Product research is the process of gathering data about your product’s purpose, intended users, and market to meet user needs and achieve business goals.

What are the steps in the product research process?

The 8 steps in an effective product research process are: 

1) Define your research goals

2) Understand your users

3) Do market research for your product

4) Get to know industry trends

5) Validate ideas with current or potential users

6) Test your MVP

7) Continue research after the product launch

8) Turn research into action

Why is product research important?

Strong product research is critical to product management because: 

It ensures the product will meet customer needs and hit business targets 

It helps product managers (PMs) develop a data-informed product vision, strategy, and roadmap

It helps PMs make confident decisions on the product backlog and day-to-day tasks

It keeps the product team motivated and connected with the purpose of their work 

It helps the product team communicate product value to stakeholders to get buy-in and secure resources

Prioritize product features

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Product Research

What is product research?

Why is product research important, how to conduct product research.

• Using quantitative and qualitative product research

Areas of product research

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26 min read Don’t skimp on your product research. The insights you gather and act upon can mean the difference between selling products that are a roaring success or an abject failure.

You’re in the process of developing a new product idea with a view to launch it on the market . Or maybe you’re reviewing and updating an existing product that’s already on the market in the hope of making it better.

It’s a risk – get it wrong and you could make an expensive mistake; get it right and you could have a successful, profitable product, service or experience delivering amazing returns on your investment. So how can you make sure you end up in the second category?

This is where product research comes in. It helps you:

• Evaluate and prioritize your ideas
• Test and validate concepts
• Assess names and packaging designs
• Check out the competition
• Set the right selling price
• Gauge customer satisfaction and monitor product-market fit post-launch
• Continually improve the product

Product research is the term most often used to describe this process, but it’s not just about physical products. The research process we’re describing here could apply equally to a physical product such as a smartphone, a service like cloud storage, or an experience like a tour or hotel stay.

Product research goes hand-in-hand with market research, which identifies a target customer, develops typical buyer personas, and analyses purchasing behavior. Together, the two help you make informed decisions about how to find the right fit between what people need or want, and what you can offer them.

Get started with our free product research survey template

A product, service or experience idea can be brilliant and original, but if nobody wants to buy it, there’s no way it can be successful. At best, it will be an impressive oddity, and at worst, a total waste of time. Likewise, if you’re proposing changes to an existing product or service but they’re not the ones your customers value, you could end up doing more harm than good.

Product research will tell you whether your idea resonates with potential customers. Because a product is only worth what people are willing to pay for it, you’ll also be able to extend your research process to set a product price accordingly.

And if your competitors are doing better than you, you need to find out why, identify any gaps that they’ve missed and uncover emerging trends so you can get ahead.

Sure, you can start your research online. Amazon, review sites, and social media will give you an idea of what’s out there and how buyers react to products, but if you want to dig deeper and own your niche, you need to invest in user experience (UX) research .

UX research focuses solely on the user of a particular product, looking at how human beings interact with products and services and learning from their experiences.

UX research typically covers the following areas:

Target demographic

Demographic targeting or segmentation helps you understand who your particular product or service is targeting. Demographic information includes everything from gender and age to education and income.

Uncovering a need is one of the main drivers for creating a winning product. For example, if you’re selling into a particular market, your UX research can help you identify flaws in particular products or services and what your potential customers might want from something new. Likewise, researching customer needs helps you to identify what you shouldn’t focus on.

When you research products and UX, you should also examine what your target market wants out of the product or service. Want differs from need as a product need is a requirement, whereas a want could specify certain features of capabilities. They can also differ in priority based on each customer.

For example, this could be improving how your product or service works, or the UX outcomes — e.g. does the product make their job easier or give them more time to focus on other activities?

This should all form part of your UX research and can give you a huge advantage if you get it right.

What do your customers think about you or your product? What do they think about your competitors , and how do you compare to those competitors in their eyes?

What do your customers think about the problem they have? Or how can they solve it? Do you think about their problem the same way they do?

You need to understand how your customers think and what they think if you’re going to convince them to buy your product.

Understanding your customers’ behavior should form a big part of your product research process. Not just in terms of how they go about their lives or work — which can help you understand how your products fit in — but also how they do their product research when looking for a solution. Do they base their purchase decisions on word-of-mouth? Do they typically buy online, or are they more likely to want to visit a retailer to see, hear and touch their potential purchase?

Think about the use case for your product or service. If it’s a gadget, will they use it in the home or out and about? This consideration might inform whether you build in a battery power feature or rely on a wall socket. If it’s a shoe-shine service, would they prefer to be able to walk in off the street or is an appointment system more appealing?

Understanding their behavior can help with your product development to meet a need, and also with your marketing strategy and sales messaging.

Motivations

What drives your customers to find and buy products or services? This is something you need in your product research so you can create solutions that further their success.

Customer motivations are either conscious or subconscious, e.g. they’re aware of a problem and need a solution, or driven by changes or demand in the market (for example, a government requirement to implement certain technologies for business operations).

Product research can help you to understand these motivators, subsequently enabling you to tailor your market messaging and create amazing products.

Using quantitative and qualitative methods for product research

Product research relies heavily upon qualitative and quantitative research methods — this includes capturing feedback , observing how people use products, and analyzing existing data (or new data) to uncover trends or opportunities.

Combining both qualitative and quantitative research methods will help you to identify the most pivotal market trends, as well as understand the specific thoughts and beliefs of customers. Here’s a quick breakdown of how each product research method works:

Quantitative UX research

Quantitative research is a starting point. It’s all about crunching the numbers that translate into informative statistics. Surveys and polls (online, mobile, paper, telephone) are the most commonly used methods, although you can add data from analytics platforms to the mix.

Qualitative UX research

Qualitative research joins the dots of the quantitative data by revealing what people think, believe, and feel about a product. Rather than ticking boxes, people say or write what they think either in open text boxes on surveys, or during interviews and focus groups. Qualitative UX research provides context, painting a picture using the data.

Breaking product research down into manageable stages will increase its effectiveness. These stages are:

Market research

Understanding the current marketplace can help you not only identify any trends in particular buying habits or fads that are attracting short-term attention. It can also help you identify areas of opportunity that you could exploit.

Market research helps with pricing decisions based on whether your market is stable or growing. From the research, you’ll uncover market size and competition, as well as answers to the following questions:

• What are the best-selling products already in your market and where do you fit in compared to them?
• Is there low competition in your market, or is it saturated?
• Are you selling a product that’s got high demand? And how long does that high demand last?
• Is your product something that can be sold year-round? Or is your product seasonal?

Customer research

We’ve already touched on this, but your product research should include your customers.

For example, research demographics to understand who they are, use psychographic information to understand their wants and needs, and leverage specific customer segmentation to ensure you’re targeting the right section of the market with your product or services. All of this will help you to build a better picture of your audience.

Your customer research should also include where you plan to sell your products based on your customers’ preferences. Will you need to sell online? Or is your product something your customers will want to see in person first?

If you plan to sell online, you’ll need to factor in other elements of your selling and marketing strategy. This will be everything from keyword research for marketing and understanding the search volume for your products, to shipping costs if you’re going to sell nationally, or internationally.

New product development

Finally, you should examine your specific product idea. This includes whether there’s a demand for it, what the pricing landscape is like and where you should position yourself, minute product details like the size and weight, or whether you’re selling perishable goods or consumables.

Furthermore, if you’re selling the same product as the competition, how are you planning to compete? Are you going to compete on price and if so, what will your selling price need to be to gain an advantage while generating a profit margin?

Segmentation Research

Segmentation is the strategic lens through which you view your market landscape. It’s used to identify who to target so that you can develop, maintain, or adjust branding and marketing tactics and identify product optimization and innovation opportunities. The most profitable products are those that are targeted at specific segments of a market and tackle a particular need or problem.

Ask yourself the following:

• How large is that segment?
• Are your customers early adopters or more traditional? Are they open to new ways to do things or will they need to be convinced?

How people perceive your brand speaks volumes about what they are prepared to buy from you. Just as you wouldn’t buy a computer from a supermarket, you wouldn’t buy your groceries from a technology store (more importantly, it’s highly likely that neither would sell either of those products).

Concept testing

Concept testing should be conducted in an agile environment.

Begin early in the process with an MVP to test on existing and potential customers. A series of small studies done throughout the product innovation cycle will ensure that your new product is refined by customer input.

It is always more cost-effective to refine a new offering as it is being developed than to have to drop or make significant changes to a product that has already consumed a great deal of investment.

This continues as you roll out your new product. You must stay in touch with your target audience as they use the product, and take on board comments and suggestions for improvement. There are many benefits to concept testing:

• It’s cost-effective and flexible: You can send out simple, quick surveys if you want high-level rapid feedback, or longer ones if you want to dig deeper into the detail
• You’ll be able to optimize your product: You’ll gather useful information on things like branding, pricing, and market status that will make a real impact on your development decisions
• Continuous quality assurance: You can use the same audience to give feedback on your improvements, or survey a new audience to get fresh insights on your product development.
• Great brand loyalty: You’ll build up good customer relationships and increase your brand equity by including potential customers in your product’s design and development.

Improve your concept testing with our Introduction to Concept testing eBook

Naming research

What’s in a name? A best selling product, we hope.

Product naming is the process of coming up with compelling, unique names for your new products.

We would always recommend using qualitative research, with its emphasis on verbal expression, to test product names with your prospective customers, and using a text analytics tool to categorize text responses by both topic and sentiment automatically.

When deciding on product names (we recommend between 3 and 15 options) to run past your respondents, remember these six golden rules:

• It should be easy to remember: consumers must be able to recall the name easily
• It should be memorable: There’s a lot of product ‘noise’, and your name needs to be heard above it
• It must be easy to pronounce: Word of mouth is important, and if your customers can’t say it, they won’t mention it to others
• It must be easily understood: It helps if the name hints at what the product does unless you have a colossal marketing budget to explain a more leftfield name
• It must translate well with international audiences: We’ve all heard the apocryphal story that Coca Cola originally transliterated as ‘bite the wax tadpole’ in Chinese. Whatever the truth, make sure audiences around the world can pronounce your product name and it doesn’t mean anything problematic.
• It has to be a name you can own. No one wants to discover after a comprehensive research program that the name everyone loves is not available for use.

Provide your respondents with a product description, and ideally images of the product. Break your testing between:

• Overall name questions: How does each name compare with the others? Rank the names in order of preference, or against criteria such as trustworthiness, appeal or creativity. Do respondents have any names of their own? The results of this testing will give you the top names overall and in every category.
• Individual name questions: Would respondents buy this product with this specific name? How does this name make them feel? Individual name analysis should reveal name sentiment, as well as data about a consumer’s likelihood to purchase or consider your product.

Feature research

You use this to identify which product features your customer’s value so that you can add or improve them.

But you always need to keep in the back of your mind that a product is more than just the sum of its features – it’s how they work together to give a seamless experience that’s important. Research will help you do that.

There are three areas of feature research that you’ll need to undertake:

• Identifying customers’ wants and needs : Customer needs analysis will give you insights into personal values, purchasing decisions, and pricing tolerance . Conjoint analysis, with its multiple product attribute comparison/trade-off scenarios, will inform which features customers consider most valuable.
• Internal development : Once you’ve analyzed what customers want, you need to bring your feature back in-house and seek the expert opinion of your product managers, business analysts, marketers, designers, engineers, and customer experience teams.
• Test with customers : You’ve created a feature that customers want, and your in-house teams have approved them. Now you can use product feature prioritization to understand the features your customers’ value (and don’t). Survey: usage (where and how the customer uses the feature); ‘top of mind’ negative and positive associations with the feature; product categorization (comparing with the competition to see which features make a product more or less ‘swappable’).

Pricing research

A product is only worth what people are prepared to pay for it. You need to ensure that its price is low enough for people to feel they’ve got good value, and you also make sufficient profit, but not so cheap that its quality is questioned.

You also need to consider how many units you’ll need to sell based on your product prices to have a good profit margin.

When you conduct pricing research , you’ll discover:

• How willing the market is to buy your product
• The highest return on your development investment
• How to maintain your brand’s value
• When and how to alter your pricing effectively
• The costs involved in producing your product

Pricing research is done through a combination of market research, competitor research , market analysis, and testing in the marketplace.

Use product pricing research tools. These use one or more of the following methodologies to ask survey respondents:

• Van Westendorp price sensitivity meter is a type of direct pricing research that asks survey respondents four simple questions to gauge whether your product is too expensive or a bargain
• Gabor-Granger pricing methodology uses predefined price points to determine the highest price a respondent would pay for your product
• Conjoint analysis gives respondents a choice between product packages and then asks them to choose one of the feature/price configurations to create the ideal option. Each option comes with trade-offs and the best time for use

Free eBook: 16 Research Methods to Maximize Product Success

Top new product development tips

You could come up with an amazing product or service, but without product research, you’ll never know if there’s a market for it. Furthermore, you might price it wrong and/or target the wrong customers, severely limiting (or preventing entirely) your sales.

The good news is that there are a lot of product research tips and product research tools we can share with you:

Research existing products on the market

The easiest way to do product research is to examine what products are already available in your marketplace and identify the top-selling products on the market that you’re competing with.

If you’re not already offering this product, you can create your own version, and with the right research, you can identify areas of improvement to differentiate your offering.

Look at product descriptions to see how existing products are being sold and use this to create products that fill a gap.

The easiest way to do product research is to get out and act as a customer. Go to popular online marketplaces like eBay and Amazon to see what people are looking at. Get out onto the high street and visit brick and mortar stores to see what product categories are already on the market.

All of the above will help you understand the current landscape and how you can fit in or disrupt it .

You can also look online at Google Trends and queries for particular products in your marketplace. Understanding these trends and the search volume for a particular keyword related to your products can help with your launch, as well as the optimization of product pages.

These trends can be particularly useful if you’re selling a seasonal product, as you can use real-time search data to see trending products, or changes to your market size when there might be more people looking for your product at certain times of the year.

Look at online reviews

The best feedback on products will always come from customers. And the best place to find honest feedback is by looking at online reviews — whether they’re on Google or Amazon.

Especially if you’re an online business, these Amazon and online reviews are a trove of ideas that can help you with your product research.

For example, paying particular attention to poor reviews can help you identify gaps in a competitor’s offering that you can take advantage of.

Identify gaps in the market

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel with your product ideas, often you can simply take an existing product and improve on it.

Online reviews are incredibly useful for product research because customers will typically share their ideas for improvement as part of the submission.

Quantitative product research

Using quantitative research with online polls or product research tools can help you reach a large portion of your potential marketplace in a cost-effective way.

You can use this as a starting point to understand the market as a whole before drilling down into specifics.

Qualitative product research

As well as analyzing the wider market, you should get specific reviews and opinions of your products from customers using qualitative research .

Through focus groups or individual interviews, you can start to understand the sentiment towards your products and identify opportunities to capitalize on.

In the long run, this data can help you to develop new product ideas, especially if you uncover downsides or holes in your product development.

Ongoing product research

While research can help test and optimize your product idea before launch, it shouldn’t stop once the product is on the market.

You should continue to do your research as an ongoing project.

This will give you more information about how your product or service is perceived and can also help you identify ongoing room for improvement for your products to help you make more sales in the future.

Conducting thorough product research is key to more sales

Researching your products can make the difference between success and failure when it comes to launching winning products and having success in the long term.

It should produce a complete picture of your market, product, and customers and will produce the roadmap for your launch and ongoing sales .

Your research will help with everything from product development, to your marketing campaigns, to selling prices and ongoing development.

By doing in-depth research you’ll be able to make better, more informed decisions about your product ideas and help you create and sell more profitable products.

Find success with Qualtrics’ product research tools

By bringing customers into your product development process, you can identify and solve problems while uncovering new opportunities. Today’s digital tools make it easier than ever.

With the right research platform, you can accelerate your product development cycle using real insights from your customers and easily identify gaps in the market. This enables you to launch new, customer-oriented products, services, and solutions, or disrupt existing categories with offerings that have new or improved features.

You can also get instant access to feedback from multiple channels and data sources like Google Search and other search engines and social media sites.

Then, use smart analysis at every step of the product development lifecycle to launch products you know your customers will love. Concept testing enables you to validate every aspect of your offering, from features and branding to messaging and price, to set it up for success. You can also use conjoint analysis to find your customers’ ideal product configurations, e.g. packing, pricing, design and features.

Finally, close the product experience gap, instantly gather real-time feedback that you can use, and automate the process using automated actions.

Start your PX journey today with our free product research survey template

Related resources

Product feature research 10 min read, product analysis 13 min read.

Pricing Research

Product Price Optimization 12 min read

Product presentation 11 min read.

Buyer Personas

Customer Targeting 12 min read

Product Development

Product Development 11 min read

Product concept 12 min read, request demo.

Ready to learn more about Qualtrics?

Product Management

How to do Product Research [Step-by-Step Guide]

Associate Product Marketer at Zeda.io.

Mahima Arora

Created on:

May 15, 2024

Updated on:

14 mins read

Transform Insights into Impact

Build Products That Drive Revenue and Delight Customers!

An effective and robust product research process increases the chances of product success. 

Seth W. Godin, an American author, once said – ‘Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers.’

The quote subtly hints at the necessity of product research. By performing product research beforehand, product managers can create the ideal product for customers. 

Did you know that 90% of new product research focuses on ‘modifications’ and ‘additions’ rather than new concepts? 

But even improving or adding new features to an existing product requires a proper product research process.   

Product research enables managers to understand the current and future needs of the users. Thus, based on users’ pain points and what they are looking for, product managers can innovate products of a higher value. 

Furthermore, organizations with a strong product research process understand the market better. They stay one step ahead of the competition and survive better in the long run. 

Now that you know how important product research is, you must dive into how to do product research right away!

So, let’s begin!

10 Steps to Product Research

There’s no single product research process that fits all the product development teams. But there are certain key steps in the process that product managers must know about. 

Here are the 10 essential steps to perform a successful product research process. Follow these steps to derive valuable product insights that will guide your product development decisions.  

1. Define your research goals

Why are you performing the research?

Once product managers find an answer to the why, they can set the goals of the research. 

Set the high-level goals first. You can set these goals considering the product strategy and vision, ensuring their alignment with business objectives. 

Next, create SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Reliable, and Time-bound) goals for the product development team to focus on during each research stage. This may include;

• Performing market research for product adoption before its release
• Finding out the key areas or features of the product to be improved after the launch
• Assessing the product performance through the product’s lifecycle.

Setting clear, measurable, and time-bound goals for the product research process guides the product team’s actions. It helps them to understand what they need to do. Also, the goals help product managers to measure outcomes and make improvements where necessary.  

2. Understand your customer's needs and pain points

An effective product research process is always customer-centric. So, start engaging in user discovery. 

Understand user pain points. Start your user research even before planning the product features. Interact with your existing and potential users to identify their needs and wants. 

Performing open-ended user research will help product managers to; 

• Measure the market demand, 
• Get inspiration for the new product
• Determine the product-market fit
• Product positioning against competitors, and 
• Increase customer satisfaction. 

Since user research is a vital part of the product research process, you can check out the best product discovery questions list . 

After the user research, when product teams develop prototypes, they can start trials and ask for user feedback. Next, the insights from feedback can be used to improve the product. 

3. Perform competitor and comparative analysis

The next step in the product research process is to know the competition. 

• Start with competitive analysis . It involves reviewing the products that are directly similar to yours. For example, if a company sells smartphones, it is directly competing with other companies selling smartphones (like Samsung and Xiaomi). 
• Next, perform a comparative analysis . It involves evaluating the alternative options for a product. For instance, an automobile manufacturer can compare the safety features of multiple car models to measure the sales of each and identify the features that require improvement. 

Performing the analyses will provide insights that product teams can use to make the product better. 

4. Study the market

Besides performing competitive and comparative analyses, product managers must run thorough market research to map the available opportunities.

Here are a few ways to study the market thoroughly;

• Use the historical market records, and research reports by academic institutions, government agencies, and trade associations. 
• Observe and analyze the competitors’ strategies like advertising, pricing, and distribution of products. 
• Read up on blogs, magazines, social media posts, and other specific content related to your space.
• Run keyword research to understand what your users are looking for. This can help you generate product ideas too. 

Once product managers validate a viable market for the product and determine the market saturation, the development teams can focus on the product's USP (Unique Selling Points). 

5. Conduct research using qualitative and quantitative methods

Further, product managers can use both qualitative and quantitative methods of market research. 

Qualitative methods – The qualitative methods of market research aren’t statistically significant. These methods help product teams to understand the potential customers at a deeper level. Individual interviews, focus groups, observations or follow-me-homes, and interviews with professionals or field experts are a few qualitative methods you can utilize for market research.

Quantitative methods – Quantitative methods include conducting surveys, polls, or sending out questionnaires. Through quantitative methods, product managers study a large enough pool of respondents in their target market to have reasonable confidence in the collected data. For organizations with a limited budget, you can rely on the survey reports of other organizations in the relevant field.

6. Know the industry trends

Stay on top of the industry trends by updating your knowledge regularly. Observe the tech trends that may impact users’ expectations of your product or its viability in the long run. 

Engage with the tech cultures – read blogs, news, and magazines, listen to tech podcasts, follow the latest tech updates on social media platforms, forums, etc. Product managers can also use tools like Google Trends, Trend Hunter, etc. 

The IT teams in organizations also serve as a key source of tech information. Product managers can interact and take regular updates from them. 

The industry trend updates can also help product managers to research future projections, disruptive technologies, and the chances of product category obsolescence. Thus, with these insights, the product teams can create products that are likely to be in demand in the future. 

7. Validate product ideas

After thorough research, product teams can test ideas and solutions.

Based on the extensive research data, you can identify the possible products, their key features, or improvisations that can meet the user's needs. Further, you can perform concept testing to examine user experiences with concrete product ideas.

To start testing, identify the key users to test. Get participants for interviews, focus groups, or implement surveys, feedback tools, etc., to test the ideas with the existing users. 

Product managers can also ask questions and assess user responses. Or, they may simply explain to the users the product concept using wireframes and mock-ups.

8. Build your product and test the MVP

A crucial step in the product research process and the most conclusive market research that product managers can perform to ensure product success. It is only after a lot of effort that product teams get to the point of testing MVP (Minimal Viable Product).

Testing MVP is all about creating the MVP and trying to sell the product or the product idea to the target audience. Several types of product testing, like card sorting, tree testing, etc., tell whether or not users can navigate your product easily, to find the different functionalities they are looking for. 

Further, product managers can run a regression analysis, quality assurance, and performance testing to check the MVP functionalities. Running these tests helps the team to identify the areas where changes are needed.  

Multivariate tests and A/B tests are helpful when the user base is split into different groups and each group has different products or product features. These tests help product managers to choose the perfect iteration.

9. Derive findings and insights from the market research data 

The market research data is of no use unless you convert them into findings and insights. 

Products managers and the product team must analyze the data to find out conclusive outcomes that can support their product decisions. 

The team can then start building the final product or improvise the MVP based on the research insights. 

10. Use the analysis to guide your product strategy

The final step in the product research process is to convert the research insights into action. Cut through the noise and gather valuable customer-centric insights .

Then, you can use the research to create a strong product roadmap and strategy to guide the entire product development process. When you perform new research, ensure to compare the strategy and roadmap to keep them updated. 

Further, the research should also be used to make regular decisions, drive product backlog management , and create the basis for your product storytelling. 

7 Tips to Conduct an Effective Product Research

A strategic approach to performing the product research process is essential. But alongside the planned strategy, product managers must consider a few tips or best practices to conduct the product research successfully. 

1. Research highly-demanded products

At the initial stage, when you do not have a product concept, get inspired by the products high in demand. 

Check out trending hashtags, reviews, comments on review sites, and bestsellers list to find out the most popular products in your space. 

Here, the goal is not to imitate the product in demand. It is to keep an open mind, ascertain the demand level, and evaluate if the product idea is awesome or not. The product manager’s goal is to perform an honest evaluation and get back to brainstorming with the collected inspirations.

2. Read about similar products

When performing a competitive analysis, read reviews and case studies on the products. 

Product reviews are gold mines. You can find out what users like about the product and what they do not. Reading the reviews carefully can give you a list of the customer pain points. 

Similarly, product managers must download or buy case studies from companies that sell similar products. The case studies generally include the product-related challenges and how the company solved them. 

Evaluating reviews and case studies allows product managers to think through the potential issues and keep the solutions handy. Also, they can identify the product features that can be made better than that of the competitors. 

3. Host a focus group

Evaluate your product by bringing in people who fit your target market. Give them a product profile – what the product will look like, its features, and benefits. Then, ask relevant questions concerning what they like and dislike about the product.

Though focus groups aren’t effective all the time, they can help product managers to get an idea of what people would say about the product. 

Providing the focus group with an MVP or prototype works better. The feedback received is more valid and meaningful. 

4. Get expert product engineers

Product managers can hire product engineers to get unbiased opinions on the product prototypes. 

The experts work on a contractual basis. They evaluate the product design, and features, test prototypes, and ensure quality and usability. 

If required, product engineers can also assess the market research, build design ideas, and supervise production. 

5. Consider product marketing

Building the product is not the end of the product research process. Not overlooking product marketing is one of the best practices to follow. 

Product managers must give equal importance to product positioning and marketing strategy. They can check out the competitors to understand;

• How they promote their products
• Whether or not their marketing strategy is successful
• How to make improvements in the strategy

Further, considering the target market is a must. Try answering questions like;

• Where do they mostly shop?
• What are their interests?
• What are the social media platforms and communication channels mostly used by the target market?
• Where do they discover the products from?

Considering these aspects, the marketing strategies, campaigns, and distribution channels must be planned. 

6. Go for a soft launch

A trial or soft launch allows product managers to estimate sales. If the trial results aren’t satisfactory, they can modify the product before spending more on its marketing.

Soft launches need not be expensive. You can create a simple landing page for the product and then run a PPC or Pay per Click campaign to assess the demand. 

You can also provide a form that interested users could fill up. Explain the product to those who inquire, maintain communication, and notify them when the product is available. 

7. Continue product research

Continue your research even after the product launch . Ask for customer feedback, measure the outcomes of your marketing campaign, and track metrics like repeat purchases, new customers, etc. 

Further, track competitors too. Observe their strategies and emerging trends. Also, test new strategies like referral programs or loyalty programs. 

Product Research Tools

Building a user-centric product isn’t easy. Product managers must be equipped with the most effective tools. They must take every bit of help available to them. 

A product research tool is something that can help the product teams a great deal. It helps in making product management a more organized and structured process. Further, using these tools, product managers can get data-backed user insights and accurate research findings.

Check out the best 5 product research tools you can invest in.

Zeda.io is one of the best product management tools that you must invest in. It is a platform where you can; 

• Collect feedback, ideas, and feature requests from customers, 
• Analyze the data from a single dashboard, convert them to actionable insights, identify trends
• Plan product roadmaps , create live roadmaps, and share them with teams and customers
• Prioritize product tasks with prioritization frameworks like RICE
• Execute the product development process in collaboration with teams

In a nutshell, Zeda.io is the all-in-one product management software that allows you to build a product seamlessly and in an organized way. 

Also Read: Top AI Tools for Product Managers and Product Teams

Zendesk is a tool that helps you maintain interactions with your customers. It is a platform that allows collecting, understanding, and responding to user feedback .

Using Zendesk, product teams can listen to customer issues, develop a response plan, and deliver solutions to address their concerns.

Simply said, Zendesk ensures carrying out regular customer conversations as they are an integral part of the product research process. These customer conversations provide direct insights into customers' thoughts opinions, suggestions, and challenges. 

Thus, you can learn from customer feedback and incorporate changes, and better features in the product to ensure an incredible user experience. 

3. ProductPlan

In the product research process, the product research eventually converts to a product roadmap. It is the product roadmap that highlights the present and future priorities, workflows, product vision, and product progress. 

Once you have come across the research stage, the focus is on building the product roadmap. ProductPlan is the platform you can use to build visual roadmaps. The tool helps in maintaining flexibility, team collaboration, and efficient addressing of issues.

Here’s why you should get ProductPlan in your product research tool stack.

• It is easy to use
• It allows customizing roadmaps with lists, layouts, and timelines
• The drag-and-drop interface helps in tailoring the roadmaps according to one’s needs
• You can collaborate with teams, tag the members, and also comment within the roadmap

Another must-have product management tool, Jira ensures a hassle-free product journey from prototyping to product launch.

Jira is a project management tool that primarily helps with;

• Organizing project tasks
• Managing scrum and agile teams
• Capturing and recording software bugs 

With Jira, agile product teams can manage their workflow seamlessly. The tool offers 300+ integrations, is highly customizable, great for managing product issues, and overall effective product management. 

5. Proto.io

After you have built a product, you cannot release it directly to the market. User feedback and validation are required. So, instead of building a full-fledged product, you create an MVP or prototype with the basic features for testing the waters first. 

This is where Proto.io comes in. Proto.io is one of the leading prototyping tools that help you build a prototype quickly and easily. 

• Proto.io has a great interactive drag-and-drop interface that lets you create the prototype to test each product feature or idea based on your research. 
• It is user-friendly with integrated icons and easy image management

Thus, Proto.io increases your research efficiency. It helps you to offer customers an amazing product experience resulting in better customer satisfaction. 

Also Read: Choosing the Best Product Discovery Tool: Top 5 Picks

Final Thoughts

How to do product research is a common but complex question. Not all organizations use the same way to perform product research. But the product research process does have a few key steps that are crucial for its success. 

Throughout the process, just remember that product research is all about user research. The main goal is to understand the users, their needs, and their pain points. 

Once product managers implement the user-centric approach, they can build better products – the products that would meet the ever-changing demands of the market. Further, it will increase customer satisfaction and inspire loyalty.

With platforms like Zeda.io , your product research process can get easier. You can seamlessly perform user research using Zeda.io ’s product features like the central dashboard, prioritization framework, building live product roadmap, easy tracking, sharing roadmaps with teams and customers, etc.  

Suggested Read: The Product Management Process: 6 Essential Steps

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• How to conduct effective product research

Last updated

27 March 2023

Reviewed by

Product research is a continuous process from the early stages of product development through testing a beta product to follow-up once a product is released. It evolves throughout, ensuring the product meets customers' needs and how it can be improved moving forward.

• What is product research?

Product research begins with a concept of the product and helps determine if that product is viable and has a place in the market.

There are certain stages to product research; how many you need depends on whether you are developing a brand-new product or refining an existing one.

Stage 1: Is there a market?

The first step in developing a new product is to determine if there is a market. You must determine who your customer will be and what pain point your product solves. You also need to establish who your competitors are and how their products meet or don't meet your customers' pain points . 

What differentiates your product? If there’s an opportunity, how large is the potential customer base ? Can it do a better job?

Stage 2: Does your prototype/beta meet the needs of customers?

Once you know you have a market, you need to test the concept of your product to determine if it meets the needs of potential customers. This may take several rounds of testing, tweaks, and iterations before people can use the solution without help or prompt. Then it is ready for development.

Stage 3: Soft release

Once you have a workable product, you release it to a targeted group of potential customers to determine how it works in the real world. At this point, you are looking for bugs, feedback, and suggested improvements, so you can make necessary changes before the release of the final product.

Stage 4: Post-release follow-up

After releasing your product, you can't just drop product research. You need to determine how much customers like the product, what improvements they would like to see in future versions, and how their needs might change in the future. In other words, as long as you’re trying to sell your product in a dynamic, fast-paced market, you need to continue doing project research to keep up with changing minds and markets.

What are the main elements of product research?

The key elements of good product research are:

Historical research about your industry

Establishing competitors and their products

Reviewing your concept to determine its validity

Testing your product prelaunch

Surveying following the release of your product to target improvements

• Why is product research necessary?

Developing a product or trying to improve one without product research is like target shooting in the dark—you might hit the target eventually, but your chances are much greater if you have a bright spotlight shining on the bullseye. In the product space, missing the target will cost you more than just bullets. You will spend incredible amounts of time and money while your competitors are getting ahead of you.

Product research creates that bright spotlight by allowing you to:

Learn about your customers

Understand their pain points

Develop a product to best resolve those pain points

Know how to market your product to address those pain points

Without research on those issues, you're making uneducated guesses about what your customers need . You can never satisfy a customer if you don't understand their requirements.

