Talk with any CPG founder and they’ll have a strong opinion good or bad about Amazon.

Personally, I’m a huge fan of Amazon and how it benefits CPG companies, but there’s a huge learning curve and lots of possible mistakes along the way.

Today I want to break down one of my favorite ways of leveraging Amazon for your CPG business, beyond sales.

First thing first, if you’re looking for basics about how Amazon works for business, listen to my Startup to Scale Podcast episode 9 with Daniela Bolzmann and episode 21 with Shannon Roddy.

Both of those are amazing resources on how to get started.

Ok, now let’s get into the use case.

Known Demand, Unknown Demand, and No Demand.

Launching on Amazon is an amazing way of testing your product market fit. Why? Amazon is one of the top product search engines for people ready to buy. This means that people looking to purchase your product (or something similar) are looking on Amazon first. Because of this, I learned from Shannon Roddy that you can identify your brand’s:

Known Demand: people searching for your products by name.

Unknown Demand: people searching by product type or for competitive products.

No Demand: people aren’t searching for your brand or product type.

How does it work in practice?

Known Demand – once your products are listed on Amazon, I recommend running a simple ad campaign with your brand name as keywords. That way when ever someone searches your brand, you’ll show up in the search results. Amazon Ads Manager will then show you how many impressions your ad received, and how many clicks. With a relatively low budget, you can track the search volume for your own brand, and how many people are looking to buy you.

If you’re not currently selling on Amazon, but have been around for a while, try typing your brand name into the Amazon.com search bar. It’ll auto-fill popular search terms, so at a quick glance you can see if people are searching for you.

Unknown Demand – Let’s say you just launched a new protein bar with functional ingredients for brain health. On Amazon you can create hyper-targeted ads toward people searching for protein bars. Amazon will then tell you how many impressions you received and how many clicks. Did a shopper search for “Quest Bar”, clicked on your ad, and then purchased? Amazon ad campaigns will give you that level of detail (when applicable).

You can also get data on category search volume. How many total people are searching for “protein bars” vs. “brain health” vs. “Lion’s Mane” (Lion’s Mane is a popular functional mushroom used to help support brain health.

No Demand – Amazon is an unbiased way to test your product / category assumptions. Honestly, many CPG ideas don’t have a large enough market that’s easy to reach to sustain a profitable business. Amazon can quickly tell you if your products are in demand, or if no one is looking for products like yours.

You might say, “but Jordan, there’s no products like mine on the market, which makes them so unique.” New to the world products can be successful, but require millions of dollars in marketing spend or years of personalized selling to be successful.

When I launched TeaSquares, we called them “Tea Infused Energy Snacks”. Looking at Amazon, ZERO people are searching for this product descriptor at all. Going back in time, that would be a good indicator to call it by a different name, something related to what people are actively looking for.

The best products do well because enough people are already looking for a product like yours.

By leveraging this data, you can understand your brand’s product market fit.

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