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By Mansour Norouzi · August 18, 2025 · Curated by George's Blog
The Amazon Data Gap No One’s Talking AboutIf you’re using Amazon’s Product Opportunity Explorer (POE) and Category Insights to understand market demand, here’s something important I’ve noticed when looking at the same niche: Ankle Braces in the U.S.Both tools are fantastic for spotting trends, competition, and demand patterns……but the numbers? They tell very different stories.Category Insights (July 2025)📦 Units Sold: 360,854💰 Net Sales: $6,493,541Product Opportunity Explorer (Past 360 Days)📦 Avg. Units Sold Range: 15,000 – 20,000💰 Estimated Annual Sales: $6.9M – $9.3MThat’s a huge gap.And here’s what I think is happening:🔍 POE behaves similarly to Search Query Performance – it only counts sales and clicks that come directly from the tracked search terms/products in that niche.So if a customer searches “ankle brace,” clicks one ASIN, but ends up buying a different variation they never clicked, that sale won’t appear in POE data.📊 Category Insights, on the other hand, reflects the broader category-level sales – regardless of whether they came from a search, ad click, or browsing.💡 Extra search volume insight:I suspect POE counts unique user searches (which also aligns closely with Search Query Performance data).Category Insights, however, might be counting every search action — including page refreshes or customers going back and forth — which would inflate the volume numbers significantly.Takeaway:When using Amazon’s data tools, understand exactly what’s being measured before you draw conclusions. POE is fantastic for keyword-level and product-specific search performance, but it’s not the full picture. For total market sizing, Category Insights will usually be more accurate.What do you think? and do you have another theory for why search volumes differ so much?