TL;DR: This blog post analyzes the Brand Benson Mills on Amazon, identifying areas of opportunity for the brand to improve. I analyzes the product portfolio, Benson's position in the chosen niche, and main competitors to create an action plan for next steps.
Approach
- Analyze Benson’s product portfolio
- Identify what Niches Benson competes in
- Analyze Benson's position in the chosen niche
- Analyze main competitors and compare with Benson's position
- Create an action plan for next steps
- Implement the plan
Benson Mills is a part of BARN & HOME storefront with 40 parent listings. Helium10's X-Ray identifies the most important products for the brand, providing a signal for Benson Mills portfolio, even without all the profit margins and TACOS levels.
A few observations:
- 7 out of the 40 products (17.5%) account for 80% of revenue. Following closely with the 80/20 principle
- 10/40 account for over 90% of the revenue.
Categorize Products into Niches
Categorizing products can provide an overall picture of category performance. In the case of Benson's, rectangular tablecloths generate the most revenue, followed closely by circular “round” tablecloths. It’s also worth noting that the tablecloth protector, despite being a single parent listing, accounts for 22% of the overall revenue. However, this product does not offer much differentiation compared to rectangular tablecloths since it is simply a clear protective layer for a table.
Now lets take a look at the primary niches that Benson Mills competes in to better understand their share in the space and who their primary competitors are. Doing a search for “tablecloth” in Amazon’s Product opportunity explorer I get the following results sorted by search volume.
Niches to Analyze
- Tablecloth
- Round Tablecloth (same as circular tablecloth)
- Clear Table Cover Protector
For the purposes of this post, I will focus on the niche called "Clear Table Cover Protector."
Clear Table Cover Protector Niche Analysis
Source: Amazon Seller Central
Data Last Updated: 7/1/2023
Several Takeaways
- Benson Mills is the second most clicked product within this niche.
- The search volume over the last year is 950,000 with 18% growth in the last 180 days. This could suggest some seasonality, as people may not buy a lot of tablecloth covers during the winter when they primarily stay indoors.
- 41 products make up 90% of all click share within this niche.
- The average price in the niche is $19.
- Most of the products (18) are in the "Kitchen & Dining/Kitchen & Table Linens/Accessories" category, with the remainder (23) in the "Kitchen & Dining/Kitchen & Table Linens/Tablecloths" category.
Amazon's Product Opportunity Explorer has a limitation in that it does not provide a click-by-brand breakdown, which would help us to understand how a brand compares to its peers in a given niche. However, we can use a bit of Excel magic to organize the data and create a brand view. With this view, we can see that Benson Mills is ranked #4 in terms of click share within this niche, despite having only 1 parent listing.
Finally, I will analyze the search terms that make up the niche, using data directly from Amazon, which can be found here. Upon a quick examination of the data, I did not find any branded terms; all the terms were generic.
Below are Amazon's insights for the niche. The main takeaways from this data are:
- Over 90% of products use sponsored products ads.
- The top 5 products' click share is 40%, and the top 20 products have 82% of the clicks—following closely with the 80/20 principle.
- When looking at the brands, the top 5 brands have 53.3% of the click share, and the top 20 brands have 97.7% of the click share, indicating strong concentration in the market.
- The average out-of-stock rate is very low in this niche, indicating that demand is pretty predictable over time and the players in the space are good at inventory management.
Since the brand Sancua has most of the click share we can look at what they are doing to compare with Benson Mills to see if there is anything missing we should implement on
Looking at Benson Mills top table cloth listing they are doing a good job defending top ASINs with their other products.
They are missing the brand story section which can be added to all of their listing easily once created. This can help drive more traffic to their other popular listings and storefront and at the very least it helps to take up more real estate on their listing.
Additional Information Needed
- How does Benson’s top products currently convert off of it’s primary competitors
- Because of all of the variety of variations does Benson know which products convert best off of competitor listings?
- The Search Query Performance Report data for Benson
- How are the advertising campaigns structured - using the Bulk File
- What are Benson’s goals as a brand
- Diving deeper into analyzing the presentation of the competitor offers and finding opportunities to enhance Benson’s presentation vs the competition to maximize their Conversion Rate.
- Using Helium10 Cerebro tool to create a master keyword list using Benson and the top 7 competitors in the space to identify organic ranking opportunities and the primary terms
Potential Areas of Opportunity
- Video - this presents a significant opportunity for Benson Mills. Incorporating video ads and adding videos to the product listing can improve conversion rates. Creating a compelling video that highlights the product's primary benefits, such as demonstrating how pouring wine on the cloth does not stain it can have a significant impact.
- No video was found on the product listing.
- No video ad was found for Benson Mills branded terms.
- Competitors are running video ads on Benson's listing.
- Improved secondary images for the top selling listings
- Test out whether communicating fabric quality similar to these images has a positive impact on conversion rates or not
Other data outside Amazon context
The tablecloth search term on Google Trends appears pretty table with spikes in November
Benson Mills website traffic. Looks like they have been focusing on their SEO for the website to grow it. The website looks polished and well organized.
If you are looking for an overview of your brand or niche feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn
Or schedule a free 30minute sessions with me
Look forward to connecting with you. Have an awesome day!
-Marc