Fifty product ideas is an unrankable list. Everything looks plausible at a glance, and choosing by instinct means choosing the one you happened to look at when you were feeling optimistic.

Scoring fixes that. Every market gets the same data points, each contributes a weighted score, and the list sorts itself.

[Watch the walkthrough](https://kb.trackiq.com/kb-assets/kbvideo-scoring-explainer-a43f6ca8.mp4)

*Prefer to watch? One hundred and thirty seconds on what a score is actually for, the margin column that overrides everything else, and the four reasons to promote a lower-scoring idea.*

## **What scoring is for**

**It is not a verdict.** A score does not tell you a product will work. It tells you which markets are worth spending an hour on, out of fifty you cannot possibly analyse deeply.

**Scores are relative to your own list.** There is no universal "good score", because markets vary enormously between categories. A 62 might be your best idea or your worst. The question is always: how does this rank against the other forty-nine?

## **The data that comes from the export**

Search the market's main keyword on Amazon, export the results, and the mechanical columns fill themselves: revenue per listing, review counts, price points, seller types, fulfilment method.

This is where the "high revenue, low reviews" signal becomes numeric rather than an impression.

## **The data you fill in yourself**

The manual columns are the ones that decide the score, and they are why this takes real time.

### **Economics**

**Expected selling price** — what the market supports, from the current listings.

**Estimated landed COGS** — product plus freight.

**FBA fulfilment fee** — driven by size and weight, and often the difference between a viable product and a dead one.

**Can you afford a better offer at 35%+ margin?** The single most important column. If the answer is no, nothing else on the row matters.

### **Demand**

**Search volume over the past 360 days.**

**Search volume growth over the past 180 days.** Direction matters as much as size — a smaller growing market beats a larger shrinking one.

### **Competition, in the top 10**

**How many Amazon-owned listings.** More than five is usually disqualifying.

**How many FBM listings.** Merchant-fulfilled competitors are generally easier to beat on delivery.

**How many overseas manufacturer-direct sellers.** They compete on price in ways you often cannot.

**How many strong sellers**, and **how many distinct sellers.** A market split across ten sellers is more open than one split across three.

### **Product characteristics**

**Differentiation potential** — can you offer something meaningfully better?

**Is it a variations market?** Variations capture more keywords on one listing and give you upsell paths.

**Subscribe & Save eligibility** and **reorder frequency** — repeat purchase changes the lifetime value of every customer you win.

**Seasonality** — evergreen demand is far kinder to cash flow and inventory planning.

**Brand fit, 1–10** — would your existing customers expect to see this from you?

### **Risks**

**Existing patents.**

**Trendy in the last 4–8 months** — a spike you might be arriving at the end of.

**Restricted or problematic categories** — compliance burden that can stop a launch entirely.

## **Weighting**

**Each column is capped according to how much it matters.** Margin potential and competition carry more weight than, say, variation options, because they are more often the thing that kills a product.

The output is a single comparable number per market.

## **Take the top 15 — and override deliberately**

Sort by score, mark the **top 15**, and move them to the next stage.

**Then allow yourself to promote a lower-scoring idea, if you have a specific reason.** The score is a summary, and summaries miss things. Legitimate reasons to override:

**You have a genuine differentiator** nobody in that market offers.

**You have an inactive listing with existing reviews** you could relaunch as a variation — a real head start the score cannot see.

**You can source it unusually cheaply**, changing the margin maths.

**You can engineer the size or weight down** to cut FBA fees where competitors have not. Fee advantages are durable competitive advantages, and they are routinely ignored.

**What is not a legitimate reason:** liking the product. That is the exact bias the scoring exists to remove.

![Search volume and share, per term](/kb-assets/shot-b28-brandterms-view-a83aae.png)

## **Validating demand from real data**

Two of the score's most important columns — search volume and its direction — are usually estimated from third-party tools. For markets adjacent to what you already sell, you can do better than an estimate.

**Search Query Performance** reports actual search volume per term and how much of it converts, which makes "is this market growing?" a data question rather than a guess. See [**Understanding Search Query Performance**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/understanding-search-query-performance) and [**SQP Is Weekly: Reading Week Cohorts**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/sqp-is-weekly-reading-week-cohorts) for how to read the trend without misreading the cohorts.

## **Common mistakes**

**Looking for an absolute score.** There isn't one.

**Skipping the margin column** because sourcing costs are unknown. Estimate it — a rough number beats a blank.

**Ignoring FBA fees** until after you have committed.

**Treating the score as the decision** rather than as a filter that decides where to spend the next fifteen hours.

## **Related**

- [**Six Ways to Find Product Candidates**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/six-ways-to-find-product-candidates) — generating the list this ranks.
- [**Narrowing Fifteen Ideas to Seven**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/narrowing-fifteen-ideas-to-seven) — the deep pass on the survivors.
- [**Before You Add a Product**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/before-you-add-a-product) — what a good market looks like.