Amazon Growth Opportunities is a free Seller Central dashboard that ranks product-level recommendations — run an ad, add A+ Content, enroll in Vine, fix a listing, cut a cost — by their estimated impact on your sales. You open it from Growth → Growth Opportunities in the Seller Central main menu, and it sorts every recommendation into four types: Sell New Products, Improve Sales, Reduce Cost, and Drive Traffic (Amazon’s tool page, checked 2026-10-04). The tool is free to use, but many of the actions it recommends — advertising, Vine, some fulfillment programs — cost money.
That last point is the whole game. Growth Opportunities is a ranked to-do list generated by Amazon, and some items on it spend your money in Amazon’s programs. This guide covers what Amazon publishes about how the list is built, how to read the Top 50 view and the HV and HP badges, and a four-gate filter for deciding which recommendations deserve your time.
Fact Block: What Amazon Publishes, and What It Doesn’t
Two public Amazon sources describe the tool: the Growth Opportunities page on sell.amazon.com and a downloadable PDF guide linked from it, which labels itself “Version 3.0 | Last updated September 24, 2024.” The Seller Central help article the page links to sits behind a sign-in wall (we confirmed on 2026-10-04 that it returns a login page without an account). Everything below comes from the two public sources, checked 2026-10-04.
What Amazon states on the tool page:
- Cost: “Growth Opportunities is a free tool. There’s no cost for reviewing recommendations, though there may be costs associated with completing certain recommended actions.”
- Refresh: “Recommendations are refreshed daily.”
- Coverage: “We only display the highest priority recommendations in the Growth Opportunities tool. That means certain products won’t have recommendations.”
- How recommendations are generated: “based on a variety of factors, including our assessment of the sales potential of your products and the sales lift experienced by other selling partners after completing recommended actions for similar products.”
- How sales lift is estimated: “We apply a machine-learning algorithm to estimate the potential sales lift a product could have gained if you had taken the recommended action for it 90 days ago.”
- Account plan: Amazon writes “We recommend using a Professional selling plan so you can take advantage of a full range of tools and programs.” That is a recommendation, not a stated requirement. The PDF guide goes further in the other direction: “Growth Opportunities is available to all third-party sellers and shows recommendations relevant to your account.”
What the PDF guide adds (dated September 24, 2024 by Amazon): impact metrics for each recommendation type, metric time frames, the KPI columns, and a list of 10 marketplaces — United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, Italy, Spain, India, and Mexico — with a note that recommendation types may vary by country. Because the guide is two years old, treat its marketplace list and screen layout as a snapshot, not a guarantee of what your dashboard shows today.
Not published anywhere public: the weights behind the ranking, the size of the “similar products” comparison set, the error range of the sales-lift model, or a per-marketplace list of which recommendation types exist. Any article that gives an accuracy figure for Growth Opportunities predictions is not quoting Amazon.
How to Open the Dashboard and Read the Top 50 View
Amazon’s own steps (tool page, checked 2026-10-04): log in to Seller Central, select Growth, then Growth Opportunities from the main menu. Amazon recommends starting on the Top 50 opportunities tab, then exploring each opportunity type. Two other ways in: Custom ASIN Lists and the Search by ASIN feature, for finding recommendations on specific products.
According to the PDF guide, the Top 50 view is the default. It shows the 50 highest-impact opportunities across all four types, and the same ASIN can appear under more than one recommendation type. Each row carries a rank, the product title and ASIN, an impact figure, and a set of performance columns (covered below). From a row you can:
- Filter by recommendation type or by specific action (add a main image, create A+ Content, create a Sponsored Products campaign, and so on).
- Sort by metrics such as inventory count or daily sessions.
- Snooze a recommendation, which the guide says hides it for a month.
- Provide Feedback on a recommendation — the guide says this feedback is reviewed regularly and passed to Amazon’s product and tech teams.
- Download Report to export the list.
To act, Amazon says you “simply select the task within it and follow the prompts.” The guide adds that completed recommendations drop off the list after 24 hours, and it lists these metric time frames:
| Column or type | Time frame (per Amazon’s PDF guide, dated 2024-09-24) |
|---|---|
| Improve Sales | 30-day average |
| Reduce Cost | 30-day average |
| Sell New Products | 7-day average |
| Drive Traffic | 7-day average |
| Inventory | Current inventory levels |
One timing detail to keep straight: the tool page says recommendations refresh daily, while the PDF guide describes the listing performance metrics as “updated weekly.” A recommendation can be new today while the session and conversion figures beside it are up to a week old.
