Unicorn Smasher vs. Jungle Scout: Which is the best?

Amazon sellers make a lot of BIG calls:

• Which product to sell?
• How many units to buy?
• What about the competition?

Here’s the good news: it’s easier than you think.

That’s why we’re going to show you two tools that could save your life as a seller: Unicorn Smasher and Jungle Scout.

So let’s dive right in.

Ever scroll through Amazon and wonder which products make serious money? And which ones are this year’s biggest flop?

Or have you ever wished you knew how many units to buy before you’ve started selling a product?

If you know Unicorn Smasher or Jungle Scout, you’ll know that they are the secret.

These two tools are both Chrome extensions. You install them direct from Chrome, and then search for a keyword on the Amazon website.

What you then get is a whole lot of vital information about these listings.

Most importantly:

• Estimated Sales
• Estimated Revenue

So just like that, you’re not scratching your head any more.

You know which are the products that sell a lot. Which are the products that make a lot of money. And which are the products that, well… suck.

Let’s take a look.

We used the keyword “laptop”. Here’s what it looks like:

And here’s an example of Jungle Scout at work. Here, the keyword is “yoga mat”:

How do they help you though?

So, you have some interesting sales data. What can you do with it?

Revenue and units are a nice start. It means if you were selling that product, you’d be making that revenue. Which is a pretty dreamy prospect, right?

But sales alone aren’t enough for you. You don’t want to buy thousands of laptops and NOT sell them. For example, because your competitor sells them cheaper than you can.

Or let’s say you design your own. (Firstly, well done for designing a laptop!)

You won’t be happy if you can’t rank. Let’s say, because all the other products have thousands of 5-star reviews.

That’s where the other info comes in. Things like:

• # Reviews
• Star rating
• Is the current seller FBA/ Amazon/ neither?
• How many sellers are on each listing?
• Sales rank

And just like that, you can be an Amazon selling ninja.

Now, you can use all this data to figure out your business opportunities.

For example: Find out which products are doing well, but don’t have great reviews. That’s an opportunity to sell something similar, and do it better. Then, that revenue could be all yours!

You can get really creative with exactly how you use these tools. So we won’t go into every possible strategy right now.

What’s important to know is that this data is extremely powerful to you as an Amazon seller.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at what the differences are between Unicorn Smasher and Jungle Scout.

So what’s the big difference between these two tools? Is there one?

Actually, yes, there are many differences!

Starting with…

Price

This race was over before it began. After all, Jungle Scout is paid.

It has two options:

• Standard, at $97/one-time. Here, you get everything we’ve mentioned so far. We’ll mention some more handy features below.
• Professional, at $197/one-time. This version goes even deeper with a profit calculator and FBA fee estimator.

By comparison, Unicorn Smasher can be downloaded from the Chrome Web store without paying a thing.

How can there be such a difference in price?

Well, there are a couple of explanations:

• Difference in quality
• Hold on, what are you doing with my data!?

There is a difference in quality. We’ll get to that bit in just a second.

But first, let’s quickly cover the data thing.

When you sign up for Unicorn Smasher, they give you a box saying they want to use your data for Google Analytics:

What exactly they want to do with your data, they don’t say. But it’s a bit fishy.

You can decline it. We did.

But this is one possible reason Unicorn Smasher is free. They suck up all the data they can about you and use it for their mysterious plans.

Countries available

Where you can use your tool is of course extremely important.

You have to be able to use Unicorn Smasher or Jungle Scout anywhere you want to sell. If you can’t do that, you’re back to being a clueless newbie.

Jungle Scout covers  all of North America, all of Europe, and a couple of extras. (Mexico and India.) So it’ pretty comprehensive.

Unicorn Smasher covers only the US and the UK marketplaces. Which means if you want to sell anywhere else, it’s unfortunately pretty useless.

Here’s a table of countries available:

Filters

This is something they both do. But it’s super useful, so it’s worth mentioning.

Instead of trawling through thousands of listings, you can work smarter.

