We recently wrote that 10% of Top Brands on Amazon Are Private Label or Exclusive Deals and received a lot of interest to share more about how brands perform on Amazon. We are continuing to research brands - recently we were able to build a reliable way to detect private label brands. Thus this time we are sharing top 25 brands based on reviews who enjoy the luxury of having no competition.

No surprise to see AmazonBasics at the top, since it’s Amazon’s own brand. Amazon has been launching more brands, for example they launched 7 clothing brands last year, but those haven’t been as successful as AmazonBasics. Nonetheless, we see that launching brands is a big focus for Amazon, given how much data they have on-hand to forecast products to build.

It looks like Electronics and Cell Phones & Accessories are the most popular categories. The exceptions are Cards Against Humanity LLC. in Toys category, Positively Tea LLC. and Healthworks in Grocery category, and NatureWise in Health & Household.

Launching new products in Electronics category is going to be hard. Many established brands have great presence, not leaving much room for new entrants. However we have noticed an almost endless stream of new phone cases and other smartphone accessories brands. Those are one of the easiest types of product to differentiate with design and color choices, but that’s not enough to become noticed - there is simply too many similar products. The differentiation is not strong enough.

Another issue with some of those brands is that they have limited reach outside of Amazon. Brands based on Amazon search results optimization (SEO) or Amazon ads are going to struggle as inevitably the competition finds a way to out-rank them. When Amazon banned the incentivized reviews work-flow it became harder to bootstrap a brand without investing considerable effort into it. But we think it’s going to create better and stronger brands in the future.

We are continuing our research, developing more accurate and deeper insights. We follow brands which are successful on Amazon not because of Amazon traffic, but because they are good on their own. Those examples are going to be much more interesting long-term.