Most competitive Amazon categories

Competition on Amazon is usually described as a count of sellers. These two columns describe something a seller can act on: how much of the demand is already held, and whether holding it is enough to keep it.

The first column is the price of being seen. Where three products take 40% of the clicks on a search, a fourth arrives late and pays for every visit it gets. Where they take 15%, the clicks are spread and visibility can be bought.

The second is what happens after the click. Where the most clicked product is not the most bought on 40% of a category's searches, the shelf is decided again on the listing: price, reviews, images, the offer. Where that figure is under 10%, the first click usually ends it.

Read together they answer the question worth asking before entering a niche, and it is not search volume or the number of competitors. Low concentration means the traffic is available. A high share of searches where the click leader loses the sale means the sale is still winnable after the traffic arrives. A category with both is open in the only two senses that matter.

One challenge is worth answering here, because a garment lives on Amazon as many listings, one per size and colour: perhaps clothing only looks open, and the three products named are three variations of the same thing. Amazon's catalogue says otherwise. Across the thousand largest United States searches, two of the three share a parent on 20.7% of clothing phrases and all three on 3.4%, which is below health and household at 22.4% and far below Amazon devices at 77.8%, video games at 54.5% and electronics at 29.4%. Where variations really do collapse three products into one seller, it is in the categories at the closed end, so their concentration here is understated rather than clothing's overstated. One reading did not survive: sports and outdoors looks open, and on 52.4% of its phrases two of the three products are the same product in another size.

Neither figure is a reason to enter a category on its own, and open is not the same as easy. Amazon's own Product Opportunity Explorer prices the difference: across the 500 niches it lists for Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry in the United States, the median return rate is 5.0%, garments run at 7.7% and footwear at 7.5%, while the jewellery, bags and sunglasses in the same category sit at 4.2%. Prom dresses are at 31.8%. That is the price of the open shelf, charged after the sale rather than before it.

So these two columns answer something narrower than where to sell, and it is still worth having: whether the traffic can be reached, and whether the sale is still in play once it is. What happens to the sale afterwards is a third question, and in clothing it is the expensive one.

One kind of row reads differently and is worth naming. Video games sit near the top of concentration in every marketplace, but on 11 to 33 phrases, and the biggest search is a console or a single title: there is one PlayStation 5, and its share says nothing about a shelf anyone can join. The same is true of the rows set aside under each table. A category holding a large number of phrases, like home and kitchen or clothing, is describing a market; one holding a dozen is describing a product.

Amazon publishes the phrase, its rank and the three products shoppers clicked most, and no category. The category here is Amazon's own, read from its catalogue for those products, and a phrase counts where at least two of the three agree. Categories are the ones Amazon uses in each marketplace, in that marketplace's own terms, so the rows are not identical between countries.

The share is a median across the category's phrases, not an average of the whole category: one enormous search would otherwise decide the number. Films, television, books and music are left out. Three titles take three quarters of the clicks on a film, which is a fact about films rather than about a market anyone can enter.

This is the head of demand, not all of it. Concentration rises deeper into the tail: across every United States search term Amazon reported for July 2026 it went from 27.6% on the top thousand phrases to 35.5% beyond rank 500,000, which is measured in a separate piece.

The month behind these figures, marketplace by marketplace, is in the most searched products on Amazon.