• Types of product research

Product research is conducted through many channels. The more thorough the research, the better your chances of developing a product that will appeal to your potential customers. Types of product research are varied, including:

Sourcing historical data from trade associations and research groups

Running customer surveys , interviews, focus groups , etc.

Having beta and soft releases where customers use your product and provide feedback

Gauging how satisfied customers are with the final product

Looking ahead to improvements that will keep the product fresh in the future

We’ll look at these in more depth later in the article.

What’s the difference between market research and product research?

Let's say you have the idea to develop a calendar app for small service businesses, such as hair stylists or nail salons, that allows customers to schedule their own appointments. Market research will help you determine such aspects as:

What competitors are in the market

How their calendars are serving small businesses

Whether their price point is an issue

Whether glitches allow calendars to double-book appointments

Whether existing calendars work for multi-seat businesses

Once you have a handle on the market you’re stepping into, you can start product research by testing your solution with your potential users. Again, it’s a good idea at this point to also research and brainstorm with your users about what they’d ideally like to see. This way, your concept isn’t just your idea, but one already validated by the very customers you’re hoping to target.

Next, you can test your prototype with users, make the tweaks and eventually release your product to the world, keeping tabs on its validity.

By including product research at every step in the designing and releasing process, you can ensure the user interface is easy to understand and use, and ultimately solves the problem users need it to again and again.

• Benefits of good product research

Good product research guides every step of product development. It gives everyone in your company the necessary tools to develop a product that meets customers' pain points and achieves your business goals.

The benefits of good product research include:

Allowing you to identify potential customers and their pain points

Guiding the development of a product that meets those pain points

Preventing you from wasting time and money on activities that don't meet those pain points

Testing your product in real-world situations to determine if it meets its goals

Saving you from developing unwanted products

Keeping you ahead of your competition by knowing what customers need, direct from the source

The exact method for conducting effective product research will vary by product and market, but following these four methods will lead you to the best results:

Use accurate, unbiased data collection methods

You're starting your product research with the hypothesis that the product you envision will solve your customer's pain point in the best way. But that's just your hypothesis. To test your theory, you must conduct accurate, unbiased research.

Sometimes this means letting a third party handle your customer surveys and focus groups. Survey recipients or focus-group respondents are more likely to give honest feedback to a third party.

A third party can help you craft survey questions that will give you honest answers, not the answers you are hoping or expecting to hear about your product.

Developing a product with inaccurate information is as bad, if not worse, than developing a product with no product research.

Conduct a thorough competitive and comparative analysis

As you enter a market niche, you need a thorough understanding of where your competitors stand and how they are serving and not serving your potential clients. This is a competitive analysis .

Your potential customers may have other options for addressing the same need but not in your niche market. Understanding how those options could affect your product is a comparative analysis .

For example, if you think you can build a better tennis racket to serve players who only play occasionally, you'll need to compare your product with others at a fairly low price point to develop a competitive analysis .

But maybe your potential customers feel their exercise needs can be equally filled by playing pickleball or badminton. Determining how your product would fare against those products would be a comparative analysis.

Leverage existing research material

You don't have to reinvent the wheel to conduct quality product research. Trade associations, academics, research groups, and government agencies may have already done much of the heavy lifting. These groups often conduct thorough research on marketplace analysis, trends, and projected changes.

Studying social media and influencers in your field can help you stay current with product development and gain foresight on when a product might be going obsolete.

Base your research on your business goals

At this point, we hope it’s apparent how critical product research is, but you shouldn’t do research without knowing why you’re doing it. To make research as effective as possible, it must be structured against business goals. These should be measurable metrics with associated dates and timelines, with clear processes or tools with which to check them.

A basic example is increasing the number of visitors to your marketing site. To set a proper goal metric, you should be explicit. For example, “By April 25, new visitors to our marketing site should increase by 10% from the 5,000 we’re currently receiving every month.” If this is announced to your marketing team in January, they can request research be carried out that will determine exactly what would give them this result. Knowing the goal, researchers will know what research methods would work best and the timeline and scope they’re dealing with.

As a bonus, working with metrics can virtually eliminate unnecessary heavy management and ultimately give your team the autonomy they need to succeed. They will know without guidance if they’re off target and will be empowered to determine what steps are needed to realize the goals you want your team to achieve.

• Methods of product research

Many methods of product research are available. Use a range of these to get the full picture of how your product should be developed and/or improved to meet your potential customers' pain points.

Concept testing

Often, before even designing a product, you might want to test the concept before spending money and time developing a non-starter. Once you have identified potential customers or people using a competitor's project, you can pitch the concept of your product to them to determine if they feel it could fill their needs.

Concept testing can be done through surveys or interviews. Bear in mind that interviews could give you more back-and-forth feedback that would be beneficial to growing your product beyond its initial concept.

Price testing

Price testing should be conducted at an early stage to determine where your product might fit in your industry, but it should remain open to further testing down the line as the product becomes more concrete. As you make improvements to your product over time, the market might bear a greater price than your initial research suggests.

Finally, there are several testing methods you could use to encourage purchases, for example, using anchoring to list prices next to more costly packages or products to make them seem more affordable.

Product tests

Once you have developed a beta version of your product, you'll want to begin product testing with some potential customers you discovered in your early research. These customers must test the product in real-world situations to determine if it works as designed, contains any glitches, and meets their pain points.

Their input will guide improvements that need to be made before you launch your final product, with continual validation and checking of analytics post-launch. Your product should stay fluid and your product process iterative.

Focus groups

Focus groups can be used at various stages of product development to give direct feedback about your product.

They can be composed of potential customers or other experts in your field, such as academics, researchers, or retired executives who could give a more defined analysis of your product than potential users. They can also be a mix of users who have or have not had experience with your product to offer new insights and perspectives.

Product surveys

Product surveys provide useful feedback after the release of your product, as real-world users can give more detailed information about the product’s pros and cons. You can better address how your product performs in comparison to your competitors’ and identify improvements in the next version of your product.

What are product research questions?

Product research questions are the questions you ask potential customers through interviews, surveys, or focus groups, to determine their pain points and how a product can meet those pain points.

Having a third party help you develop these research questions will take the bias out of the equation to ensure you are getting accurate data.

• How to measure the success of your product research

With measurable metrics in place, your research efforts will be much more likely to help your team achieve its goals. However, it’s important to remember research in and of itself shouldn’t be measured as successful just because you’re aiming for these metrics. Good research should remain unbiased and seek the truth, rather than continually bringing your team great news.

If you really want to hit your success metrics, you need to focus on using the correct research methods, rules, and tools to seek truthful answers to the questions you’re asking. This is when research can be deemed successful.

Judging your product research will become more clearly defined once you have clear questions based on the business metrics you’re aiming for. Sometimes your first research method won’t find the answers, but it will always show you what you didn’t know before and often lead you to what you should do next. Conduct the necessary follow-up research and let the results guide you.

Once you have the answers you need from the research, the insights should enable you to move ahead with product development.

Ask yourself the following questions to judge whether your product research has been successful:

Have you structured the best design methods so that the resulting data can help the necessary stakeholders work toward the business goals?

Have you been able to make actionable suggestions to teams based on educated and data-backed solutions?

Have you been able to understand the problem statement more clearly after analysis?

Should you be using a customer insights hub?

Do you want to discover previous interviews faster?

Do you share your interview findings with others?

Do you interview customers?

Start for free today, add your research, and get to key insights faster

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How to Do Product Research: Top 10 Strategies for 2024

• January 2, 2022
• Last Updated on January 2, 2024

Do you want to sell on Amazon or start another e-commerce business but have no idea what to sell?

On Amazon, you can build a sustainable online business and reap the rewards for years to come.

In fact, nearly 74% of Amazon sellers earn more than $1k a month and 39% more than $10k. Only 14% of sellers don’t make any profits yet (2019).

But, if you want to become a successful Amazon seller , you need the right product.

Over 2.1 million active sellers are on Amazon (July 2020), and countless niches are oversaturated. If you enter a niche with thousands of competitors, the chances are high that you’re going to fail.

However, using the strategies I’ll show you in this post, you’ll be able to find the right types of products with high demand and low competition.

In this post, you’ll learn the best product research tactics for 2023.

Let’s jump right in.

The Basic Product Research Strategy

A brilliant Amazon product research strategy is the so-called ABC Strategy.

Enter one single letter into Amazon’s search bar and see what Amazon suggests to you. For example, type in the letter “C”:

Amazon suggests “can opener”. Type it into the search bar to take a closer look at it:

You can see that there are several different types of can openers. Now, you’ve two options:

• Analyze all these products with Jungle Scout’s Extension (product research tool)
• Go even further and enter another letter

Let’s enter another letter, for example, “R”:

As you can see, there are lots of results. However, you need to find the winning products. You have to type in every single letter from A-Z and then analyze all these keyword niches with Jungle Scout’s Extension.

Here’s how to do that:

1. Get Jungle Scout’s Extension with a 20% discount .

2. Type in a keyword, e. g. “can opener rust-resistant”.

3. Analyze the keyword niche with Jungle Scout’s Extension .

Finally, I would not recommend going for this niche. As you can see, Jungle Scout tells you that the competition is very tough.

The Advanced Product Research Strategy

If you’re serious about selling on Amazon, you have to do more market research to get new product ideas and finally find profitable products.

This product research strategy works via keyword research, and you will need Helium 10 to go through the process. There’s no other Amazon product research tool with such great functionality.

Here’s how it works:

Take this 20% discount for the first 6 months. You can also sign up for free , but you’ll then have a limited number of uses. However, if you’re just starting, the free plan is definitely worth it.

When you’re signed up, log in, open Helium 10 Black Box , and select “Keywords”:

Then, open “ADVANCED FILTERS”:

Now, type in the parameters to find the products you’re looking for. I highly recommend you read this post on what to sell on Amazon to understand what kind of products you’ve to search for. In fact, you need to enter parameters that indicate high demand and low competition.

Helium 10 analyzes the entire Amazon marketplace to find products with exactly those parameters that you’re looking for.

Next, go through the results and sort out all keywords that refer to a big brand. When people are searching for Adidas sneakers, they want to buy ADIDAS sneakers. They don’t want to buy YOUR sneakers.

Go through the list again and put all potential products on your watchlist. The first product I saw was this lock picking practice set:

There’re only 36 results and the keyword has a  search volume of 621.  Let’s check this keyword with Helium 10 XRay .

As you can see, all products in this niche have a solid revenue and a low review count.

But you shouldn’t stop here. You need to run all products of this niche through Helium 10 Cerebro .

Cerebro is a tool that shows you all the keywords a product is ranking for. This is super useful because you’ll know exactly from which keywords a product generates sales. In fact, you only need to check out these keywords to decide whether you can compete or not.

There’s a TON of useful data:

• Search Volume
• Sponsored ASINs
• Competing Products
• CPR 8-Day Giveaways

I would say that this niche is not super bad, but not great either. There are a few not-so-competitive keywords with decent search volume. But if you’re just starting, this niche is too hard to beat.

The Offline Product Research Strategy

You don’t always have to do product research online to find successful products.

Sometimes, you get the best product ideas by analyzing existing products and thinking of ways to improve them.

Here are some great places to get new product ideas:

• Exhibitions
• Retail stores
• Second-hand shops
• Supermarkets
• Furniture stores
• Fashion stores

The Normal Product Research Strategy

Instead of setting parameters for keywords and then searching for products related to those keywords, you can directly search for products.

Take this 20% discount for the first 6 months of Helium 10 or sign up for free . If you sign up for free, you’ll have limited uses. However, it’s enough if you’re just starting.

After you’ve registered, head over to Black Box :

Then, set all parameters to find the products you’re looking for. Remember that you should read our guide to what to sell on Amazon to understand what parameters you should set.

As already mentioned, it’s all about high demand and low competition. Don’t enter a niche where thousands of sellers selling the same thing.

Next, go through the list and sort out all results that refer to a big brand. Put all potential products on your watchlist.

Check competition

By now, you should have tons of products on your watchlist. But you don’t know the two most important things:

• How many competitors are there?
• Which keywords generate sales?

So what you have to do is to run all keywords through Helium 10 Cerebro .

A small number of ranking products means low competition. A high number of ranking products means high competition.

You should also use CPR-8-Day Giveaways to determine the competition level. CPR-8-Day Giveaways is a Helium 10 score that shows you how many sales you have to make within 8 days to land on the first Amazon SERP for a given keyword.

Here’s a vacuum stealer that I ran through Cerebro:

Now, let’s check if these keywords are competitive:

The first keywords are highly competitive. But when you go deeper, you can see that there’re lots of keywords with less competition and still decent search volume:

The Easy One

We all know that Amazon suggests similar products to you based on your behavior (e. g. what you buy or what you type into the search bar):

The easiest product research strategy is to check out all these suggestions and click through the product listings.

It’s just that simple.

But don’t forget to check all relevant metrics like monthly revenue, profit margin, or seasonality with product research tools like Jungle Scout or Helium 10 .

If you go for this strategy, you will find lots of trash. However, if you do extensive research, you will definitely discover some high-potential products.

A Simple Hack

If you want to apply this strategy, you’ll need Jungle Scout’s Extension. You can get it here for $19 .

Then, here’s what you’ve to do:

Head over to Amazon and search for a product. You can check out the bestseller list or use the ABC strategy, whatever.

For example, let’s choose this rack set here:

Then, identify the most important keyword. In this case, it’s rack set .

Put the keyword into the search bar and press “search”.

Now, open Jungle Scout’s Chrome Extension and start the Keyword Cloud:

Keyword Cloud shows you all the keywords related to the main keyword, that people are also searching for.

What you’ve to do is to choose another keyword that sounds interesting to you:

Type this keyword into the search bar again and repeat the whole process until you find a very specific product. Let’s type in “wood”:

Amazon suggests me “wooden dish rack and drainboard set “ . There are only 398 search results which is okay:

However, Jungle Scout tells me not to go for this product because it’s highly competitive:

Don’t forget to validate your product idea.

With this strategy, you can discover hundreds of product ideas.

Remember that it’s most important to analyze sales-relevant data. You should also use Jungle Scout’s Product Tracker to analyze demand fluctuations. This allows you to find out whether a product sells stable throughout the year or not.

Keyword Product Research

This strategy works based on the same principle as the last one.

First, you’ve to pick a particular product as a basis. Then, run this product through Helium 10 Cerebro . The tool shows you all the important keywords that this product is ranking for on Amazon.

Make a list of all these keywords and run them through Helium 10 Magnet  (Magnet shows you ALL keywords related to one single main keyword).

What you will get is a massive list of keywords.

This strategy is almost the same as the last one, however, you will get ten times more keyword ideas. Accordingly, you can check ten times more niches with an Amazon seller tool .

Use AliExpress

This is also a strategy to get new product ideas, but it’s essential to validate them with Helium 10 or Jungle Scout .

Unfortunately, AliExpress doesn’t have a page for the best-selling products. However, you can still find out which products are popular. You’ve to select a category and sort the list by “Orders” to see only the best-selling products.

AliExpress is also a great place to get awesome ideas for product development.

Check Out These Sites…

There are lots of Amazon entrepreneurs offering their products to potential customers on customer review sites for a massive discount.

In most cases, these are fairly new products.

So you can head over to one of these 26 Amazon Review Sites and search for trending products there.

Out-of-the-Box Strategy

This strategy is more suited for advanced sellers or sellers who have more budget to launch their business.

Because out-of-the-box means selling products, that most sellers can’t sell. These products are often oversize-products, have striking colors, and have a higher price point than others.

The main advantage is that there are fewer sellers for these products, because “everyone” on Amazon sells cheap products. Most new sellers don’t have the budget.

When we analyzed the number of products by price range, we found interesting results:

For advanced sellers and sellers with a high budget, the out-of-the-box strategy might be a great chance.

Here are some things to consider when searching for out-of-the-box products:

• High priced products:  If you’re going for high-priced products, you may face less competition.
• Eye-catching shapes/colors:  Fewer sellers provide eye-catching colors and shapes.
• Over-size products: These products cost much more than standard-size products and also shipping is much more expensive.

However, if you don’t have a high budget, try to stay away from out-of-the-box products.

At the end of the day, you will need money to promote your product. If you can’t promote it, you will not be able to make your first sales.

