SmartScout Review: A Comprehensive Analysis of this Amazon Research Tool

As an Amazon seller, finding the right research tool to grow your brand can be challenging. But what if you could find a comprehensive tool that goes above and beyond your expectations?

Enter SmartScout, a powerful Amazon research tool designed to cater to the needs of both Amazon sellers AND service providers.

You might be wondering how a tool can serve two very different types of Amazon entrepreneurs, but stay tuned as we dive we will dive deep into the world of SmartScout and explore its unique features, effectiveness in various Amazon selling niches, and how it can help you make informed decisions to scale your business.

What is SmartScout?

SmartScout distinguishes itself from other Amazon research tools as a comprehensive suite of 20+ tools. It is a cloud-based software with an intuitive dashboard, making it a breeze to navigate.

Top 10 SmartScout Features & Use Cases

As we dive into the features of SmartScout, we're going to show some practical steps to using the software rather than simply listing features like you would find on a sales page.

Let's take a look at how you might find various sellers that are selling a specific brand on Amazon.

Using SmartScout's Subcategories Feature to Find Brands to Sell on Amazon

There's multiple ways to find a brand or niche using SmartScout, but here's one way you can start your research journey.

First, we're going to head over to the Subcategories section in the left-hand menu.

From here, we choose the Niche Finder tab.

Now you'll see a list of Subcategories and a table of data, including things like monthly revenue, the number of brands selling the subcategory, the top ASINs by % share and so on.

For this example, we're going to click the icon next to "Binoculars" and then choose "Products" from the dropdown menu.

You can filter the map search, or simply start navigating and zooming in on the map.

If you zoom in, you can start to see both resellers (purple circle) and private label sellers (orange circle). Hovering the circles will also show the seller's monthly revenue.

If you click on a seller from the map, you can then start seeing information about their company, offers, brands they're selling etc.

There's heaps of information here to either become friends with them, become their competitor, or both! 🙂

This feature can also be used to find clients if you run an Amazon agency or service.

Let's not leave anything out here either.

Maybe you have several outlets in your area like we do. You may want to find the people that are likely to be shopping those outlets to see what they are sourcing and how you may be able to find a new brand or two to source for yourself. Maybe even a few products by stalking their storefront.

Using SmartScout to Find Wholesale Suppliers

You know we love online arbitrage here at Clear The Shelf, but we've also recently started exploring Amazon Wholesale.

Let's start by going to the Brand dashboard, which you can access from the left-hand side menu. From here, we're going to choose a category.

In this example, we've chosen Appliances. Now it's time to apply some filters.

So, we've chosen the Category, and we need to set our desired Amazon in-stock rate (to ensure the listing isn't dominated by Amazon), our minimum of 3 sellers (to avoid private label brands), and a monthly revenue range of $35k-$500k.

From here, you can start exploring the products under each brand and then reach out to brands to apply for wholesale accounts. This is a process in itself, which we explore in our Wholesale Challenge.

Exploring SmartScout's Traffic Graph

This is one of the more unique features that I have personally seen in an Amazon software tool. What they've essentially done is reverse-engineer the "frequently bought together" feature on Amazon product listings.

When you go to the Traffic Graph feature from the menu, you can search using product keywords or an ASIN.

When you hover over a product on the graph, the purple arrows show other listings that are sending traffic to that product from other listings, and the yellow arrows show you where traffic is being sent from the selected product.

This tool allows you to carry out detailed research by diving deeper into each product shown on the map.

The SmartScout Traffic Graph feature is also going to help you choose better placements for your Amazon PPC ads.

Finding (and Spying on) Arbitrage Sellers

 There's a couple of ways to do this, the first of which is to choose the Brands option from the menu.

When the brands are shown, filter the results so the "Dominant Seller Percentage" is set to a maximum of 10%. This means that the sellers that sell the most of each brand has no more than a 10% share of the total sales. We do these so we can find more arbitrage sellers.

From there, you can go into the brands and see who the sellers are, how much they are selling, and so on.

The second method is using the Sellers feature. We’re going to spy on some stores near you, so you need to filter by your location to find sellers around your area.

The benefit of choosing a seller in your location is that you know they might be sourcing near you (if they are doing retail arbitrage) and you'll know that the shipping costs will be the same as you.

Filter by "Full Brand Coverage" and choose 0. This means that they DO NOT sell more than 60% of the sales for any particular brand, which indicates that they are either a wholesale seller or an online or retail arbitrage seller.

You can then spy on their store and reverse engineer top selling products.

You could even then filter by a maximum of $100,000 of monthly revenue, which may indicate they are an arbitrage seller.

Check out their offers and see if you too can source and sell the same products.

Storefront Stalking

We think there are good use cases spying on storefronts, but Keepa only lets you look at the top 100,000 sellers. With smartscout, you can find over 1.5 million sellers on Amazon which is going to give you basically every single seller in the US.

When you go into the Sellers tab, you can see where they are located and you might find some of them are located in China (but selling in the US).

You can filter this to sellers that are located in the US and you will see around 700,000 that are actually located in the US.

Now you have a massive list of sellers in the US to stalk, happy days :).

Find Products to Sell on Other Amazon Marketplaces

While you're looking at US based sellers, you can switch over to Canada (top left menu) but keep the sellers located in the US. This will show you what opportunities you have to sell in other marketplaces, and you’ll see what’s selling.

Obviously if you are located in the US but want to start selling in Canada, you may need a prep center located in Canada.

UPC Scanner

If you're familiar with a piece of software called Scan Unlimited, you might find SmartScout's UPC Scanner similar.

Essentially you can enter a UPC or ASIN, or upload an entire list, to find a product currently selling on Amazon and evaluate them in greater detail.

In this example I've searched for a Star Wars Lego product, and it shows that Amazon has a 65% share of the buy box. Other sellers with less buy box share are still selling, as you can see from the revenue column.

You can continue your research inside the UPC Scanner by clicking the History tab, which will show you the Keepa graphs for this product.

Popping Topics

If you've ever done any of my training, I have my own little method that I like to call the "Amazon whisper method", where I use auto-search complete to see what products are being searched for right now.

SmartScout's Popping Topics feature does something similar. It will show what keywords have grown in the shortest amount of time, you literally see what's popping right now.

This is great if you're quick on your toes and can find some quick wins that you can source and list right away.

You can click each trending graph and then see the top listings for the keyword.

AI Listing Architect

This is a neat little feature that will build you a fully optimized product listing that you can push straight to Amazon from SmartScout.

All you need to do is enter the ASIN if you're listing an existing product, and you can even build a listing for a product that doesn't exist on Amazon yet. All you need to do in that case is provide some similar ASINs to help build an AI-powered, superior listing.

SmartScout Pricing

SmartScout has three core plans, plus an Enterprise option.

Clear The Shelf readers have an exclusive SmartScout promo code to get 25% off for the first 3 months.

This is a huge money saver, so check out more about my SmartScout coupon code if you think this tool is right for you.

• Basic - $29 per month
• Essentials - $97 per month
• Business - $197 per month

The above plans are paid monthly, but those wanting to pay Annually will get a discount on these prices.

The Final Word on SmartScout

This tool is one of the more unique ones I've come across, so you will be hard pressed to find a suitable alternative. If competitor research is your game, or you're a service provider, I highly recommend you check out SmartScout and see everything that it has to offer.

(and keep an eye on this tool too, its going to be a market leader before you know it!)