Creating a Product Roadmap for Your Amazon Store

Creating an effective Amazon product roadmap requires planning, goals, and keyword research. Once you have your product roadmap, you'll want to track your successes with Junglytics business intelligence for Amazon sellers.

Tom Rohlf

September 20, 2023

Part of growing a successful business on Amazon includes expanding your product offerings. It’s really about giving customers more of what they want and expanding offerings to capture more consumer demand.

But this isn’t something you can do willy-nilly. You have to create Amazon product roadmaps with smart planning. This helps you save time, resources, and effort—all while attracting and converting shoppers.

Let’s explore the basics of creating a product roadmap for your Amazon store, how to make smart choices regarding product expansions, and how to track your efforts using Junglytics—the most customizable business intelligence solution for Amazon sellers.

How to Make an Amazon Product Roadmap

Creating an Amazon product roadmap involves planning and prioritization. You might have a million great ideas, but realistically, only the resources to accomplish a couple of these at any given time. That’s okay. You can—and should—revisit your Amazon product roadmap periodically to see what you can add (or subtract) to run a more efficient brand.

Think of Amazon product business planning in these five steps:

Establish your goals: Your goals can be as high-level or as granular as you need them to be. Examples include “increase sales by 25% in six months” or “grow brand visibility by 50% by January.” It’s important to have a north star you’re aiming toward. NOTE: Your goals might be different for different segments of your business. Your goal in a new market or product line might be to break even and drive revenue—whereas a mature product might have a goal to increase profit while decreasing total advertising cost of sales (TACoS). The Amazon seller business intelligence tool, Junglytics, is uniquely positioned to measure segments of an Amazon business.‍
Create initiatives to help you reach your goal: Once you have an overarching goal, break it down into a series of actionable deliverables. For instance, if you’re trying to increase sales or visibility, consider how advertising might play a role or how to optimize your listings to garner the attention you crave.‍
Investigate keyword search volume: The vast majority of Amazon shoppers discover the products they want through the Amazon search bar or other search engines like Google. Keyword search volume tools give sellers vital information about the demand they are likely to see from the products they are offering.‍
Determine whether your offerings match customer expectations:Smart sellers listen to customers in the form of reviews, interviews, focus groups, social chatter, and the like. Better still, investigating what customers are saying about your competitors can spark ideas for product expansion.‍
Track important metrics and iterate on your product expansions: Ensure you’re on track to meet your goals with Amazon analytics. Measure key performance indicators (KPIs) including revenue, profits, return on ad spend, and more to see which levers you can pull to increase your sales and visibility.

Now that we’ve covered the broad strokes, it’s important to drill down into the areas that inform the types of products you might want to expand into.

Complementary Goods

It’s wise to stick with complementary goods to retain the personality of your brand. If you make a reputation for yourself selling hockey gear, it would confuse your customers and hurt your brand to start selling power tools instead. Not that selling power tools is a bad idea. It’s just more appropriate to break that off as a new brand rather than dilute your hockey-related brand with unrelated products.

So, if you are doing well selling hockey sticks, consider extending into pucks, gloves, masks, or customizable jerseys next. A keyword tool can help you identify search volume for the goods you’re considering.

Find Search Terms That Have Volume But No Existing Solution

While you could conceivably offer any number of new products, Amazon isn’t the place to generate demand for goods that people are not yet searching for. The platform is more amenable to putting your products in front of customers already interested in similar merchandise. Since the vast majority of shoppers discover products through search terms, it only makes sense to look at the keywords or phrases being searched.

Short, generic phrases (like “phone case”) indicate that the shopper is very early in their buyer’s journey. Longer, more specific phrases (like “iPhone 14 Pro protective case Chargers logo”) indicate that they know what they want and are ready to buy.

And this is where Amazon sellers can find great opportunities for their product roadmap. Long-tail keywords with search volume but no existing solutions represent potentially lucrative gaps in the market. From keyword search data, you can discover buyer intent and match your product roadmap to it.

Make Certain That Search Volume

Oddly enough, not every great idea succeeds on Amazon. You might have a brilliant idea for an underwater basket weaving machine to produce baskets at scale. But if nobody is searching for that, it’s bound to fail.