Here’s a summary of all the product research strategies:

• Basic Product Research Strategy – Everybody should use this strategy
• Advanced Product Research Strategy – The best strategy
• Offline Product Research Strategy – Great for inspiration
• Normal Product Research Strategy – 2nd best strategy
• Easy Strategy – You should do this all the time
• The Simple Hack – 3rd best strategy
• Keyword Product Research – Great to get lots of ideas
• AliExpress – You should try it
• Review Sites – You should also try it
• Out-of-the-Box Strategy – The best strategy for advanced sellers

Moritz Bauer

Moritz Bauer studied industrial engineering at the University of Applied Sciences in Constance. At the age of 16, he build his first online store. Today, he teaches companies how to set up their business online.

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Amazon Product Research: Methods to Discover Winning Products

Arishekar N

Did you know that selling on Amazon comes with a potential failure rate of 80%-90%? However, the 10% that do end up making it, make it big! Like they really kill it. One of the core reasons why they make it is their ability to conduct effective Amazon product research.

They fundamentally understand that only decisions backed by data result in success.

After all, in the ever-evolving world of e-commerce , consumer preferences can change in the blink of an eye and successful sellers have no choice by to adapt by staying ahead of the curve.

Use various methods to dive deep into the needs and desires of your target audience, understand their pain points, identify gaps in your competitors’ products, and ultimately, zero in on lucrative opportunities that can propel your business to new heights.

While it can be tempting, simply finding a product you like, creating a listing, and hoping for the best can be ineffective in the long run.

Therefore, we’ve put together this comprehensive Amazon product research guide with effective tips to streamline your Amazon product analysis and research journey.

Let’s jump into it!

Here is a quick peek into the article:

What is Amazon Product Research?

• Four Elements Influencing Your Product Research on Amazon
• Ways to Discover Good Product Ideas

Final Thoughts

Amazon product research refers to finding a “winning product” that could turn a hefty profit when sold on Amazon. Unfortunately, you cannot rely solely on gut feelings or passion when it comes to selling a product on Amazon.

For example, you could spend several hundred hours of time and resources coming up with a proprietary product that you think is amazing.

However, if there’s no market demand for it, then your product simply won’t sell on Amazon. Additionally, highly competitive products result in saturated niches that can be extremely hard to break into.

To effectively zero in on a profitable product, you’ll need to deploy a range of strategies to gather data, and thoroughly analyze and validate its potential for success.

Specifically, you need to consider various metrics such as BSR, estimated daily orders, estimated daily revenue, category and subcategory information, and much more. Of course, manual methods of product research may not result in gathering the same level of information as Amazon product analysis with a specialized third-party research tool.

By understanding this data, not only could you find opportunities in a non-competitive niche or the subcategory of a saturated niche. For instance, breaking into the water bottle niche can be challenging. However, there may be potential in the sports water bottle subcategory.

Four Factors That Influence Product Research on Amazon

To effectively validate a product and find lucrative opportunities, you need to consider the following factors:

Competition

Profitability.

Understanding the demand for the product is extremely important. As mentioned earlier, you could potentially lose a significant amount of money trying to sell a product without any demand or by trying to break into a category with high competition.

Therefore, without understanding the demand, you won’t be able to gauge the success of your product.

Here are some key factors that can help you identify demand for a product:

A minimum of 10 estimated daily orders

Find a product that has a higher average unit sales per day. As a baseline, we recommend you keep it to a minimum of 10 estimated orders per day.

This essentially implies that the product that you are trying to sell should have already been sold by at least one other person and should generate a minimum of 10 sales per day. This would also suggest that the product has a good demand with at least 300 orders a month on average.

Of course, there’s the question of profitability as well. Let’s assume that two products are selling at $30. Product A has an average daily order of 5 and product B has an average daily order of 10.

Now, let’s assume that both products have a profit of $10 after the Amazon FBA fees , shipping, promotions , etc. Essentially, the gross sale you make per month in Product A is $30* 5 units * 30 days = $4,500, and in Product B is $30* 10 units * 30 days = $9,000

The profit you make for Product A is = $10 * 5 units/ day * 30 days/ month = $1,500 per month, and Product B is $10 * 10 units/ day * 30 days/ month = $3,000 per month.

As obvious as this may sound, products with higher average sales units per day have better profits. Therefore, aim to sell a product that can at least bring in 9000-10000 in gross sales and at least 3,000 in profit.

A BSR of 5,000 or less in the category

Understanding the sales frequency of a product can be complicated without the right tool. However, you can find the best seller rank (BSR) for free on the ecommerce platform. Most importantly, the BSR can help you understand the sales performance of a product within its category.

Fundamentally, a lower BSR suggests higher sales. For instance, a product with a BSR of 20,000 has significantly fewer daily sales than the same product with a BSR of 2,000 in the same category.

Therefore, avoid selecting a product with low sales potential even if it has found its way to the top pages.

When zeroing in on a product, it’s advisable to have 3-5 products in the main category with a BSR rank of around or below 5,000. The more number of products you have with a low BSR, the better your chances of success.

Note : When examining the BSR, focus on the main category rather than subcategories. Keep in mind a product with BSR #100 in the Electronics category wouldn’t necessarily generate similar sales as a product with BSR #100 in the Pet Supplies category.

We recommend you use SellerApp’s Product Intelligence Tool to find products that can sell on Amazon . Specifically, use SellerApp’s unique “Opportunity Score” feature, which analyzes the product and gives a score based on the following criteria.

• Demand : It calculates the demand for the product in the category
• Revenue Potential : It estimates the monthly revenue of the product in the category
• Competition : It shows if the competition is higher or lower than the category average
• Overhead Cost : It estimates the overhead cost and shows if it’s higher or lower than the category average.
• Profit Margin : It shows you the estimated profit margin of the product compared to the category average
• PIS Index : This metric measures the scope of improvement in the product.

A high Opportunity Score indicates that the product can be highly profitable if you choose to sell, and vice versa.

The product has keywords with good search volume

Another effective method to gauge the product demands is to understand the various keywords and search volume for those keywords. If the product keywords already attract substantial search traffic, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

As a rule of thumb, see if the top 2-3 product keywords have at least a cumulative search volume of 10,000+ to effectively understand the demand for said product. Of course, this may vary based on your product type and niche.

Note : Stay away from a product with a very high search volume, as this niche might be too competitive to capture a portion of the market share and make a decent profit.

We recommend you use the SellerApp Reverse ASIN tool to find all top-performing keywords and search volume for the product.

Log in to the SellerApp dashboard . Go to the , and add your competitor ASINs. Here you can analyze the keywords based on search volume.

A product that promotes repeat purchases.

Selling a product that encourages repeat purchases like cosmetics paper products or packaging materials is a great way to improve customer lifetime value and your profits.

Additionally, selling these types of products can also help you build a brand and even customer loyalty.

Recurring purchases also indicate customer satisfaction and trust. They are also less likely to switch to competitors or substitutes. Most importantly, choosing to sell such a product also results in lower acquisition and marketing costs as you don’t have to spend so much money attracting new customers, as you already have a loyal customer base.

An evergreen product

Unfortunately, you need to consider seasonality as a factor when choosing to sell your product. As you can imagine, the product’s demand can fluctuate depending on the type. For example, demand for snow gloves drastically increases during winter and is non-existent in the summer season.

Some product demands also increase during specific holidays. For example, Halloween costumes or decorations.

Therefore, we recommend you get a general idea of the seasonality of the product using Google Trends. Specifically, to identify if the keyword search volume data of the product is steady across the year.

But if there’s a periodic spike in the search volume, it shows seasonality.

A business built around seasonal products may be profitable for a day or a season but wouldn’t be sustainable in the long run.

Review customer feedback

However, we recommend digging far deeper into the reviews than simply glossing over 3-5 reviews.

One of the best ways to track demand and understand the effectiveness of a product is to head to the customer review section and read the feedback.

Use the SellerApp Chrome Extension and gather all the reviews for a specific product. You can filter by verified purchases to gather insights from the actual buyers and filter the reviews by star rating, text/video/image reviews, and even geography.

More importantly, use the Product Scanner Feature to gather the average ratings and reviews for all the products at the category or subcategory level to understand the overall demand.

Monitor pricing and track competitor inventory levels

Another way to understand product demand is to track competitor pricing and inventory levels. But by understanding the price wars between your competitors to win the buy box or even the fluctuations in selling price, you can understand the demand for the product to a certain level.

Although not amazingly insightful, you could still understand a certain level of demand by tracking your competitor’s inventory level and understanding how often they’re low in stock. Of course, this can take a significant amount of time, which is why it should ideally be an ancillary method to gauge demand.

In addition to Demand, you must deep dive into the niche and understand customer sentiment to understand your product has potential.

Look for Products with a low review count (About 2-3 Products With < 50 Reviews on Page 1)

Studying reviews is a necessary part of product research.

With this research, you can understand whether the product is effectively solving the customer’s pain point but it will also help you understand gaps in the competitive landscape that you can take advantage of.

For example, if you keep reading that Product X would be more easier to use with Feature Y. You could implement Feature Y into your product and sell it to capture market share from your customer.

Of course, reviews also help in more a straightforward manner. By reading the reviews you can understand if there is demand for the product. The number of sellers and the number of reviews split across them also give you insight into the difficulty of entering the market.

A good rule of thumb is to make a list of the top ten keywords for the product and check the top 10 products for each of those keywords. The product is likely to sell successfully if the top 10 products have less than 100 reviews.

However, if there are more than 1000 reviews, it’s best to move on to another product. When it comes to choosing the keyword go from broad to phrase and then to exact.

Identify the Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Analyzing the product reviews and Q&A section can give you insight into not just the weaknesses and gaps with the product but also help you understand the strengths and unique selling points of the product.

Usually, if the top products already have 4.5+ ratings, there’s a high chance that these products are already “perfected”, and it will be difficult to identify gaps in the product.

But for products with less than 4.5 ratings, you can identify some negative reviews and understand the gaps in the products. Use these gaps to improve your products and tailor your product messaging.

Of course, this isn’t an absolute. You could always try to find opportunities to improve a nearly “perfect product” and launch a new one with additional features or improvements.

Other than Demand and Customer Insights, you must also thoroughly understand the competition. After all, there is no point in spending time and resources on launching a problem, only to be drowned by the competition.

Here are some key factors to consider when it comes to understanding the competition:

The barrier to entry should not be low

Don’t select a product that has a low entry barrier.

As obvious as it may sound, it’s important to understand that everyone can see the potential in this product and you will run into several new competitors, negatively impacting your business.

On the other hand, the more difficult to enter a new market, the fewer new sellers will pose a threat to your product. Therefore, look for products that require a relatively high capital investment, unique features, or strong differentiations from other products.

These types of products can help you avoid direct competition and create a niche market for yourself.

No Big Brands in the product category

Entering a product category dominated by big brands will always put you at a clear disadvantage. Here’s why:

• One, you will need to compete against their large marketing budgets and brand recognition . Capturing market share would be harder than going to the moon. Ok, maybe not. But the point still rests.
• Two, winning customers who are loyal to these brands can be significantly challenging. And if you try to work around their market share, you might be targeting a super narrow demographic, which would restrict your growth and profitability.

If you still want to compete against such dominant brands, ensure that you have a solid marketing strategy , a good product, a great brand story/mission/values, and exceptional customer service.

The Number of Sellers

Tracking the number of sellers should be a no-brainer – it can indicate the level of competition and the demand for that product. Generally, if there are too many sellers for a product, it would mean that the product is highly competitive, and you may have difficulty breaking into the market or succeeding once you’re in.

On the other hand, if fewer sellers exist in the category, it would mean less competition and more growth potential.

Once you’ve evaluated a product’s demand, competition, and customers, you need to ensure that the product you sell is profitable.

Here are some factors to gauge the profitability of a product:

Look for Products Between the $20-$50 Price Range.

Products priced at $20-$50 lie in the impulse buying decision range. Fundamentally, the higher the price tag, the more a consumer thinks about spending the amount.

Meaning, that they’ll conduct more research and try to understand if they need the product, while with less expensive items, they won’t spend as much time comparing them to others.

Additionally, there is an extreme on the other end as well as shoppers may associate the product with cheap quality.

Sellers often tend to get into a black hole when trying to find the right pricing strategy for their products. Ultimately, while the impulse purchase range does have its benefits, it’s important to note that the product price should be set after calculating the expenses and profit. Most importantly, it should address the customer’s perceived value.

For example, a great example would be portable chargers like the famous BlendJet. The cost of manufacturing the product may be less than $10. However, with marketing and branding, you could build a perceived valuation of the product and potentially elevate the cost to $50-60.

Look for Lightweight Products

Yes, the size of the product is important. Especially, since there can be additional fees associated with shipping or storing the product. Therefore, it’s always advisable to look for small and lightweight products , as these types of products can keep your shipping and storage fees down, which usually are based on the weights and dimensions of the product.

For example, it would be much cheaper to source and sell a small product, such as a necklace, versus wooden furniture.

While wooden furniture may be in higher demand, the logistics cost will be humongous, which can eat up a massive chunk of your profit margin.

Key Tip : Don’t go for too light or heavy fragile products, like glass or electronics. Pick something sturdy and easy to ship.

Choose a Product With a Decent Profit Margin of 25-35%

The ultimate goal of your business should be profit.

Unfortunately, there are a ton of fees associated with selling on Amazon. So, it’s not a simple calculation of product cost and selling price. You will also need to factor in multiple factors such as subscription fees, selling fees, advertising fees, storage fees, shipping fees, etc.

Whenever you conduct product research, calculate the gross profit margin to specifically understand the earning potential of the product.

There is no particular profit margin to aim for, as it’s subjective. However, we recommend at least a 25-35% gross margin as this would help you build a successful business with long-term potential.

This will leave you with enough room for your advertising budget to stand out from the competition.

You can easily find the profit margin of a product by using the SellerApp FBA calculator.

Just go to the product listing on Amazon , open the SellerApp FBA Calculator tool , and provide the following information:

• Cost of Goods Sold

And the tool will automatically calculate the profit margin for you.

Amazon Product Research Checklist

Here is a quick checklist to help you easily pick the right product to sell:

• Product prices should fall between the range of $10 and $50
• Products should make at least 10 sales a day
• The product should have a minimum best-seller rank of at least 5,000 in the main category
• The top 3 related keywords have 10,000+ monthly searches on Amazon
• Choose evergreen products instead of seasonal products
• The product must have at least 2-3 competitor products with less than 50 reviews on the first page of the Amazon SERPs
• Small and lightweight products (under 2 to 3 pounds)
• No brand names or trademarks associated with the product
• A product can be set up for 25% or even less than the sale price
• Proper room for product optimization and improvement of present listings
• There should be multiple product-related keyword opportunities
• The product should not be fragile
• There should be a potential to expand the brand with related products
• Can make a superior product over similar products in the market
• The product encourages repeat purchases
• The product should not have any legal or compliance issues

Techniques to Discover Good Product Ideas

Now that you’ve learned the four factors to consider when selecting a viable product, let’s look at some effective methods to discover the products.

Amazon Marketplace

Amazon is the first place you should research to identify good product ideas. Amazon has different categories like Bestseller lists, Movers and Shakers, Most Wished For, and Gift Ideas section, public wishlists all of which can offer countless product ideas to you.

First, visit Amazon’s Best Sellers page. Here, you’ll find the best-selling products for each category. Don’t stop your research in the top category. Go deep into subcategories to identify unique product ideas.

Additionally, you can also look at New Releases, Movers & Shakers, Most Wished For, and Gift Ideas tabs. These products will have high demand but less competition over the best-selling products.

Let’s say in the “New Releases” tab, you go for “Sports & Outdoors.” Now, this is way too broad a subcategory to identify product ideas. But you can go deep into subcategories to identify product ideas that you’ve never thought of.

For example, Sports & Outdoors > Exercise & Fitness > Cardio Training > Exercise Bikes.

Under the “Exercise Bikes” subcategory, you can look through many product types.

Speak with Your Current Supplier

If you’re already an Amazon seller, the best and easiest way to do product research is by simply asking your suppliers what products are trending and selling like hotcakes now.

Your supplier should already have the information and might happily give it to you if you have a good relationship with them.

You can also make it worthwhile for the suppliers by giving them bulk orders for the new products.

Looking at eBay’s Trending List

Even if your target marketplace is Amazon, other marketplaces like Walmart , eBay, and AliExpress can still be valuable sources for identifying product ideas.