We don’t have Seller Central access, so this guide doesn’t include screenshots of the dashboard. The descriptions above come only from Amazon’s public page and PDF.
The Four Recommendation Types and Their Impact Metrics
Each type is tied to a business objective, and each has its own impact metric. The definitions below are paraphrased from Amazon’s PDF guide (dated 2024-09-24, checked 2026-10-04).
| Recommendation type | Impact metric | What the metric estimates | What it typically points to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sell New Products | Likelihood of Success | The chance of generating one or more sales in the next 90 days if you take the action today | Launching or listing products Amazon thinks you could sell |
| Improve Sales | Potential Sales Lift | Incremental sales you could have gained over 90 days had you taken the action on this product 90 days ago | Listing content, A+ Content, Vine, programs such as Subscribe & Save |
| Reduce Cost | Net Proceeds Gain | Net proceeds you would have gained over 90 days had you taken the action 90 days ago | Operational changes such as reducing customer returns |
| Drive Traffic | Potential Traffic Lift | Incremental sessions you could have gained over 90 days had you taken the action 90 days ago | Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display |
Read the time direction carefully. Three of the four metrics are backward-looking counterfactuals — “what you would have gained if you had acted 90 days ago.” Only Likelihood of Success looks forward. A Potential Sales Lift figure is a model estimate of a past that didn’t happen, not a forecast of your next quarter.
The tool page lists the programs that feed recommendations (checked 2026-10-04): Multichannel Fulfillment, Brand Registry, A+ Content, Vine, Amazon Business, Subscribe & Save, Image Manager, Shoppable videos, Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display, and Amazon Outlet. Some recommendations depend on eligibility — the PDF guide says, for instance, that “A+ Content recommendations are only displayed to Brand Owners” — and it notes that Create A+ Content, Add Video, Add Main Image, and Add Sponsored Campaigns may not apply when a listing has multiple offers.
HV and HP Badges: What They Mean
Amazon defines both badges on the tool page’s FAQ (checked 2026-10-04):
- HV — “high value.” In Amazon’s words: “They are the top 10% of your products measured by sales or number of customer views. These products are already important to your business, and keeping them optimized can be important to your growth.”
- HP — “high potential.” Amazon says these products “are identified using the past performance of similar products in the Amazon store,” and that they “have a high probability of generating high-potential sales if you optimize them by taking the actions recommended.”
The difference matters for how much you trust a recommendation. HV is computed from your own data — your sales and your customer views — so the badge is a fact about your catalog. HP is inferred from other sellers’ products that Amazon considers similar. It’s a model’s guess about your product, based on comparison listings you can’t see.
The PDF guide adds one specific use: in its peak-season checklist it says HV ASINs (shown with a gold badge) are recommended for FBA enrollment.
The KPI Columns Beside Each Recommendation
The PDF guide lists six columns and defines them as follows (paraphrased, dated 2024-09-24):
| KPI | What Amazon says it measures |
|---|---|
| Impact | The recommendation’s estimated effect, using the impact metric for its type |
| Daily Sessions | Visitors to your listing page |
| ASIN Conversion Rate | Units purchased compared with sessions where a customer viewed the listing |
| Category Conversion Rate | Your conversion rate compared with similar listings in the same category |
| Sales Rank | Popularity and sales performance relative to other listings in the category |
| Inventory Count | Current real-time inventory from Manage All Inventory, across all SKUs on the ASIN, FBA and merchant-fulfilled combined |
These columns are a summary. For the full session, page view, and conversion history, the Business Reports in Seller Central are the deeper source; for search-term and competitor data, brand owners have Brand Analytics. Sales Rank here is the same figure covered in our BSR guide.
Which Recommendations Are Worth Acting On: A Four-Gate Filter
Growth Opportunities ranks by estimated impact. It does not rank by your margin, your cash, or your workload. We run every recommendation through four gates before acting on it.
