Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jungle Scout CEO Greg Mercer (Part 3)

Greg Mercer: There are two different scenarios that I am going to give you. There is one that is a brand new startup that launched their first brand and then I will do another example of how a larger company would use it. Let’s start with the former one.

Let’s say that I am an entrepreneur and I want to start one of these digital-native brands. I am going to start on Amazon. Where do I begin? You use Jungle Scout to identify the different opportunities that are best opportunities for you. What makes a great opportunity? These are things that customers are either searching for and cannot find.

Alternatively, these are the opportunities that are in high demand, but there’s low competition or supply for them. We identify those. We also identify things that customers are complaining about. Let me give you some more detailed examples there. Let’s say you want to do something in the Home and Kitchen space. Jungle Scout can identify that a new style of cookware has become popular. A lot of customers are searching for it and there is huge demand for it.

At the same time, we notice that the only people selling on Amazon are running out of stock, and there’s not enough supply. It could also be that the existing brands on Amazon have a very poor quality of listings. We think that if you were selling something similar with a much better marketing strategy, then you can do better than them. We identify different items like that. Does that make sense to you?

Sramana Mitra: Yes.

Greg Mercer: Larger companies are using us as well. We have some of the largest brands in the world using us. The use case for them is a bit different, but it’s more or less the same concept. They have these entire R&D divisions. Let’s pretend that you are Stanley Black & Decker and you manufacture tools. Historically, the R&D division would go to the job site and talk to construction workers to see what they want different in their tools. They would also talk to Lowes and Home Depot to see what was selling well in their stores and to see what they should be creating.

Now, e-commerce is becoming a huge part of these large companies’ businesses that instead of starting R&D in the brick and mortar store, they are reversing and starting it on Amazon to determine what consumers want. They might see that consumers are buying a lot of this style of measuring tape and they are not offering something similar to it. That is something that they should develop. Consumers are purchasing the specific style of measuring tape, but all the bad reviews are mentioning that the spring to roll it up isn’t strong enough. That identifies an area of improvement for us. 

Sramana Mitra: Got it. It is a market research tool for them. 

Greg Mercer: Yes, market research is a great way to describe it. 

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in E-Commerce: Jungle Scout CEO Greg Mercer
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