Usually, if one product sells well on other marketplaces, it’s more likely to sell well on Amazon too.

So, head over to other marketplaces like eBay or Walmart and view all the trending products in your favorite categories.

Not all products will fit your criteria, but you’ll get a rough idea of the product in demand and brainstorm from there to find a product that makes the perfect sense to you.

Visit Retail Stores

Visiting your local retail stores can also be a great way to discover new product ideas to sell on Amazon.

These local stores often sell unique products that are not available online. These shops also serve as a real-time platform for identifying current trends and conducting price comparisons, which can provide you an edge over the competition.

Additionally, physical retail stores allow you to do a detailed quality assessment and help you make more informed decisions about the products to sell.

Use Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer

If you’re already an Amazon seller, use the Amazon Product Opportunity Explorer tool on Seller Central to find new products.

Log in to your Seller Central account, and navigate to Growth → Product Opportunity Explorer.

Use the search box to enter a broad keyword related to the product or niche you’re interested in.

Alternatively, you can browse niches by category or use the example niche recommendations based on your current product offerings.

The tool will display relevant niches, associated search terms , and key metrics such as customer needs, top search terms, search volume, units sold, average price, and price range.

You can use these metrics to filter and narrow down your search to avoid low-quality products.

Not just that, utilize the Customer Review Insights section to identify improvement opportunities within a product and niche. It shows you all the positive and negative reviews for both niche and product levels.

With this Product Opportunity Explorer tool, you can narrow down profitable product ideas backed by data and are less likely to fail.

SellerApp also offers a comprehensive Product Research tool that helps you research products on Amazon.

Just log in to the SellerApp Dashboard, go to the Product Research tool, and search with a seed keyword. The tool then gives you a list of products based on your search query .

You can filter the keywords based on multiple metrics to narrow your search to the most relevant products.

There you have it, a comprehensive checklist for Amazon Product Research!

As you can see, there are many aspects to consider to conduct thorough FBA product research, Following the steps given in this post will help you get started with your Amazon product analysis.

However, if you’re looking for an efficient way to accelerate progress, consider signing up on SellerApp Dashboard. It gives you free access to invaluable features such as product analysis and tracking to help you find the best-selling products for your next launch .

Leave a comment below and let us know what Amazon product research strategies you use in your business!

Was this post helpful?

Related posts:.

• A complete guide to finding Best Selling Amazon Products
• Best Amazon Predictive Analytics Tips You Will Read This Year

Amazon Product Listings Optimization & Guidelines For Increased Traffic

• How to Remove Amazon Counterfeit Products – Everything You Need to Know

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10 comments on “amazon product research: methods to discover winning products”.

Thank you for explaining best ways of product research Awesome post @Ankitha

Thank you for explaining about product research

i recommend this

Thanks for giving your ideas.

Very useful information for amazon sellers.

I like this blog!! It’s a masterpiece for amazon sellers.

SellerApp blogs are a wealth of knowledge for sellers. You cover everything from product research to marketing, and I’ve been able to improve my sales as a result.

I’ve been able to improve my product research and sourcing thanks to the information provided in SellerApp blogs. They have really helped me find profitable products to sell.

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Product Research: The Building Blocks of a User-Centered Solution

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The product research process for building winning solutions

In the previous chapter, we covered the key elements of product research. Now, you need a robust process to understand how your user will engage with your product—and the alternatives currently on the market. Here’s how to prep, conduct, and access the results of your product research.

What to consider before starting the product research process

Before adopting a product research process at your organization, you need to align with other stakeholders and ensure everyone’s on the same page about what you’re trying to achieve, why, and how you’re going to do it.

Some key things to bear in mind are:

Adopt a continuous product research mindset

When you have a continuous product discovery mindset, user insights aren’t just gathered at the beginning of a project, but are collected regularly using various product discovery techniques throughout the product lifecycle.

Think of research as something that happens during product development, not as a precursor to it. That way, you’ll always be working towards delivering a product that your users really want—and can easily use. “This iterative approach helps refine the product, enhance user experience, and identify future opportunities,” explains Sonal Srivastava , Senior UX Researcher at Amazon.

Ideally, you’ll conduct research on an ongoing basis, but at the very least, you could think about how to implement it during the following stages:

• Before development: To understand user needs, identify opportunities and define product features
• During product development: To test various concepts and refine the product through user feedback
• Post-launch: To evaluate performance, gather user satisfaction insights, and identify areas for improvement

Adapting a continuous product discovery mindset before you begin research is helpful for several reasons. Firstly, your team will be prepared for a process that isn’t entirely linear. Part of this includes storing user and product research insights in an organized and secure way, so they can be used easily throughout the product lifecycle. You’ll also be able to plan the time and budget accordingly, making sure you’re prepared to conduct studies before every iteration.

Know what you’re looking for and why

Researching without objectives is aimless, and can result in incorrect assumptions and biased products.

To avoid wasting your resources (and your user's time), you need to set clear research goals. This means knowing exactly what you want to achieve with each study, and why you're conducting it. When you combine this with an effort to stay aligned with the business and product strategy, you'll experience the added benefit of getting your decisions signed off more quickly. Your key stakeholders will understand exactly what your research will achieve.

Having clear goals also helps you decide whether you have any relevant context from previous user or market research, or if you're starting from scratch.

Build the type of product your user needs

Keep users at the center of your product decisions by using Maze to conduct remote tests at scale—and throughout the product lifecycle.

8 Steps to conduct effective product research

Before you begin, bear in mind that the product research process can (and should) be cyclical. Below, we lay out the steps in a linear way, but a continuous discovery approach is most effective for ensuring every product decision is based on user insights.

1. Opportunity assessment

Matthieu Dixte , our Product Researcher at Maze, explains the opportunity assessment stage as the place to identify and prioritize opportunities before thinking about the solution. If developing a product were a murder mystery, this would be when the detective starts looking for leads. No assumptions are being made just yet; it's all about gathering clues and fact-finding.

For you, the opportunity assessment means:

• Going through any previous research findings
• Monitoring the market
• Hosting customer feedback sessions
• Doing competitive product analysis or customer voice analysis

During this stage, you can also review your product's performance to spot any interesting trends. For example, Matthieu tells a story of a company he worked with before Maze. His team noticed that people were trying to click on charts on their website—the charts weren't actually clickable, but people wanted to filter them.

"This behavior helped us understand that people wanted to interact with the charts," says Matthieu. "We also detected that sometimes people clicked on the charts to copy and paste information because they wanted to share it with stakeholders."

These are the kinds of insights that can appear during the first stage of your product research process, and highlight which opportunities to explore in depth. “At Maze, we frequently review user feedback and monitor the market to gauge how our competitors are evolving. Each product idea comes from a trend that we detected,” says Matthieu.

2. Problem shaping

At this stage, you’re building on your findings from the opportunity assessment stage and shaping them into hypotheses. This will help identify the specific problem you want to solve.

For example, imagine people are complaining about your existing product not being flexible enough. This could mean a number of things:

• They’re not able to customize the dashboard colors
• They can’t export the source code
• The mobile experience is lacking

During the problem shaping stage, look into all those possibilities, refine the potential hypothesis, and decide which opportunities to explore further using prioritization techniques . You should also think of your target audience and how to conduct research to identify what your customers want.

Take this opportunity to seek stakeholder alignment, set clear objectives in line with your research strategy , and plan what you’ll do with the gathered insights. You can also use this stage to come up with ideas for product experimentation based on your previous research and findings.

3. Solution generation and screening

The solution generation and screening step is for outlining how your new feature, product, or initiative will reach the previously set goals—and improve the customer experience. It’s about defining how you’ll bridge the gap between user problems and a solution.

You should also use this stage to screen the different solutions or ideas and prioritize them. Determine which ones have a better market fit and are feasible, and get rid of unpromising ideas. Here you should also decide the methods, questions, and participants’ requirements—and share the plan with key stakeholders. At this stage, you should seek stakeholders' input and ensure continued alignment.

To properly screen ideas and solutions, you need to keep business goals in mind as well as the users’ pain points, so you can come up with win-win solutions for all your key stakeholders. Speak to users through surveys , focus groups, or five-second tests to see how they understand your idea or solution, then use those insights to decide which solution to develop.

4. Solution definition

It's time to think about how the ideas can come together. The solution definition stage is about further refining and solidifying the chosen idea or concept. The goal is to get a clear concept that designers can turn into a prototype.

During this stage, you should also conduct a feasibility assessment to determine whether you have the resources to go ahead with the solution. This means assessing your internal resources and team capacity, as well as potential revenue. You can use feedback and satisfaction surveys or conduct user interviews to gauge your target customers' opinions and address the desirability of the solution or idea.

You can also take a look at what you already know, or what others have learned to further define your solution. Here's how Sonal does it:

"I draft research questions that guide the study and address our objectives," she explains. "I also conduct a literature review and collaborate with the analytics team to gather relevant data. I define the methodology, participant recruitment criteria, and timelines, sharing them with stakeholders for feedback and alignment. Then, I create interview scripts or survey questions based on the objectives and conduct research sessions to collect data."

Like Sonal, it's vital to collaborate with other team members and stakeholders throughout the process. That way, you get their input as you define your solution and will have their buy-in when you want to make product decisions later.

5. Prototyping

Before going deep into the product development process , you should get your current or potential customers to test a prototype of your solution. Contrary to popular opinion, you should test your prototype when launching any new feature—you don’t need to wait until you have a new product to launch.

Prototyping usually involves designing physical or digital representations of the solution or concept. These can be anything from low-fidelity mockups to high-fidelity, almost fully-functional products. This stage allows you to collect insights on your product’s usability , user experience (UX) , and information architecture (IA). It also identifies any potential design flaws before the development or product launch—remember, it’ll be far more complicated and costly to make edits later.

It’s worth remembering that you can move back-and-forth between this step, validation and testing, and solution definition, until you’ve found a concept that drives customer satisfaction.

Product tip💡

Use a product research tool like Maze to test your prototype or wireframe. Share the tests with your users or access Maze’s Panel of highly qualified participants. Maze can also help you conduct UX research methods like surveys, tree testing, and card sorting.

6. Solution validation and testing

After creating a prototype, you should validate and test your solution to ensure it's effectively solving the problem and meeting the desired goals. During this step, gather feedback from your target market, personas, or potential users to identify any design flaws or areas of improvement.

To conduct proper solution or idea validation and testing, you can gather insights through user interviews, usability tests, focus groups, surveys, copy and content tests , A/B tests , and five-second tests. It's always important to get a mix of quantitative and qualitative results, but it's crucial that you conduct some sort of qualitative research at this stage, like an interview study or survey, so you're able to truly understand your customers' needs and pain points.

7. Development and deployment

The development and deployment stage of product research is when your ideas, concepts, and solutions come to life. Once you’ve validated, tested, and refined your prototype, you can involve the development team. Now’s when you can build the minimum viable product (MVP) or complete a new feature, considering your time and resource constraints.

Depending on your software development methodology, you can also choose to continuously deploy solutions as the team codes them, or wait until you've tested the different components before deploying them. For example, if the update is straightforward and has low user impact, a continuous deployment approach might be more efficient.

Continue to conduct product testing after launch so you can keep iterating and building successful products. If you’re using Maze as your continuous product discovery tool, you can use In-Product Prompts or Live Website Testing to gather insights from real users—after your solution is live.

8. Impact assessment

The last step of the product research process is to analyze the impact of your innovation. Review the results and present them to the product team and stakeholders. If you’re following a continuous research mindset, use this stage to reflect on the metrics and come up with improvement ideas to test and develop in the next sprint.

"I like to present findings in a team meeting, followed by a brainstorming session to discuss the next steps for the team based on research insights," says Sonal. This helps you continue building better products that excite your target demographic. "I often also create multiple versions of the results where I customize the report for different stakeholders to ensure they receive the insights relevant to their roles," she adds.

Product research process: What you need to know

In short, the product research process enables you to make decisions based on product-market interactions. If you want to build user-centric products, adopting a continuous product research mindset is crucial. This means taking user insights as a starting point for doing further research and informing decision-making. Your workflow should also have clear goals aligned with your high-level business and product strategy.

Throughout the product lifecycle, complete the following steps at regular intervals:

• Opportunity assessment
• Problem shaping
• Solution generation and screening
• Solution definition
• Prototyping
• Solution validation and testing
• Development and deployment
• Impact assessment

Keep reading for our chapters on how to experiment with your product to improve customer satisfaction, and how to conduct competitive product analysis to set you apart.

Frequently asked questions about the product research process

What does product research include?

Product research includes finding areas of improvement, testing ideas, and developing solutions to enhance the product experience. The product research process goes like this:

• Validation and testing

How to conduct product research?

To do product research, start by looking at the product's performance, user, and market data to come up with opportunities you want to explore. Then, talk to users to shape the problem space and generate a solution. Conduct further research to define the solution, test your prototype, and validate your assumptions. Only then can you take the final design to the development team, launch the product, and assess the impact of your innovation.

What tools do you need for product research?

These are the tools you need for product research:

• Product testing tools like Maze to test usability, capture customer feedback, and gather user sentiment at scale
• Note-taking apps like Notion to write down interview questions and answers, or keep track of your diary studies
• Video conferencing tools such as Zoom or Google Meet to interview your customers and collect feedback

Product experimentation

What is Product Research? Methods, Process, and Benefits

Product research is a vital initial stage that starts well before the product development process . Successful product research teaches product teams about 

• how to shape a product idea
• what similar products there are on the market already
• what is the best way to develop and advertise the product
• whether the product will be a success in its market

The process of product research will also teach you about what customers want and how to adjust your strategy to meet their needs. Surveys are a great tool to get this process started.

But product research does not just happen in the initial stages of product development. Well-seasoned product managers know that the process should be continuous. Businesses that perform best conduct regular product research to stay ahead of their competitors .

Without proper product research your chances of success, like your product decisions , will be random. Learn from the market and your customers to perform data-driven and customer-centric decisions.

Product research methods

The optimal method of gathering product research data will vary depending on whether you are launching a completely new product or a product update.

If you are working on new features for an existing product, your goal is to examine product satisfaction

• customer needs and pain points
• how those needs have changed over time
• how users are adopting new features

Then use this information to decide which initiatives you should prioritize and what to concentrate on within the updates.

If, however, you are developing an entirely new product, you likely won’t yet have a customer base or any historical information about user behavior. You’ll have to concentrate on learning about competitors and the existing market your product will fit into.

Let’s have a look at some ways you can obtain this information.

Product surveys are a great way to learn how existing and potential customers feel about your product. 

These surveys can include questions about what consumers think of your product

• what frustrates them the most
• what the most needed improvements include
• what their favorite features are, and more.
• You can also gain insights into how these aspects compare to that of your competitors.

Product surveys can be sent via email or link , in-app , in-product , or through your website . This is probably the most convenient, affordable, and effort-efficient way of gathering information to fuel your product research.

Another kind of survey that can prove useful is a quarterly-basis NPS survey . The open follow-up question can be a great source of new product and feature ideas.

You can also run in-product surveys to see what potential struggles your customers come across. Pair this with session recordings and heatmaps to get a complete picture. Survicate integrates with products like FullStory and SessionCam to facilitate this process.

💡 YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN: After scenario questionnaire survey template

Customer interviews

At Survicate, we run product research surveys in which we ask customers about their needs. The surveys end with the following question:

“Would you be interested in talking with our team once we work on that feature?”

That way, we can recruit candidates for user interviews and usability testing .

This feedback from sales calls is a great way to get qualitative data on product ideas and concepts.

Lastly, we use Intercom conversations with customers to gather additional feedback and input on silent launches. Respondent attributes identify customers who would be good candidates for product testing .

Concept testing

Concept testing is the process of surveying users about a potential product . You can learn how they feel about it and whether they would be willing to purchase such a product were it available on the market.

This method is very versatile, as it can happen online, over the phone, or through real-life interviews. It can be difficult to obtain a sample of potential clients willing to provide you with feedback, so we recommend using a customer feedback tool to facilitate the process.

Focus groups

You can find focus groups of people who already use a product similar to the one you are thinking of developing. You can enquire about things like an optimal price , the most important features , and features they are missing in their current solution.

This can help you estimate your budget, product development strategy, spending, and profit margins. You can also find out about the qualities of your product that will make it unique and outbid your competitors.

To eliminate bias , choose third-party interviews or online surveys .

Usability testing and demos

Conduct product testing once you create a test model of your product. Show it to potential customers to get their feedback. This can also include having them watch a demo if you don’t yet have a beta version of your idea.

As above, surveys can be a great way of learning about their experience.

When to perform product research

Product research usually happens at these four stages of a product’s (or product update’s) lifecycle.

Before launch

Product research before launch lets you figure out what the competitive market is like, what features are missing but in demand, and what aspects of your product you should prioritize.

Testing and feedback

Once you have a beta version of your product, you can perform testing. This will help you understand how customers perceive your product or its new iterations, what they like and don’t like, and how you can still improve your product.

Soft launch

A soft launch means releasing the product to a part of your customer base to see how it will work in a “real world environment”. At this stage, there is usually still no advertising, so research should focus on usability and value rather than pricing or market fit .

Post-launch

Product research after launch should focus on customers’ behavior, satisfaction , and potential struggles.

Product research process 

Product research is essentially studying users to learn their needs and expectations for your product. Start with general information about the competitor landscape and end with detailed data like pricing , subscription plans, and visual design.

Analyze the competitive landscape

A part of product research should always include an analysis of your competitors' products, audiences, and processes.

Even if you are the first to market, you’ll have some indirect competition you need to be aware of or maybe even drive inspiration from. You’ll also likely need to do extra research to ensure there is in fact a demand for your product.

The existence of competitors is not always a bad thing. It at least confirms that the market has been validated. But you will need to come up with ways to differentiate your product and break through the crowd.

Find out how competitors reach their audience and what they do to retain customers for as long as possible.

Evaluate the size of your market

The first step in determining your market size is defining your potential customer . You have to know who you are going to cater to in order to estimate how large that target market is.

We recommend running a demographic survey among users of your competitors.

Market segmentation research

Once you have an idea of who your customers are or are going to be, you can categorize them into segments based on specific characteristics.

This will help you figure out the optimal ways of reaching them, meeting their needs and expectations, understanding struggle points, and learning about their goals.

Product feedback

Test your product before launching it. Use different marketing strategies, pricing options, and distribution methods to learn what conditions your product will thrive in.

We have many product feedback surveys that can help evaluate key aspects of your idea. Most notably, examine your users’ onboarding process …

… product experience …

…and usability of your product .

Price testing 

The price is a huge aspect of your product. Of course, you want to be as competitive as possible, but at the same time, you want to make the biggest profits possible.

Use a product pricing survey to learn about demand elasticity and the relationship between product demand and pricing.

Customer research

Learning about your customers or who your customers will be can help you make better product development and advertising decisions.

For example, you may find you have an international audience, in which case it may make sense to make your product or service available in multiple languages . 

Find out who your existing customers are to come up with ways to reach new potential clients.

You can also query customers who have recently stopped using your product to learn about ways of preventing churn .

Ask your customers about features they are missing in your product . If they are considering switching to a competitor, you may be able to prevent this by ensuring them you are working on an update.

And always stay on top of customer satisfaction to learn when you need to make changes to your product or its aspects.

Automate your product research

Product research and development should be a continuous process. In the modern world, it’s not enough to develop a great product and call it a day . Use a great product feedback tool to keep gathering customer insights that will drive growth to your business.

With a tool like Survicate, you can automate your surveys to be sent at regular intervals as to reduce your employees’ workload. 

All results are compiled in one place - our dashboard. The analysis panel generates survey reports in real-time.

You can also use ready-made visuals to get information across your entire team.

Segment results

Product research does not end with successfully gathered data. The last step is to use it to fuel product decisions that will realistically improve your product and customer experience , and drive brand growth.

Segmentation of results should be based on business goals and your KPIs. This step ensures data is not wasted and reaches appropriate teams. It will also help plan short-term and long-term goals so you know what data you might need in the future.

For example, tracking user pain points that an update didn’t solve might be helpful in the future when building new features. Documenting what went well during your last product update will help you design your roadmap more efficiently.

Benefits of successful product research

Let’s quickly run through what you can gain through thorough product research.

Identify user needs that your product can solve

Product research will not only help you boost innovation within your product, but it will keep your accuracy in check, too. You’ll be sure that the changes you are implementing actually align with user needs.

Understand the struggles and pain points of your customers

While customer feedback like your CSAT and CES scores are great ways to find pain points, you have to remember they are tied to your customer service and are solicited in nature.

No great business strategy should rely on great customer service to fix issues with the product setup. Make sure you are surveying your customers on the developments they’d like to see. Product research also provides you with behavioral data and insights to build optimal solutions.

Identify potential wins that will differentiate you from the competition

Product research will also help you gain a competitive edge. Researching the market and competitive landscape with help uncover market gaps you can fill with new features or products.

Design modifications in your roadmap to successfully hit KPIs

Successful product research will make prioritization simpler and more efficient. You’ll know what features users want and which ones make them consider leaving you for a competitor.

You can make sure the most important changes are lined up in the near future and your backlog is optimized. The entire team will be aware of which initiatives to work on next to improve customer satisfaction .

Use Survicate to make your product research effective

The best way to learn about your customers’ needs is to understand their behavior in context. Place surveys and feedback widgets in high-traffic visitor points for optimal feedback.

Survicate offers both website and in-product surveys to help you gain insights into customer needs, pain points, and feature ideas. There are over 125 survey templates that go well beyond your usual NPS , CSAT , and CES campaigns.

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Survicate integrations with tools like Slack also make closing the loop an automated process. Set up notifications and communicate with customers immediately after receiving responses.

Wrapping up

Product management centres around product feedback . If you don’t take advantage of this process, you are at risk of missing users' needs and wasting your product development budget.

Understand what will make your customers happy and build a customer-centric product that will break through the competition. Organize your product research with Survicate to get insightful and contextual customer experience data .

The free trial offers 10 days of access to Business plan features and up to 25 survey responses. Sign up today!

We’re also there

12 Best Product Research Tools to Empower Your Strategies

14 min read

With the right product research tools, you can dissect vast pools of data, gather actionable insights, and create products that align directly with your user’s needs.

But how can you build the right product research tech stack to achieve your product growth goals?

For that reason, we’ll go over 12 of the best tools you should use when conducting product research.

Product research tools are platforms used by product managers to gather, analyze, and interpret data related to their products and user behavior.

• The best product research tool for your business can provide the data you need to make informed decisions for product development , allow you to conduct market research, and mitigate risks associated with product launches.
• It’s essential to choose product research tools that can provide the right insights for your business objectives, deliver high-quality data, are customizable, are easy to use, integrate with your tech stack, and offer great customer support.

Best product research tools that you’ll need as a product manager if you want to improve your decision-making process:

• Usepilot. An all-in-one tool for customer success that can significantly streamline your product research operation through in-app surveys , user tracking, and deep product analytics.
• Zendesk. A well-rounded customer service solution with powerful tools for collecting user feedback, implementing ticketing systems, and spotting customer experience gaps .
• Qualtrics. A solid research tool to gather high-quality data through market research, surveys, and great reporting tools.
• Hotjar. A heatmapping tool for collecting user engagement data and enhancing user experience.
• UXPressia. A tool designed for creating an ideal user persona to guide product development and build a user journey map.
• Miro. A collaborative visual platform that can help encourage creative brainstorming around product ideas.
• Figma. A design tool that can help build mockups and wireframes in the early stages of product development and create quick prototypes.
• Gleap. A flexible tool for sending in-app surveys, building product roadmaps , and implementing in-app bug reporting in order to involve customer feedback in your product development.
• Productboard. A tool for building public roadmaps that can efficiently centralize feedback, listen to customers, and prioritize key features.
• Asana. A project management platform you’ll need for managing tasks involved in product research and development.
• Optimizely. An A/B testing tool useful for testing app features, comparing their performance, and making data-driven product development decisions.
• CrazyEgg. A platform that can help you analyze website traffic and diagnose errors.
• Optimalworkshop. A research tool for conducting qualitative research, surveying customers, and getting a deeper understanding of your user’s emotions and thought processes.

Since you can’t try everything in this list at once. Why not start right now by booking a Userpilot demo to see how you can quickly start gathering valuable product insights?

What are product research tools?

That said, a product research tech stack can include a great variety of tools for obtaining insights on market trends, understanding user behavior, collecting user feedback, running A/B tests, and more.

They’re key to guiding product development, enhancing user experience , informing decision-making, and boosting your product success.

What benefits do product research tools bring?

The right product research tech stack for your business can provide the data you need to stay ahead of the competition, as it allows you to make informed decisions for product development .

Product research tools can benefit you in many ways:

• You can create a user-centric product based on user pain points and product usage patterns.
• It tracks user engagement and satisfaction levels, helping you to continually optimize your product experience.
• They allow you to scale your market research capabilities, allowing you to understand customer preferences, demands, and sell the trend.
• It mitigates risks by guiding product development and launches with data-driven insights.
• Allows collaboration and promotes seamless communication with your team.

What to consider when choosing a product research tool?

It’s essential to build a product research tech stack that can deliver high-quality data that’s aligned with your business objectives, for which you need to consider many factors:

• Purpose : Is the tool designed to bring insights about your product performance, user behavior, or market trends?
• Features : Does the tool have the right features for your research objectives?
• (i.e. product analytics, user reporting , market research, etc.).
• Usability : Is the tool user-friendly and intuitive to navigate, decreasing the learning curve and saving valuable hours?
• Customization : Can you customize your research process according to your specific industry or product needs?
• Integration : Does it integrate with your existing tech stack without causing any disruptions?
• Pricing : Does it offer a good balance between the functionalities offered and the cost of its plans?
• Customer Support : Do you get fast 24/7 customer support and training resources?

Top 13 product research tools you need

Considering what you need to look for in a product research tool, let’s look at 13 options that you can use to aid your research goals and product development:

#1 Userpilot – all-in-one product research tool for SaaS

Userpilot is a customer success platform with the ability to create, design, and trigger in-app surveys for user research, either from scratch or by using any of the multiple templates available.

Userpilot brings more than the ability to trigger NPS surveys inside your app for research. You can also create onboarding flows , collect user behavior data , and give access to advanced product analytics —everything to nurture product growth.

Here’s how Userpilot can help you with your product research needs:

• Get a deep user experience understanding with analytics charts such as funnels (to spot friction ), trends (to understand what brings value across different plans), and paths (to draw the product journey of your users.)
• Use feature-tagging and event-tracking to analyze user behavior and identify friction points.

• Analyze feature usage with feature heatmaps to understand product adoption and which areas of your product bring value to your users.

• Collect feedback for your research using a great variety of in-app surveys such as CSAT, CES, and NPS surveys.

• Use advanced survey analytics to tag and filter user responses based on recurrent themes and keywords and save time analyzing responses.

Userpilot’s pricing

When compared to other product research tools in the market, Userpilot offers great value for money as it provides all the necessary features without any usage limit.

• Starter : The entry-level Starter plan starts at $249/month and includes features like segmentation, product analytics, and reporting.
• Growth : The Growth plan starts at $499/month and includes features like resource centers, advanced event-based triggers, unlimited feature tagging, AI-powered content localization, EU hosting options, and a dedicated customer success manager.
• Enterprise : The Enterprise plan uses custom pricing and includes all the features from Starter + Growth plus custom roles/permissions, access to premium integrations, priority support, custom contract, SLA, SAML SSO, activity logs, security audit and compliance (SOC 2/GDPR).

#2 Zendesk for collecting user feedback

Zendesk is a well-rounded customer service solution with powerful tools for collecting user feedback, implementing ticketing systems, and analyzing customer service data.

It brings several features that can help you gather product research insights:

• Multi-channel support : You can collect feedback from various touchpoints, including email, chat, phone, and social media platforms, streamlining the data collection process.
• CX analytics : So you can watch meaningful trends, measure your support team performance, and understand customer satisfaction levels for your product.
• Customizable dashboard : To configure your dashboard in a way that aligns with your brand and your specific research goals.
• Reporting and insights : This can provide granular data to understand customer behavior and product performance—and improve customer service reps’ productivity.

Zendesk’s pricing

Zendesk pricing scales with the size of your team and your needs, and the prices are:

• Team: $55 per month per agent (paid annually).
• Growth: $89 per month per agent.
• Professional: $115 per month per agent.

#3 Qualtrics for gathering data for product research process

Qualtrics is a product research tool that offers solutions for companies across multiple industries, including B2B, technology, healthcare, travel, and education.

It offers robust features when it comes to conducting marketing research, sending surveys, and analyzing data.

So given its complexity, it’s mostly fit for enterprises with big pools of data that need to be organized. Some of its core features include:

• Versatile market research tools such as market trends, competitive benchmarking, and A/B testing. Its customer demographics tool enables you to segment your market and discern the best positioning for your business.
• Extensive survey-making capabilities and templates, including NPS, CSAT, and CES surveys.
• Great reporting with visualization options and data export.
• Research services data processing, market analysis, design, and programming.
• Massive ad testing capabilities for validating ideas and optimizing your ROAS.

Qualtrics’s pricing

To have access to Qualtrics, you need to contact sales to set up a demo and find an ideal package for you. Then, their team will implement everything for you.

Packages start at $1,500 per year, according to Capterra.

#4 Hotjar for collecting user engagement data

Hotjar is a heat mapping tool that can help you understand user engagement. It allows you to visualize how users interact with your app or website by providing insights through heatmaps, session recordings, and more.

Some of its great perks include:

• Heatmaps and session recordings : Visual representations of user interactions, such as clicks and scrolls, on your website.
• Feedback widgets : Users can submit CX feedback, and allows you to watch, read, and filter their requests.
• Engage research : This automatically matches interview participants with your research criteria and collects 1-on-1, high-quality feedback.
• Conversion Funnels : Pinpoint the steps leading to customer drop-off, helping you focus improvements on these key areas.
• Feedback Polls and Surveys : Gather user thoughts and opinions directly, providing a richer understanding of your users’ experiences and needs.

Hotjar’s pricing

Hotjar offers flexible pricing schemes, crafted around the demands of businesses of various sizes.

So depending on the scale of your SaaS business, you can adjust the plan that suits you best:

• Basic : Free of charge, but has limited features and capacity.
• Plus : At $39 per month, you gain access to greater tracked session limits and the ability to segment data.
• Business : Priced according to the size of your business (ranges from $99-$589 per month), the Business plan caters to larger teams, providing uncapped data and premium features.
• Scale : With a pricing plan that ranges from $213 to $1259, depending on your tracked sessions and responses. Includes funnel, a trend analysis, console-tracking, and a dedicated customer success manager to guide you around.

#5 UXPressia for creating user personas

UXPressia is a tool dedicated to crafting detailed, effective user personas.

It helps define user groups that interact with your app based on their behavior, patterns, and goals, thus enabling you to tailor your product development according to their needs.

Here’s what you can get:

• Persona Creation : UXPressia allows users to design targeted user personas while providing a mobile-friendly view.
• Journey Mapping : With this tool, you can create user journey maps , highlighting their experiences throughout their interaction with your product.
• Collaboration : It offers a collaborative environment, enabling team members to work simultaneously on the same project.

UXPressia’s pricing

UXPressia plans are affordable, considering how comprehensive the platform is. They include:

• Starter : Free, with limited features and access.
• Pro : $16/month per user, offers full access to features including unlimited templates, collaborative editing, and live chat support.
• Team : $36/month per user, including all Pro features and additional collaborative tools, branding, AI personas, and more.
• Enterprise : Custom pricing, tailored solutions for organizations with specific needs, featuring custom onboarding, training, and increased security measures.

#6 Miro for brainstorming product ideas

Miro is a visual collaboration tool designed to brainstorm ideas with your product team.

It can help you generate, organize, and collectively explore your team’s product roadmap and the insights you got from your research initiatives. It includes:

• Digital Whiteboards : Where you can create an unlimited number of boards where product ideas can be mapped and developed in real-time with your team.
• Product Development Workflows : You can streamline your development strategy in a shared, visual space. Where you can create public roadmaps, collaborate with customers on research, and make design choices based on customers’ feedback.
• Centralized Workspace : Where you can bring collected data from other tools and create your own dashboards, analyze it with your team, and prepare reports for your stakeholders.
• Integration Capabilities : Including Google Workspace, Slack, Asana, and more.

Miro’s pricing

Miro’s pricing structure is designed to cater to single users or large teams. It’s flexible and offers a Free Plan with basic features at no cost, and several paid plans, including:

• Team Plan : Priced at $8 per member per month, billed annually.
• Business Plan : Available at $16 per member per month, billed annually. Includes advanced collaboration and management features.
• Enterprise Plan : Based on a bespoke quote. Includes custom solutions designed for organizations with specific needs.

#7 Figma for building prototypes and wireframes

Figma is a collaborative, cloud-based design platform with online whiteboarding, design systems, and diagramming.

When doing product research, it can help you visualize and test product concepts or updates before they go to development, streamlining the product research process and enhancing efficiency.

Some of its helpful features include:

• Real-time Collaboration : Multiple team members can work on the same design simultaneously, promoting improved alignment and efficiency.
• Wireframes and Prototypes : Design a wireframe for your app and create dynamic, clickable prototypes to validate your designs before moving into development.
• Design Components : You can save reusable components for consistent design across your projects, increasing productivity and maintaining brand consistency.

Figma’s pricing

Figma pricing options depend on the number of users and features available. Here’s a simple rundown of their current pricing structure:

• Starter Plan : Free and includes up to 2 editors and 3 projects.
• Professional Plan : $12 per editor/month, offering unlimited projects and unlimited version history.
• Organization Plan : $45 per editor/month, designed for large teams with advanced security and administrative features.
• Enterprise Plan : At $75 per editor/month, offers dedicated workspaces, advanced design systems, and personal support.

#8 Gleap for collecting insights to build products

Gleap is a dynamic tool you can count on for bug reporting, live chat, public roadmaps, and more.

It can gather first-party data about your product from the user’s perspective, which you can leverage to make a more customer-centric product and increase user satisfaction.

With Gleap you get:

• In-app Surveys : This can be triggered inside your app so users can submit feedback about your product at the right moment.
• Public Roadmap : Where you can share your development roadmap with your user base, receive feedback, manage feature requests, and engage with your customers.
• In-app Bug Reporting : This is a widget that allows users to report bugs within the tool, helping you improve the product quality.

Gleap’s pricing

Gleap pricing plans are simple:

• Hobby Plan : At $23/month (billed annually), which provides access to basic features for solo teams.
• Team Plan : At $119/month, it is designed for teams and includes more features such as in-app surveys, session data, and all integrations.
• Enterprise Plan : Provides more capacity and high-priority support. Pricing is only available upon request.

#9 Productboard for organizing and prioritizing product updates

Productboard shines as a top-notch tool for streamlining your product roadmap.

It can help you manage feedback and suggestions, prioritize features, and align your team around your product strategy. It includes:

• Roadmap Planning : Where you can visualize your strategy and communicate it effectively with a beautiful, collaborative roadmap.
• Centralize Feedback : This centralizes all user feedback and input to understand what your customers really want.
• Prioritization : Organizes product ideas based on what customers really value, allowing you to make informed decisions about what to build next with a clear prioritization framework.
• Team Collaboration : Engage all stakeholders in the product management process and keep everyone aligned.
• Feedback Loop : Close the loop with users to show that their feedback translates into tangible product betterment.

Productboard’s pricing

Productboard offers a simple and transparent pricing model that can provide just what you need if you work with a small team or at an enterprise. Here are the plans:

• Maker Plan : priced at $20 per user/month, designed for individual use and small teams.
• Pro Plan : at $60 per user/month, this plan suits larger product teams, offering advanced collaboration features and integrations.
• Scale Plan : With custom pricing, ideal for enterprise-level organizations, with extended functionality and support.

Note : There’s also a free plan that allows you to build a single roadmap.

#10 Asana for managing product research tasks

When it comes to streamlining and managing your product research tasks, Asana can work as your go-to project management tool.

With Asana, all your assignments, tasks, ideas, and discussions are gathered in one easy-to-navigate place, letting you have a clear overview of your research project’s progress and collaborate with your team.

Its most relevant features include:

• Task Management : Can create, assign, track, and manage tasks seamlessly.
• Project Timeline : Visualize your research project timeline and set dependencies between tasks.
• Collaboration Features : Creates a collaborative environment with easy team communication and file sharing.
• Customizable Dashboards : Configure your dashboard to show key metrics and progress related to your product research.
• Integration Capabilities : Syncs with various tools to streamline your workflow and avoid switching between apps.

Asana’s pricing

Asana offers a flexible pricing structure tailored to your specific needs as a product manager. There are four primary pricing plans:

• Basic Plan : Free, includes core task and project management features.
• Premium Plan : $10.99 per user per month, offers AI features, project reporting, and task automation.
• Business Plan : $24.99 per user per month, provides access to integrations and advanced workflow capabilities.
• Enterprise Plan : Custom pricing, gives maximum control and support for large enterprises.

#11 Optimizely for running A/B tests to extract meaningful data

Optimizely is a tool for running A/B tests during your product research process.

It offers you a strategic way to extract actionable insights from test results and aid your decision-making process. Optimizely includes:

• Advanced A/B testing : Where you can compare multiple versions of your webpages or app features and measure their performance.
• Multivariate Testing (MVT) : Tests multiple variables simultaneously to understand which combination provides the best results.
• Personalization : Tailor your users’ experiences based on their behavior, demographics, and preferences.
• Actionable Analytics : Access easy-to-read reports and visualizations that offer actionable product insights.

Optimizely’s pricing

Optimizely adopts a custom pricing model where the prices vary depending on your site’s traffic and the level of customer support that you require. They don’t publicly disclose their pricing information, meaning you’ll need to contact their sales team for a tailored quote.

#12 CrazyEgg for traffic analysis and error checking

CrazyEgg is a high-performance tool for analyzing your website traffic and cross-checking errors.

It can provide deep insights into visitor behavior, allowing you to make data-driven decisions to improve user experience and enhance product growth.

• Heatmapping : A visual representation of where users are clicking or hovering on your site to identify popular sections and usability issues.
• Error Tracking : It records and shows the web errors that are preventing your users from advancing through their journey—allowing you to give them attention fast.
• A/B Testing : It helps determine which versions of your website elements lead to better user engagement and conversions.
• Traffic Analysis : This allows you to check the performance of campaigns and compare them. For instance, there are confetti reports that register and segment click data by variables like referral sources, types of devices, and search terms, giving you deeper information about what drives specific behaviors in users.

CrazyEgg’s pricing

CrazyEgg’s pricing structure is simple and based on your usage of the product, its plans include:

• Standard Plan : $49/month with 75,000 pageviews and 500 recordings.
• Plus Plan : $99/month with 150,000 pageviews and 1,000 recordings.
• Enterprise Plan : Custom price for unlimited page views and recordings.

Selecting the right product research tools is mostly about understanding your specific needs and knowing which products can fill those gaps.

Once you get the right product research tech stack, you won’t only get more data but also improve your decision-making process, orient product development, and cultivate product growth.

Want to get started with product research? Get a Userpilot demo to see how you can quickly start gathering valuable product insights.

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Trying to figure out how to do product research?

When it comes to analyzing ecommerce markets, there’s one thing that matters the most.

It’s a product/market fit.

Don’t get too caught up on specific products, its the product research niche that you need to key in on for your winning product.

Even if you are an idea guru that can come up with 50 good ideas in your bathroom, it is essential that you find a product/market fit to validate demand.

You don’t want to spend money and time on a product that no one or very few people want. That is why keyword research is a good idea.

Demand alone isn’t enough. You need to make sure that your niche has a marketing opportunity for your online business.

I’ve put together 21 tips on researching products to sell online.

1. Research Hashtags On Social Media To Uncover Trending Products

If you have an interest in a particular industry, you can search for posts on it using hashtags.

Step 1: Use Hashtagsforlikes To Get Trending Hashtags

Hashtagsforlikes curates popular hashtags in different categories. While their specialty is Instagram , you can use the hashtags curated to search on other social media sites.

You can either search for a hashtag using the search box or go with the drop-down on the home page. Alternatively, you can go directly to the categories .

You will get a list of popular hashtags in each category here.

Step 2: Search For Posts On Instagram Using Your Hashtags

Go on Instagram and search for posts with those hashtags.

Take note of interesting ideas and anything else that you like. Also, keep a list of those hashtags, they will be relevant for Instagram marketing  later.

Step 3: Uncover Trending Posts On Facebook Using The Hashtags

Facebook has billions of active users. You’ll get not just niche ideas here, but also insights into what your audience is willing to buy.

To start, type a keyword in the search area. You can use one of those hashtags you got in step one or an idea that you are considering.

While typing your keyword, you’ll see other popular search terms.

You could filter the results.

Ensure that you check out groups and Facebook pages for ideas into what people are interested in.

Bonus Tip – Posts with a lot of engagement – likes and comments – are signs that people are interested in that product. You can also check out those with fewer engagements for interesting ideas that you could modify later on.

2. Study Amazon Categories For Product Research That People Sell

Amazon is one of the biggest marketplaces.

There’s no doubt that you’ll see thousands of ideas if you take out time to look at each product.

However, that is too stressful. The best way is to look at the categories.

Step 1: Determine A Potential Product To Sell Or Be An Affiliate For

There is no rule against selling and becoming an affiliate at the same time.

There are other sub-sub-categories under each of those subcategories.

Step 2: Pick One To Three Subcategories That Appeal To You For Your New Product Ideas

From the list of subcategories, pick one to three of them. You can choose based on hierarchy, that is, which you’d rather sell and which you’d rather be an affiliate for.

For example, you can decide to sell a styling product and become an affiliate for hair tools.

Step 3: Pay Attention To Amazon Best Sellers

The best selling products in each category give you insight into what people are willing to buy.

From here, you can predict products that are likely to appeal to your target market for good conversion rates. Take a look and make a list of a few products that are exciting.

Step 4: Still Not Sure? Test The Market

Successful Amazon sellers always test. Don’t jump in with guns a blazing and spend $20K on untested products . If you cannot choose a product to sell, you could test the market for a while as an affiliate marketer. You’ll see what products are selling and consider the market before you decide if you want to put your label on a product.

Bonus Tip: The structure Amazon uses for the categories and subcategories is something you can draw inspiration from when designing your ecommerce website .

Note that Amazon is great for research, but if you want to scale your business, sell on your website instead. It’s not so hard to  set up a website on Shopify  or Bigcommerce. Selling on your own site will benefit your brand over solely selling on Amazon .

3. Walk Around Brick And Mortar Stores For Product Ideas

Brick and mortar stores make up 90% of retail stores . They have been here far longer than any ecommerce business, and people still buy from them. Paying attention to what they sell can spark up ideas.

Step 1: Pay Attention To Product Categories

Local stores are either general stores or specialized stores. Walk into specialized stores and look at what they are selling.

Go to the general stores too. Products are usually arranged in categories here. Pay attention to the broad category and subcategories. For example, food can be a broad category and cooking oil a subcategory.

Step 2: Make A List Of Interesting Categories

After you have spent some time in the stores, you can get a better idea of what they are selling and how profitable products are categorized.

Get a feel of that and note down for a product research you could sell. Then think of ways to adapt those products to an ecommerce business.

Instacart and Postmates are strong examples of adapting brick and mortar businesses into ecommerce brands.

4. Use The Pins and Comments on Pinterest To Source Ideas

Pinterest provides an interesting marketing mix. Getting ideas here is as simple as A, B, C:

• Take a look at your feed
• Search for pins
• Look at the comments on the pins

Your feed will only have pins in your chosen interest areas. If you can’t get anything there, modify your interest or search for pins by using keywords.

For example, handmade soap, or coconut products.

You’ll see interesting ideas and new modifications of old products.

Sometimes the comments on pins also give exciting ideas. Look at this.

A simple pin for making handmade soap

Can give you ideas on new shapes for other items

5. Use WatchCount To See What eBay Products Sell

WatchCount shows the most popular eBay products.

Using WatchCount is very easy.

Input Your Keyword

Your keyword could be your product idea.

Alternatively, you can search in a niche by using the drop-down or both.

A long list of popular products will show up in the results.

Watch Count is the number of viewers or ‘watchers’ of the product. This helps you discover products that have attracted the most interest.

From the most ‘watched’ products, you can get ideas on how to expand on your initial product.

Make a list of popular products and those you think you can combine into one product.

6. Leverage Reddit To See Practical Products That People Want

Reddit describes itself as the front page of the internet. Billions of unique visitors go on the Reddit forum every month. If you can find a product that a good number of them are crazy about, you have found gold.

Step 1: Mine The Gold In The Subreddits

There are thousands of subreddits based on different topics.

In the list of subreddits , there are many categories from automotive to business to law, etc.

Going into each one will take a lot of time.

If you don’t feel like spending so much time on that, use the search on the top right corner of your screen.

Some subreddits are more useful than others in product research.

I like buy it for life . You can see a lot of practical products here that members have used for years and encourage others to buy. Inspiration can come from here.

There are also subreddits dedicated to Amazon businesses and products. Find it on Amazon  is a nice one. People post requests on products they need and ask if they are listed on Amazon.

Step 2: Create A Reddit Account And Get Free Idea Boxes

If you stick around Reddit for a while, you may come across free idea boxes from questions like this one:

I counted 15 ideas from answers.

• Create an account.
• Follow topics
• Ask questions relating to niche ideas, and marketing and modification thoughts .

7. Use Quora To Source For Ideas And Get Feedback

Quora is global. It’s a place where you’d meet others who have tried some industries that you are thinking about.

The great thing about Quora is that people love to share details here because it is promoting their brands; People embrace Quora marketing.

You can ask just about anything and everything. Like business ideas :

Have a new product development? Ask what people think. You can also search Quora to see what others have said about it.

If a lot of people are asking a question that your product idea can solve, you are on the right track.

Create an account and add some industry/product-related topics to your feed.

8. Mine Amazon Reviews For Product Modification Ideas

Don’t have the time or budget for focus groups?

No problem.

One straightforward way to zero in on products to sell is by analyzing customer reviews on Amazon.

Step 1: Look Out For Unsatisfied Customers

Unsatisfied customers are ripe fruits of ideas. They tell you exactly what they want.

Look out for pain points, upsetting or disappointing parts of an online purchase, or what customer experiences are raving about.

It doesn’t always have to be from one-star reviews. Even four or five stars can give you something.

Step 2: Use The Gripes To Modify That Product

Take that pain point of the customer and improve that product.

Do customers wish there is an extra space with more zippers?

Write that down.

You could have product, gripe, and potential solutions to gripe.

Try to get at least two potential solutions to the issues.

You may not be able to satisfy everyone, but simple modifications from reviewers’ pain points can go a long way.

Include a section for additional modifications to the product. This section is for ideas that do not come from customer reviews, just your creative juice.

Ever heard of Amazon FBA?

This service is the process of third-party vendors who store their products in Amazon’s fulfillment centers. This will essentially take product management on the warehouse level away from your duties.

• No shipping
• Tracking returns and refunds are handled by Amazon

9. Use Alibaba To Source For Popular Ideas And Modification Inspiration

Alibaba is a mine for tons of product ideas . Not just ideas only, but also inspiration on how to modify them.

You can either

• Search for items based on suppliers or
• Search for items based on product descriptions

Searching for products based on suppliers is only necessary if you need modification ideas based on what private label product manufacturers  offer.

If that’s not you, start by searching for items based on product descriptions.

When you search based on products, you’d see tons of ideas to work with.

When I searched for leggings, I got yoga leggings as a specific product.

You can decide to narrow your results to the material and age group. From my results, there are different designs of leggings. Those are style ideas. I could decide to mix two of these into one product.

Note down ideas as you go. If you want to go the private label route, use Alibaba, not AliExpress.

10. Narrow Down To Scalable Ideas

A successful ecommerce business has products that are scalable. You have to grow.

Step 1: Think Of Second Sale Opportunities

Reselling to a customer that has already bought an item from you often requires fewer touchpoints. One part of that is upselling and cross-selling.

Think of products that match the ones on your list.

For example, if you plan on selling yoga leggings, yoga mats are an option for cross-selling. If you plan on selling digital downloads  or consumable products like organic shampoo, you can offer a subscription.

Step 2: Get Second Sale Opportunities From Amazon

You can get inspiration from Amazon in the ‘frequently bought together’ area for items you can cross-sell with your product.

