We ran our standard quarterly teardown on the Amazon tools category through March 31, 2026. The short version: the top 3 brands by GMV grew 11% collectively, but two of them did it on volume, not price, and the cracks are showing.
Headline numbers
- Category GMV up 7.8% YoY (US)
- Top 10 brand concentration: 41.2% (down from 44.1% in Q4)
- Median TACoS across the top 50: 9.1% (up from 7.8%)
- Private label share up 210 bps, the first time we’ve seen material movement since 2023
- Median Sponsored Brands video CTR: 1.1% (down from 1.2% in Q4), small drift, but every brand we tracked lost CTR on identical creative
What’s actually happening underneath
Top-line growth in tools is being carried by two subcategories: cordless drills and multi-tools. Both grew 11-13% YoY, well above the category average. Strip those out and the rest of the top 50 grew 3.4%, close to flat, after inflation. The category isn’t healthy. It has two bright spots and a long tail of subcategories where brands are losing margin to defend share.
Power saws contracted 2.1%. Hand tools grew 1.8%. Outdoor power equipment was flat. Tool storage grew 4.4% but on aggressive promotional pricing, strip the promo lift and the unit-economic story is roughly flat. The brands that look healthy on the YoY GMV number are concentrated in the two growth subcategories. Everyone else is treading water.
The Cosmo signal
Cosmo’s reranking has hit tools differently than housewares. Where housewares saw 18% of impressions reroute to listings that didn’t appear in the original query a year ago, tools saw 12%. Less aggressive, but the pattern is the same: the algorithm is matching intent rather than literal-string queries, and brands whose A+ hasn’t been refreshed for the new semantic environment are losing visibility on the queries that historically defaulted to them.
The specific shift we saw in tools: queries with use-case modifiers (“drill for arthritic hands,” “cordless saw for ceiling work,” “compact multi-tool for commuting”) grew from 4% of impressions in Q4 to 7% in Q1. Three percentage points in a quarter. None of those queries were ranking signals in 2024. In 2026, they’re a meaningful share of converting traffic, and the brands serving them, usually private-label or smaller specialty brands, are the ones gaining share against the established top-10.
Three winners that weren’t
Rankings pulled from Helium 10 + our own indexing show three brands “won” Q1 by sales rank. Look at the P&L and the story is different: each of them bought rank with promotions that can’t be sustained past Q2.
The first ran a 22% sitewide promo from January 14 through March 8. Volume up 31%. Margin contribution dropped to ~3% on those units. Their year is now mathematically about whether they can hold rank at full price in Q2, which they probably can’t. Q3 will tell.
The second scaled DSP defensively, share-of-voice on category-anchor terms had been bleeding for two quarters, and the team responded with a 40% increase in DSP spend to defend. The math: $0.42 of incremental ad spend per dollar of incremental revenue. That’s not a sustainable defensive posture; it’s a financed delay of an underlying catalog problem. The catalog problem doesn’t go away when the spend turns off. It just shows up immediately.
The third is the most interesting. They’ve been quietly buying their share back since November via a combination of price elasticity tests and aggressive review-velocity programs. The bps math we ran on TACoS drift suggests they’re now structurally negative on contribution margin at current spend levels. Their TACoS is up 380 bps over six months while organic share has been flat. That’s not stabilization. That’s a brand spending money to stand still, which is a different problem and a worse one.
Private label, the structural shift
The 210 bps private-label gain is the headline that should haunt the established top-10. We’ve watched private label move 50-100 bps in tools in past quarters; 210 is a different signal. Three drivers explain it:
- Cosmo’s rerouting rewards catalog completeness over brand recognition. Private-label SKUs that have completed their A+ rebuilds are getting into consideration sets for queries that historically defaulted to brand-name. The reverse-engineered audit: 38 of the top 50 private-label gainers had FAQ modules with use-case-specific questions. Only 4 of the top 15 incumbents losing share did.
- Review velocity pulled forward. The new private-label entrants are running review-collection programs that move much faster than the slow-cumulative-review programs the incumbents rely on. By the time Cosmo evaluates a SKU’s review trajectory, the private-label challengers are at 200-400 reviews; the incumbents are at 12,000 cumulative reviews but only 80 added in the last 90 days. The recency signal is winning.
- Price elasticity in the long tail. The use-case-modifier queries (the “compact for commuting” type) skew price-sensitive. A $39 private-label drill optimized for that use case wins a query the $169 brand drill historically owned, because the buyer wasn’t asking for the brand drill, they were asking for the use case.
What we’d watch in your data
If you’re a brand in this category, three diagnostics:
First: pull share-of-impression on your top 5 anchor queries quarter-over-quarter. If you’ve lost more than 6 points of impression-share, you’re getting Cosmo-rerouted, not outbid. Don’t fix it with a bid increase. Fix it with a catalog rebuild.
Second: pull your review-velocity (reviews added in the last 90 days, not cumulative) and compare to the top 3 share-gainers in your subcategory. If their velocity is more than 2x yours, you have a recency-signal problem that won’t fix itself.
Third: check whether use-case-modifier queries are showing up in your ST report at meaningful volume. If they aren’t and the category is moving toward them, your A+ isn’t speaking the right language. The Cosmo-aware A+ rebuild is the fix.
Reach out if you want the anonymized dataset, we’ll pull your brand if you’re in it.
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