How Flapen scores Amazon niches
Every niche in Flapen's live rankings gets a 0–100 score built from ten signals computed on live Amazon search, sales, and review data. Scores refresh weekly per niche; the same pipeline runs across every marketplace we track.
The pipeline
Amazon search and shelf data is collected continuously, aggregated weekly per niche, scored by the same deterministic curves for every marketplace, and published with the scrape date shown on each page ("Data updated"). Nothing is hand-adjusted; a score changes only when the underlying data does.
The ten signals
| Signal | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Market size | 15% | Yearly tracked revenue and search volume. Scored against cohort benchmarks. |
| Growth | 15% | 90-day Amazon search growth. Must be strictly positive to pass the launch gate. |
| Conversion | 10% | Search-to-purchase rate — the share of searches that end in a sale. |
| Competition | 15% | Top-5 click share. Lower means an open shelf where new products get seen. |
| Brand share | 10% | Top-5 brand share of clicks. Lower means no brand owns the niche. |
| Quality gap | 10% | Average incumbent rating. Lower means beatable quality. |
| Review moat | 5% | Average incumbent review count — the moat a new listing must climb. |
| Returns | 10% | Return rate over the trailing year. High returns kill the launch gate. |
| Avg price | 5% | Average listing price, scored on distance from the margin sweet spot. |
| Price range | 5% | Share of the niche price span inside the sweet spot. |
Verdict bands
A composite score at or above 56 with every launch gate passing reads Launch it; below 50 reads Skip it; everything between — or a high score with a failed gate — reads Worth a look.
Launch gates
- Market size at or above $850K/yr (cohort top decile)
- 90-day search growth strictly above 0%
- Return rate strictly below 6.0%
- A signal with no reported data fails its gate — an unknown market can never be launch-ready
What we don't score
Sourcing cost, logistics, intellectual-property risk, and listing quality of a specific competitor are outside the score — they vary per seller. Treat a verdict as a market read, not a business plan.
Citing this data
Flapen niche statistics may be quoted with attribution: "According to Flapen's Amazon niche tracking (flapen.com/research)". Every niche page carries its scrape date; please include the month when citing a figure.