Step 3: Check If Your Ideas Qualify For Online Ads

Another thing you should look into is whether your ideas qualify for Facebook and Google ads. These are critical marketing avenues, especially for new brands or products, so you don’t want to miss out.

Some products don’t qualify for Facebook ads; there’s a list, from prohibited to restricted content.

Google also has restrictions . One of them is counterfeit products.

If the products do not qualify for ads, it will be harder to market. As an ecommerce startup, it may not be worth it to stick to those products.

11. Use Jungle Scout To Validate Product Demand

When doing product research, it is not enough to get scalable products. You need to validate product demand.

Jungle Scout  is one tool I recommend for Amazon product research. But there are alternatives.

Before you can use Jungle Scout, you need an account.

When you have set that up, click on Keyword Scout on your member menu.

Type in your product idea. You can specify a category if you want.

The ‘exact match search volume’ is the search volume of your product. This shows you how many people are looking to buy it. Shoot for 5K and above.

You’d also see similar product ideas below with search volume for each of them.

12. Use Jungle Scout To Uncover Products With Low Competition

The more saturated the market is, the lesser your chances are of selling, especially as a new brand.

I use Jungle Scout Niche Hunter for this. The Niche Hunter uses the number of reviews a product has. If a lot of the product listings have lots of reviews, that is a sign of high competition.

This is broken down into numbers in the results on Jungle Scout.

Input your keyword and search. As you can see from my results, there’s information about each product alongside the competition level. The lower the CL, the better.

13. Use Ahrefs To Evaluate Your Keyword Opportunity

It is important to evaluate your keyword opportunity to know what you are up against. You can get part of that through Ahrefs domain rating.

Step 1: Look Out For Low Domain Rating Brands

Domain rating is a metric that shows the link popularity of one website against others on a scale of 0 to 100 for a keyword. I usually look at 65 or under to determine small brands.

So, I typed ‘luxury socks,’ and I can see a lot of low domain rating sites on the first page.

This is a good sign. Small brands are ranking for this keyword.

SEO takes time, but it could take even more time, money, and effort if you are competing against big brands.

Step 2: Note Down High-DR Sites That Are Not Direct Competitors.

Websites with high domain ratings are great for backlinks. They carry a lot of weight.

Note down high-DR sites that are not direct competitors, like bloggers, influencers, business and entrepreneur sites, etc.

Aim them later for backlinks and building your brand awareness.

14. Use Google Trends To Validate Demand Stability

The key to using Google Trends is treating it as an ecommerce market analysis tool and not a keyword tool.

If you are looking for a keyword tool, go to Google Adwords.

You’ll have enough keywords for your ads, but you can’t bank on Adwords  for ecommerce market research.

Google Trends is a useful tool for seeing market growth, stability, or decline. You don’t want to start an ecommerce brand with a product that wouldn’t sell next year.

Step 1: Check The Trends From As Early As Possible

Start from 2004. You need to see if interest has grown over time.

A sudden massive spike in interest may not help you on a long run. A stable trend is fine, a growing one is better. Just make sure the industry is not in decline.

This result shows that the interest in Yoga leggings has grown over time. You can also see that there’s a seasonal pattern in interest.

Step 2: Check Regional Popularity

Beneath the trend of your product over time, you can see the popularity of your idea by region.

For an ecommerce brand, you can target areas where there’s more demand when marketing. That’s if you chose to go forward with that idea. You don’t want SEO to target US audience when your customers are in the UK.

Step 3: Compare Similar Products

You may choose one idea and realize that it is a similar idea that people are up for.

Compare similar products.

15. Research CAGR To Validate Long-term Market Growth

You need some clue on market size before you become an online retailer.

Take it further with a market analysis of financial projections to know the chances of long-term market growth.

CAGR shows you if the projections look nice or not. If the market is dying for your product research, it is not worth selling.

Step 1: Use Google Search to Discover Market Research Documents

On Google search, use any of these words:

• “Keyword market growth”
• “Keyword CAGR”
• “Keyword market trends.”

In my search, I used leggings which is my keyword/idea with ‘market research.’

Any of those results could get the needed information, but it can get really expensive.

Step 2: Pay For The Document Or Dig Deeper For Free Info

It might be worth it for you to spend over $500 on a market report, but for most people, a free report is what they want.

You may not get credible information straight away if you want it for free. You will need to dig deeper.

One way to get it is by looking out for it on the websites of publishers. Sometimes, research firms give a little bit of the information in their research to those websites for PR.

This is the information that I am looking for on this site.

Step 3: Use CAGR To Validate Market Growth And Compare Ideas

When you have gotten the market information, add the data to your ideas. Compare them side by side to see products that you can build a successful brand on.

16. Uncover What Your Top Competitors Are Doing Right

Knowing who you are up against and what they are doing helps you plan your strategy. That is why it is important to identify the top sellers in your niche.

Step 1: Make A List Of Competitors

Start with making a list of all the big brands and niche sites that you know. If you need more, you can get that by searching for top brands in your niche on Google.

I searched for top brands in my example niche – luxury socks. You don’t need so many. You can use one brand to get other top competitors on Ahrefs. From Ahrefs results, you can see the market leader.

Step 2: Use Their Keywords To Validate Your Idea

Look at the keyword that these brands are ranking for to validate your ideas. You can get keywords from low domain sites.

17. Take A Sneak Peak Into Your Potential Competitors PR Strategy

Your competitors’ PR strategies give insight into their brand messages and SEO strategies that help them rank. The more you know, the easier it is not planning how you’ll overtake them.

Step 1: Use Ahrefs To Discover Their Backlinks

Start by studying the backlinks of the top brands in your niche. You can use Ahrefs.

Their backlinks give you an idea of the links doing the most work and the bloggers they are reaching out to. Note down these bloggers, you will need them later.

Step 2: Study Their Content

Take a look at the type of content they post, especially the ones with the most engagement. See what your target audience like. Also, study how often they publish content.

Step 3: Look For Gaps In Their Strategy

One way to overtake a competitor is leveraging on the areas they are not doing so well in. Look for gaps in their strategy.

Is there a type of post that they hardly get out?

Is their frequency not enough?

What about the backlinks?

Look for the gaps and leverage on them.

Think of how to reverse engineer their strategy to draw your target audience and build your brand awareness.

18. Search For Bloggers In Your Niche

Are their bloggers in your potential product niche? If not, there’s probably not enough interest.

The presence of many top bloggers in your niche with a lot of social following is a good sign.

Along the line, they can help with building backlinks, getting social media mentions, and getting sales through credible reviews.

Step 1: Use Google Search To Find Bloggers

To start, enter “keyword intitle:review” in Google search.

You don’t need to get the links of all of them. Get one and use Ahrefs  to get the links of their top competitors.

Make a list of the top bloggers.

Step 2: Check Out Social Following

Then, you can check out a few of them for social following. Check the blogs to see how much engagement they have. If you see a lot of that, it is a sign that people are passionate about that product.

You can take it further by reaching out to the bloggers. Ask them if they would be interested in checking out your product.

19. Find Wanna-be/Established Influencers In Your Niche

The fact that there are influencers or that people want to be influencers in that niche clearly shows that there’s a passionate audience.

Step 1: Search For Influencers On Google

You can find influencers through Google search. Type in your niche and phrases like:

• “Tips from”
• “Advice from”
• “Chat with”
• “Interview”
• “Q&A with”

From my search, I have seen four influencers from the first four results.

This shows potential. Not just in demand, but also a marketing opportunity.

Step 2: Use Heepsy To Find Influencers Endorsing Brands

Influencer marketing is a great way to get on-demand traffic.

You may not need it at this point. However, if you want to do all your research upfront, this is a huge bonus for your brand.

For this, I use Heepsy .

You can do your influencer research using your product idea or your niche competitors to see which influencer they have worked with.

Check their engagement levels. If you can’t find good influencers after a few brand searches – it’s probably not a good niche.

Other research tools you can try out to find influencers include:

20. Identify Your Niche

If you are just starting your ecommerce business, it is important that you don’t start as a general store. You need a niche.

Some people hesitate to niche down because they think it means a smaller audience. The truth is you are targeting the exact people that are most likely to buy from you.

Even the big brands started as niches. Amazon, for example, began as a bookstore.

Your ecommerce niche is the narrow category that your products fall into. This is your:

• Broad niche
• Product category
• Who your product is for.

Identify all three. If your broad niche is beauty and personal care. Your product category could be beard oil, and who your product is for is urban beardsmen.

With this, you can tailor your interactions with your audience by using their persona.

21. Validate Your Selected Niche Using Facebook Audiences

Facebook audiences give insight into how many people in a particular location are interested in your product. You can get that while creating ads.

To Start, Create An Audience

After inserting the interests, which includes the broad niche category (Yoga, Pilates), Niche competitors and my product research (leggings), I got this:

This is way too large to target, so narrow further.

In this case, I chose a gender – female. I added an interest – parenting. That narrowed it down further.

By the time you have narrowed down your audience, you know exactly the number of people to target. As well as the average number of people that are interested in your product.

Set Up A Test Ad

You could set up an ad to test your market.

However, ensure that your customers know that your products will be shipped at a later date or is not ready.

Also, you don’t have to advertise for sales; you could advertise for engagement and getting emails that can contribute to sales when you start selling, through funnels.

Once you get a few sales, then its time to scale up your product marketing.

Product Research And Validation Is An Essential Step

Don’t ever skip it.

Almost every successful ecommerce brand that you know of analyzed their market .

I f you are still in the process of product research, you don’t have to use every tip here . You can pick out a few. Ensure your pick covers brainstorming ideas, finding demand and market opportunity, and competitors. You can check out more product research ideas on our guide for researching products to sell on Amazon .

Have you validated your ideas? Let us know in the comments.

If you still don’t have product research ideas , or how to find your niche , you can start an affiliate marketing site in a validated niche.

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More Americans want the journalists they get news from to share their politics than any other personal trait

Most Americans say it is not important that the news they get comes from journalists who share their political views, age, gender or other traits. But people are more likely to say it is important for journalists to share their politics than any other characteristic we asked about. And certain demographic groups place more value than others on the personal traits of their journalists.

A 2023 Pew Research Center survey asked Americans how important it is for the journalists they get news from to have six personal characteristics that are similar to their own.

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis as part of a broader look at Americans’ views of the news media. The data for this analysis comes from a survey of 10,701 U.S. adults from March 13 to 19, 2023.

Everyone who completed the survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the  ATP’s methodology .

Here are the  questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and the survey  methodology .

Pew Research Center is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts, its primary funder. This is the latest analysis in Pew Research Center’s ongoing investigation of the state of news, information and journalism in the digital age, a research program funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, with generous support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

About four-in-ten Americans say it is at least somewhat important that they get news from journalists who share their political views (39%). That is nearly double the share who say the same about getting news from journalists who share their religious views (22%) or who talk or sound like them (20%).

Smaller shares say they want to get news from journalists who are similar to them in age (15%), share their race or ethnicity (14%), or share their gender (10%).

On several of these questions, opinions vary based on respondents’ political views, age and other personal traits.

Political views

Similar shares of Republicans and Democrats say it is at least somewhat important for the news they get to come from journalists who share their political views. Four-in-ten Republicans and GOP-leaning independents say this, compared with 41% of Democrats and Democratic leaners.

When combining party and ideology, people who place themselves at either end of the political spectrum are more likely than those toward the center to say journalists’ politics are important.

• Roughly half each of conservative Republicans (47%) and liberal Democrats (50%) say it is important that the news they get comes from journalists who share their politics.
• Smaller shares of liberal and moderate Republicans (29%) and conservative and moderate Democrats (33%) hold this view. 

Younger adults are more likely than older Americans to say they want news from journalists who are around the same age as them. Among U.S. adults ages 18 to 29, 23% say this is at least somewhat important, compared with one-in-ten of those ages 65 and older.

Younger adults are also more likely than older adults to say it’s important that the journalists they get news from are the same gender as them; still, large majorities say this is not important. Some 16% of those ages 18 to 29 say it is at least somewhat important for journalists to share their gender, versus 6% of those 65 and older.

Race or ethnicity

Black Americans are more likely than other racial or ethnic groups to say it is important they get news from journalists who share several of their characteristics – particularly their race or ethnicity.

About four-in-ten Black Americans (41%) say it is at least somewhat important that the news they get comes from journalists who share their race or ethnicity. A quarter of Hispanic Americans, 20% of Asian Americans and just 5% of White Americans say the same.

For more information on how Black Americans answered these questions, read our report on Black Americans and news .

Overall, Americans who identify with a religion are more likely than those who are religiously unaffiliated to find it at least somewhat important to get news from journalists who share their religious views (26% vs. 15%).

Among Christians, Protestants are more likely than Catholics to say it is important for journalists to share their religious views (30% vs. 21%). But there are also differences among Protestants and among Catholics:

• White evangelical Protestants (37%) and Black Protestants (33%) are about twice as likely as White nonevangelical Protestants (16%) to say this.
• About three-in-ten Hispanic Catholics say this (28%), compared with 17% of White Catholics.

Among Jewish Americans, just 10% say it’s at least somewhat important to get news from journalists who share their religious views.

Note: Here are the  questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and the survey  methodology .

• Journalists
• News Coverage

Emily Tomasik is a research assistant focusing on news and information research at Pew Research Center .

Americans’ Changing Relationship With Local News

Most u.s. journalists are concerned about press freedoms, about one-in-six u.s. journalists at news outlets are part of a union; many more would join one if they could, u.s. journalists differ from the public in their views of ‘bothsidesism’ in journalism, twitter is the go-to social media site for u.s. journalists, but not for the public, most popular.

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Research: Technology is changing how companies do business

By sarah mangus-sharpe.

A new study from the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business advances understanding of the U.S. production chain evolution amidst technological progress in information technology (IT), shedding light on the complex connections between business IT investments and organizational design. Advances in IT have sparked significant changes in how companies design their production processes. In the paper " Production Chain Organization in the Digital Age: Information Technology Use and Vertical Integration in U.S. Manufacturing ," which published April 30 in Management Science, Chris Forman , the Peter and Stephanie Nolan Professor in the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management , and his co-author delved into what these changes mean for businesses and consumers.

Forman and Kristina McElheran, assistant professor of strategic management at University of Toronto, analyzed U.S. Census Bureau data of over 5,600 manufacturing plants to see how the production chains of businesses were affected by the internet revolution. Their use of census data allowed them to look inside the relationships among production units within and between companies and how transaction flows changed after companies invested in internet-enabled technology that facilitated coordination between them. The production units of many of the companies in their study concurrently sold to internal and external customers, a mix they refer to as plural selling. They found that the reduction in communication costs enabled by the internet shifted the mix toward more sales outside of the firm, or less vertical integration.

The research highlights the importance of staying ahead of the curve in technology. Companies that embrace digital technologies now are likely to be the ones that thrive in the future. And while there are still many unanswered questions about how these changes will play out, one thing is clear: The relationship between technology and business is only going to become more and more intertwined in the future.

Read the full story on the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business news site, BusinessFeed.

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Drug-Induced Renal Injury List (DIRIL) Dataset

A large database of single-molecule, oral administered drugs for human use annotated for diri and nephrotoxicity., about diril dataset.

The DIRIL dataset is comprised of 317 single-molecule, oral administered drugs for human use, annotated for drug-induced renal injury (DIRI) and nephrotoxicity and confirmed using FDA drug labeling. DIRIL was assembled from literature data with specific criteria—it had to be highly curated with a large number of drugs, using comparable methods to annotate DIRI with a binary classification system. Of the 317 drugs in DIRIL, some were present in both existing datasets with consistent DIRI annotation. For these drugs, their DIRI calls from the original authors were kept in DIRIL. For those drugs that had conflicting DIRI calls between Gong and Shi datasets, their DIRI annotation was determined by FDA labeling data retrieved from FDALabel through manual readings.

• 171 DIRI-Positive
• 146 DIRI-Negative

Download the Complete DIRIL Dataset

Generation of a Drug-Induced Renal Injury List to Facilitate the Development of New Approach Methodologies for Nephrotoxicity .  Connor S., Li T., Qu Y., Roberts R.A., and Tong W. Drug Discovery Today . 2024, 29(4). doi:10.1016/j.drudis.2024.103938.

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