The King Who Charges More and the King Who Charges Less
On Amazon, the best-selling pair of headphones is one of the most expensive in its category, and the best-selling roll of paper towels is one of the cheapest in its own. The winner’s price is not a quirk. It is the category telling you how it is won.
Picture the best seller in two different Amazon aisles. In headphones, the product at the very top of the category is a pair of Apple AirPods Max, sitting near four hundred and fifty dollars while the typical pair in the category costs around sixty. The winner is about seven times the price of the middle of its own market. Now walk to the paper goods aisle. The best-selling paper towel is Bounty, and it sits at roughly half the price of the typical listing in its category. Two number-one products, two of the strongest brands on the whole marketplace, and they occupy opposite ends of their own price lines. One is a king who charges more than almost everyone around him. The other is a king who charges less. (The revenue figures here are Ecominsights estimates drawn from marketplace signals; the prices are from our data for the Amazon channel.)
This is the question almost nobody asks before entering a category. We ask who the leader is. We rarely ask where the leader is standing on price, relative to the ordinary products around it, and that turns out to be one of the most revealing things you can know. Line up the best seller against the median price across a long list of categories and the winners fall into three kinds: the king who charges more, the king who charges less, and the king who charges about the same as everyone else. Each kind is a different category wearing a different set of rules, and the rules decide how you are allowed to compete long before you have made a single other choice.
The things a buyer can pay to improve
The king charges more wherever a buyer can pay for a genuinely better version of the job and actually perceive the difference. A three hundred dollar pair of headphones really does sound better than a twenty dollar pair, and you can hear it in seconds. A faster laptop opens programs faster, a stronger vacuum picks up more, a nicer smartwatch does more on your wrist, and in each case the improvement is real and legible to the person buying. Where that is true, the category organizes itself into a ladder, and the strongest brand climbs to the top of it rather than the bottom. So the best seller in over-ear headphones is Apple near the ceiling of the category, the best seller in laptops is an Apple MacBook Pro at about two and a half times the typical laptop, the best seller in stick vacuums is a Dyson at about three times the median, the best seller in smartwatches is an Apple Watch at close to twice. The winner being the dearest thing on the shelf is not an accident or an act of greed. It is the category doing exactly what it is built to do, which is reward a better version with a higher place.
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And that fact is quietly brutal for anyone planning to enter. The instinct, faced with a premium king, is to come in underneath on price, to be the sensible value alternative to the expensive leader. It is almost always the wrong move, because price is not the reason the premium king wins. Buyers are not choosing AirPods Max because they failed to find something cheaper. They are choosing it because of what it is, and undercutting it offers them nothing they were looking for while handing you thinner margins in the same crowded fight. The only attack that works against a premium king is to be more premium than they are in some narrow wedge they are too broad to serve well, to find the buyer the giant cannot be bothered with and serve that buyer completely. You beat a king who charges more by charging more still, to someone specific, for a reason they can perceive.
The things a buyer only wants to trust
The king charges less wherever the job has a settled, good-enough quality level and what the buyer actually wants is simply to trust the product and not overpay for it. A roll of paper towels, a bottle of laundry detergent, a body wash, an everyday air purifier: the shopper is not hunting for the best possible version, because there is no meaningfully better version to hunt for. They want a name they believe will work, at a price that feels fair, and then they want to stop thinking about it. Where that is the motive, the winner comes from underneath. The best-selling paper towel is Bounty at about half the typical listing, the best-selling air purifier is a Levoit at about half the category median, and detergent, body wash and surface cleaner are each led by a household name, Arm and Hammer, Dove, Clorox, sitting well below the middle of its own category. These are not bargain-bin brands scraping the floor. They are the most trusted names in their aisles, and they win precisely by being trusted and affordable at once, which leaves the expensive products above them as a niche rather than the main event.
The mistake here is the mirror image of the premium mistake. Faced with a value king, the tempting move is to arrive with a nicer, pricier product and expect the category to trade up to meet you. It mostly will not, because the whole gravity of the category points at affordability and trust, and the premium tier is a ceiling the category reaches on occasion, not a frontier it is marching toward. You cannot out-cheap the trusted default either, because the default already has the scale that makes cheap possible. What is left, and what actually works, is to win a dimension the value king has no reason to chase: a specific format, a specialty buyer, a single quality signal that a thin slice of the category genuinely cares about and will pay a little more to get. You do not dethrone a value king. You carve a room in the house they do not use.
There is a third king worth naming, the one who charges about the same as everyone else. Energy drinks are led by Monster, coffee pods by Nespresso, collagen by Vital Proteins, game consoles by the Nintendo Switch 2, and in each case the winner is priced within a few percent of the median. For these categories price has been taken off the table entirely, and the contest has moved somewhere else, into brand and ecosystem and distribution and the simple power of being the default. Against this kind of king, price is the one weapon that does nothing in either direction, and the war is fought on everything else.
It is worth saying clearly what this is not. It is not the same as how widely a category’s prices spread from cheap to dear. The spread tells you whether price is a lever at all. The king’s position tells you which end of that lever the winner is holding. A category can have a narrow spread and still be ruled by a value king or a king priced with the pack. Energy drinks is exactly that, a tight band of prices with a leader sitting right in the middle of it, and you need both facts to read the aisle honestly.
So before you commit to a category, find its king and check one number: the best seller’s price divided by the category’s median. Above roughly one and a half, you are facing a king who charges more, and the money is up the ladder, so look upward or stay out. Below roughly three-quarters, you are facing a king who charges less, and the gravity pulls down, so find the room they do not use. Right around one, price is not the battlefield, and you should stop staring at it and go fight where the category actually fights. The headphones and the paper towels are not two curiosities. They are two instructions, written in the one number most people never read.
You can pull the best seller and the full price curve for any Amazon category, and see for yourself which kind of king you would be up against, free to start:
