Scoring got you from fifty ideas to fifteen using data that exports cheaply. This stage is the opposite: **an hour or more per product, by hand, minimum fifteen hours total.**

That sounds excessive until you consider what is downstream — a purchase order, months of cash tied up, and a listing you will live with for years. Fifteen hours to avoid the wrong one is inexpensive.

The purpose is to find out which opportunities are genuinely good, and which only looked good on surface data.

[Watch the walkthrough](https://kb.trackiq.com/kb-assets/kbvideo-narrowing-explainer-61061726.mp4)

*Prefer to watch? One hundred and thirty-five seconds on the seven criteria, why opening competitor storefronts changes your read, and why no differentiation idea is itself the finding.*

## **Seven criteria**

Work through all seven for each of the fifteen.

### **1. COGS and the leaders' margins**

**Highest impact of the seven.** About 5–10 minutes.

Estimate what the top one or two sellers pay for their product, and what margin they are running. Take their selling price, estimate landed cost from sourcing marketplace listings, and work backwards.

**Good:** the market leaders appear to be making healthy margins — 35%+. If they can, you probably can, and there is room to price competitively and still profit.

**Bad:** the leaders look like they are running thin. If the incumbent with scale and supplier relationships is scraping by, a new entrant will do worse.

### **2. Brand fit**

About a minute, and it is a judgement rather than a calculation.

**Would your existing customers expect to see this in your store?** Does it match your theme and audience? Could you cross-sell it to the buyers you already have?

**Good:** it fits naturally, so you get spillover traffic and cross-sell opportunities from day one.

**Bad:** it is unrelated, and you are effectively launching a new brand with none of the advantages of your existing one.

### **3. Seasonality**

3–5 minutes. Look at demand across the last 12–24 months.

**Good:** steady year-round. Easier to forecast, easier to fund, easier to keep in stock.

**Bad:** sharp spikes and troughs. Seasonal products punish inventory mistakes twice — you stock out in the peak and hold dead stock afterwards.

### **4. Who the top competitors actually are**

5–10 minutes, and the most revealing of the seven.

Open the top 5–10 listings and look at each seller's storefront. How many products do they carry? How good are their images and A+ content? Are they big brands, Amazon itself, overseas manufacturers, or small FBA sellers?

**Good:** the top spots are held by small or mid-sized sellers with narrow catalogues and mediocre listings. Those are beatable with better execution.

**Bad:** well-known brands, Amazon 1P, or high-revenue manufacturer-direct sellers. Revenue means resources, and resources mean they can outspend you for as long as it takes.

### **5. Other marketplaces**

3–5 minutes. Check the same product in the UK, Germany, Canada.

**Good:** real demand across several marketplaces, which gives you somewhere to go after a successful launch.

**Bad:** demand only in one market, capping the product's ceiling before you start.

### **6. Variation options**

2–3 minutes. Do competitors offer sizes, colours, styles, bundles?

**Good:** the market supports variations. One listing can capture far more keywords, and you get natural upsell paths.

**Bad:** a single-SKU item with no natural variants.

### **7. Differentiation ideas**

5–10 minutes, and the one that requires actual thought.

Study the top listings and ask what you could offer that they do not — design, features, a bonus item, better packaging, a smarter bundle.

**Good:** you have a specific, concrete idea. Not "better quality" — something you could describe to a supplier.

**Bad:** you cannot think of anything. If the product is generic and you have no angle, you are entering a price war with someone who has better unit economics than you.

## **Cutting to seven**

**Start at both ends.** Remove the obvious failures, protect the obvious winners, then spend your remaining judgement on the middle.

**The number is a guide, not a quota.** If nine still look genuinely strong, carry nine. If only five survive honestly, carry five — do not promote something you already know you will not launch just to reach a target.

**Cut on the criteria that are hardest to change.** Margin structure and competitor strength are facts about the market. Weak differentiation is sometimes solvable with thought; a category dominated by Amazon is not solvable at all.

![Category performance, side by side](/kb-assets/shot-cat-kpis-27b1e2.png)

## **Reading the demand side properly**

Two of these criteria — seasonality and cross-market demand — are demand questions, and they are usually answered from third-party estimates.

Where the market is adjacent to something you already sell, use your own data instead. Real search volume by week shows seasonality directly rather than as a smoothed estimate: see [**SQP Is Weekly: Reading Week Cohorts**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/sqp-is-weekly-reading-week-cohorts). And if you already sell in several marketplaces, [**Marketplaces and Currency**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/marketplaces-and-currency) shows how demand differs between them for products like yours.

## **Common mistakes**

**Rushing it.** An hour per product is the point; twenty minutes each produces the same answer you already had.

**Judging competitors by their listing alone** rather than opening the storefront. A weak-looking listing from a seller with 400 products is a different opponent from the same listing run by someone with four.

**Falling in love with a product** and reverse-engineering justifications through all seven criteria.

**Ignoring "no differentiation idea"** as a finding. It is the strongest signal in the list.

## **Related**

- [**Scoring Product Opportunities**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/scoring-product-opportunities) — how the fifteen were chosen.
- [**Designing the Offer**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/designing-the-offer) — turning the surviving seven into something specific.
- [**Before You Add a Product**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/before-you-add-a-product) — the market rules this stage applies in depth.