Tutorial: Navigating the Black Box Dashboard

Black Box offers tons of useful ways to research products. Let's begin by getting familiar with the Black Box dashboard. 

1. Access Black Box by clicking on the top "black box" icon on the left side menu.

2. The dashboard consists of two areas: where you enter your search criteria; and where the Black Box returns the results.

In addition to the basic criteria, more search options are accessed by expanding the original dashboard or by activating a pull-down menu.

3. Notice that the dashboard has five (5) different tabs with five different product search focuses (and their own set of options): Products, Keywords, Competitors, Niche and Product Targeting.

4. Black Box opens with its basic search functions for quick searches, but under the Advanced Filters, the search options triple. 

Let's explore some of the various search option filters.

5. First, product searches are relevant to the specific country in which you are marketing your products. Because most Amazon sales are currently in the US, Amazon.com holds the default setting. Shopping habits and the words associated with specific products vary by country though, even between the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., where the most predominant language spoken is English. It's important if you're selling the same product in multiple countries, to conduct searches for each country separately, as variations in local language usage can diminish or confuse the search results. For example, "chips," "fries" and "crisps" refer to different things depending on which country you're in. U.S. (French) fries are called chips in the U.K., and U.S. (potato) chips are called crisps in the U.K.

6. Product searches can be narrowed to search specific, available ungated Amazon Categories. 

7. Shipping size can significantly impact profits, and whether a product is better suited for FBA or FBM. Black Box lets you set the size of the product in your search.

8. Under the Advanced Filters tab, Black Box lets you limit the fulfillment parameters of your search. You can select whether a product is Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA) or Fulfilled By Merchant (FBM). When a private label product is warehoused and shipped by Amazon, it's categorized as FBA; when merchants warehouse and ship the product themselves, it's categorized as FBM.

9. Black Box always saves your most recent search, but you can save specific searches as projects, and then access them again at any time. 

10. Each product search tool shares many of the basic parameters with the other search tools, while including unique parameters specific to its function. For example, Products, Keywords, and Niche search the Amazon database using words and phrases, while Competitors and Product Targeting search using specific ASIN numbers.

11. The Competitors feature allows you to easily download your results into a CSV file to review offline.

12. The Niche feature lets you research long tail keywords.

13. The Product Targeting feature lets you research products that Amazon identifies as Frequently Bought Together, Amazon Suggested or Customer Also Bought.

14. The results of a search are displayed below the search option fields, including product category, brand, seller(s), fulfillment type, size, listing images, variations, weight and dimensions, storage costs and the length of time it's been on Amazon, price, monthly sales, monthly revenue, BSR (Best Seller Rank), and the number and average of customer reviews. The final column lets you take a variety of actions, like go directly to the product page on Amazon to see the full listing or to add the product to a list for future reference.

15. After you search a product, and the results come back, you can sort the order of the list by using the Sort by pull-down menu.

To explore each product search tool in more detail, check out the other articles in our guide, under Black Box, as they become available. Or, jump in and watch some of the Helium 10 training videos in Black Box. 

Check out our quick glance chart to review the filters available under each tab.