Instead, find things that people are searching for that might not be served in your catalog. For instance, my own brand Cuddle Club sells fun alternatives to everyday baby clothes. We see a fairly high search volume for baby snowsuits. While we don’t have a perfect match in our catalog, we do offer a fleece baby bunting bodysuit that satisfies our customers’ need for warm outwear. My brand still converts on this search term, but we could conceivably expand our product line for a perfect match in the future. Even if it’s not a perfect match, your offerings could solve something else for the perusing shopper.

By looking at popular search terms—and either directing traffic to adjacent existing products or adding new product options to your product roadmap—Amazon sellers can give customers what they’re already looking for.

Of course, it’s prudent to balance the overall search volume with the goals you’ve set—such as revenue, profit, or number of sales.

Look at Reviews to See What Customers Are Asking For

Online shoppers love Amazon reviews. It gives them perspective about the products they’re perusing and helps them compare goods before hitting the “checkout” button. But Amazon sellers can benefit from user reviews too:

Listen to customer opinions: Are customers leaving reviews on your listings with requests for larger sizes, new product colors, different materials, or additional product types? Suggestions like these are ripe for product expansions. Sometimes these will be as minor as including a few new product variations while others might require their own product lines.
Understand how customers are using your products: Buyers sometimes use your products in surprising ways. Maybe you sell an electric heated blanket and buyers lay on top of it. You could expand your product line with a heated mattress pad to attract more sales. Or maybe buyers talk about how much they love using your earrings with matching jewelry from another seller. Could you sell similar jewelry from your store? Always keep an eye out for new opportunities.
Watch for criticism and gaps in your competitors’ offerings: Mining your competitors is another clever way to discover potential product expansions for your roadmap. Are customers so-so or critical about a product your competitors sell? If you think you can do it better, add it to your product roadmap. Is there something obvious that customers are asking for that your competitors don’t yet sell? Beat them to the punch by offering it before they do.

Garner Feedback from Your Target Audience

The best way to know what customers want is to ask them. While hosting focus groups is great, it can be expensive and difficult to pull customers to you. Alternatively, Amazon sellers can go where their prospective customers are and engage them there.

If you sell bike accessories, joining an outdoor bike meetup sparks new ideas. You can ask what people like about the sport, what they appreciate about their favorite brands, common pain points, or challenges they have yet to find a good solution for. From these conversations, you might discover a market for a lightweight, insulated water bottle that comfortably fits a custom holder. It’s a niche product matched to a real audience.

Once you prototype your new bottle, you can test it out with your community of bikers to see if it matches their needs and expectations.

Meetups are just one example. Others include online message boards, trade shows, or in-person events. It’s all about listening to what people really want.

Using Junglytics to Track and Iterate Your Amazon Product Roadmap

At Junglytics, we like to say, “What gets measured, gets done.” Once you’ve launched your product or product line, you’ll certainly want to track how it resonates with prospects.

Junglytics puts Amazon sellers in the driver’s seat by providing easy-to-use, customizable dashboards. Easily filter your catalog with Junglytics, so you can see metrics for your new products with everything else filtered out. With this business intelligence tool, Amazon sellers can track:

Sales trends
Profit
Total Advertising Cost of Sales (TACoS)
Traffic
Conversion rates
Amazon fees
ROI
Margin
Advertising performance metrics by ad type (products, display, brand)
Organic vs. PPC
Inventory
And 40+ essential metrics for Amazon Sellers

A customizable Junglytics dashboard showing quarterly profits by primary variant (in this case, color). A few clicks is all it takes to slice and dice the data you are most interested in exploring.

This level of insight provides Amazon sellers with the metrics they need to explore how newly launched products are performing—so they can make better-informed decisions about what to do next with their Amazon product roadmap.

Explore the platform for yourself in our live demo.

For more in-depth advice for Amazon sellers, check out our content and follow me on LinkedIn.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tom Rohlf

Tom has been selling on Amazon since 2014 - He exited his first business (Playerten.com) in 2019 and is the CEO and Co-founder of Cuddle Club an Amazon native children's clothing brand.

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