Gate 1 — Does the action spend money? Sort recommendations into free actions and paid ones. Free: adding a missing main image, rewriting bullet points, and building A+ Content (Amazon’s PDF guide says A+ Content is free for brand-registered sellers). Paid or margin-reducing: Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display campaigns, Vine enrollment, Outlet deals, and Subscribe & Save discounts. Potential Sales Lift measures sales, not profit, so a large lift figure on an ad recommendation tells you nothing about what’s left after ad spend. Clear free actions first.
Gate 2 — Is the inventory there? Check the Inventory Count column before acting on a traffic or sales recommendation. Driving sessions to an ASIN that’s about to stock out wastes ad spend and can hurt your in-stock metrics; our IPI score guide covers why that matters for FBA capacity. If the stock isn’t there, snooze the recommendation instead of acting on it.
Gate 3 — Is the badge HV or HP? We act on HV recommendations first, because the badge is backed by your own sales and views. HP recommendations go second, because the case for them rests on other sellers’ products. An HP recommendation that is also free (Gate 1) is a cheap test; an HP recommendation that requires an ad budget is a bet on someone else’s data.
Gate 4 — Does the diagnosis match your own numbers? Compare the ASIN Conversion Rate with the Category Conversion Rate. If you’re well below category, content fixes (listing optimization, A+ Content, images, video) address the gap directly, and paying for more traffic sends more visitors to a page that already converts poorly. If you’re at or above category but sessions are low, Drive Traffic recommendations make more sense.
A practical cadence: check the Top 50 once a week rather than daily, clear free HV items in one sitting, and decide on paid items with a budget cap per ASIN. Amazon does not promise any outcome from completing a recommendation — the lift figures are model estimates — so track the ASIN’s sessions and conversion in Business Reports for a few weeks after each change rather than trusting the tool’s number.
Common Mistakes
- Reading Potential Sales Lift as a forecast. Amazon defines it as what you could have gained had you acted 90 days ago. It’s a counterfactual, not a promise.
- Treating “free tool” as “free actions.” Amazon states plainly that some recommended actions carry costs. Advertising and Vine recommendations are paid programs.
- Assuming no recommendations means no problems. Amazon only shows the highest-priority items, and the PDF guide says an ASIN may not appear because of low sales velocity or account changes. Use search trends data and your own reports for the rest of the catalog.
- Assuming you need a Professional plan. Amazon’s page recommends it; the PDF guide says the tool is available to all third-party sellers. If you’re deciding between plans, see Individual vs Professional.
- Acting on ad recommendations before fixing the listing. If the conversion rate is below category, more traffic spends more money on the same problem.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Amazon Growth Opportunities free?
Yes. Amazon states that Growth Opportunities is a free tool with no cost for reviewing recommendations, but that some recommended actions — such as advertising campaigns or program enrollments — may have costs (sell.amazon.com, checked 2026-10-04).
Where is Growth Opportunities in Seller Central?
Select Growth, then Growth Opportunities from the Seller Central main menu. Amazon recommends starting on the Top 50 tab, then filtering by Sell New Products, Improve Sales, Reduce Cost, or Drive Traffic (checked 2026-10-04).
What do HV and HP mean in Growth Opportunities?
HV means “high value”: the top 10% of your products by sales or customer views. HP means “high potential”: products Amazon identifies using the past performance of similar products in the Amazon store (Amazon tool page FAQ, checked 2026-10-04).
Why don’t all my products have recommendations?
Amazon only displays the highest-priority recommendations, so some products won’t appear. Its PDF guide adds that an ASIN may be missing because of low sales velocity or account changes, and that recommendations may appear as sales grow (checked 2026-10-04).
How often are recommendations updated?
Amazon’s tool page says recommendations are refreshed daily. The PDF guide (dated 2024-09-24) describes the listing performance metrics shown alongside them as updated weekly.
Conclusion
Amazon Growth Opportunities is worth opening weekly: it’s free, it surfaces listing gaps you might miss, and it puts sessions, conversion, sales rank, and inventory next to each suggestion. Treat the ranking as Amazon’s view of impact, not yours. Clear free actions first, check stock before buying traffic, trust HV over HP, and compare your conversion rate with your category before paying for ads. For day-to-day checks away from your desk, our Amazon Seller app guide covers what the mobile app handles.