Open up the filters, and choose the kind of results you get. For example:

• Nothing over 3 stars
• Price only above $5
• Maximum 30 reviews

In this way, you can narrow down your results. And find exactly what you’re looking for, fast.

Top marks to both tools for including this. It’s a huge time-saver!

The filter options for the two tools look like this:

Go deeper

This is where there are major differences between Jungle Scout and Unicorn Smasher.

Jungle Scout has a number of in-depth features which Unicorn Smasher is missing:

• Price History: Check out pricing trends. This way, you can make reasonable guesses about your profitability.
• Wordcloud: Find out which keywords competitors use. You can use this to decide on a product title, for example. Or for keyword campaigns.
• Google Trends Report: Go beyond Amazon data and outside the box. Here, you get the demand and interest for your product over the last few years. This way, you can see whether the product is evergreen or seasonal. You can also find out if interest in it is just a short-lived trend. Or the real deal!
• Amazon Sales Rank History: Again, justify your conclusions with more data! This time, let Amazon data tell you if your product is a steady earner.
• Pro version: Opportunity Score, profitability, FBA fee, weight etc. If you  get the pro version, these are the levers that await you! In particular, we find the immediate profitability score a huge benefit. It saves a lot of mental arithmetic, and lets you work quicker. So bonus points here, if you’re willing to invest the cash.

Ultimately, these extra features make a big difference.

In short, they:

• Make your life easier
• Speed up your processes
• Make you less likely to make a mistake, which means:
• More likely to kick butt

Accuracy of Data

Ultimately, this is the most important part.

Having a great tool that loads fast is great. Lots of fancy features to dig deeper, also brilliant.

But if the data doesn’t add up then what’s the point? You can’t use it to make excellent business decisions. So you’re kind of back where you started.

This is important, because the data that Unicorn Smasher gives you is quite different from what you get with Jungle Scout.

Here’s an example of the data you get for the keyword “watches” with both tools:

That’s right. Unicorn Smasher thinks there nearly half the sales on products related to the keyword “watches.” At the same time, according to Jungle Scout, the Sales Rank is one third of Unicorn Smasher’s estimate.

Take a look at this other example. Here we’re looking at the keyword “plastic table cloth”:

Again, really strange differences here.

Unicorn Smasher estimates three times as many monthly sales, and double the average sales rank.

What exactly is going on here?

Clearly, three’s a massive difference between the two sets of data. Not only this, but the difference is not even consistent.

One time, Unicorn Smasher’s sales estimate is way higher than Jungle Scout. The next time, it’s far lower.

Which one should you trust?

We believe Jungle Scout’s data is more reliable. Here’s why:

Jungle Scout Accusales

Jungle Scout recently dropped a bombshell, claiming to have the most accurate sales estimates, ever:

Now that’s a really big claim. But Jungle Scout back it up.

Every day, they process 500 million data points. They actually spend $100k per month purely on servers to analyse that data.

Four data scientists literally spend their days figuring out how to make their estimates better.

For us, this is pretty convincing evidence. Add to this anecdotal feedback that Unicorn Smasher is consistently inaccurate, and we’re quite sure of it.

Probably no data set is perfect, but Jungle Scout seems have a pretty good handle on their business.

For this reason, we’d consider Jungle Scout data as accurate. And Unicorn Smasher data… still needs some work.

There isn’t really any debate about this. Jungle Scout is hands-down the better tool.

It feels better, it works faster, it offers more.

The question is, is it worth paying for? When the alternative is free??

We would almost be willing to forgive the imperfections of Unicorn Smasher. And its weird tendencies.

But we care too much about data for that. The fact is that these two tools give completely different sets of data, and we trust Jungle Scout’s more.

Which means: Even if Unicorn Smasher had the best user interface in the world, its data is bad. So it doesn’t do the one thing it actually has to do well.

Maybe this will change in the coming years. Who knows?

But for now, we’d rather pay for Jungle Scout than make bad business decisions.