Healthcare on Amazon.de keeps growing: in September, 19 million products were sold, 13 % more than in the same month last year. Not every submarket keeps up. Supplements, the largest of the five healthcare markets, grew by only 5 %. Vitamins and herbal supplements are even selling slightly less than a year ago.
Within supplements, one area bucks the trend: weight management grew by 15 %. And within that, an inconspicuous category stands out: add-on products, with 84 % more units sold than a year ago. More on what is behind it in a moment.
What is driving it? One lead runs through search. Every month we go through the search queries on Amazon.de, some 200,000 terms, from rank 1, the most searched, downward. Most of the time they confirm what you would expect. This time one term surprised us: cortisol.
In October 2024, “cortisol senken” (German for “lower cortisol”) sat at around rank 14,000 on that list. In September 2026 it was at rank 975. A stress hormone has become a search trend.
We wanted to know: what do people associate with cortisol? What do they end up buying? And who makes money from it?
Not relaxing, but losing weight
Cortisol is the body’s stress hormone. Anyone who wants to lower it wants to relax, or so we expected. The search terms tell a different story.
The second most common cortisol term on Amazon.de is “cortisol senken abnehmen”: lower cortisol, lose weight. Two years ago it ranked beyond 200,000; in September 2026 it was at rank 1,503, and in August it was even ahead of “cortisol senken”. And anyone who types in “hormonbauch” (hormone belly) finds a guidebook on the cortisol belly during menopause.
Relaxation does play a part, just not the way we thought: as a drink. Since late 2025, Germany has been searching for the cortisol cocktail, a trend from social media. The test, on the other hand, stays far behind: “cortisol test” is back roughly where it was two years ago, around rank 30,000.
Customers don’t want to know their cortisol level. They want to lower it, and they are hoping for a flatter belly along the way.
What ends up in the cart
Search Amazon.de for “cortisol senken” and you mostly see new things: 14 of the first 20 results did not exist a year ago. Most of them are powders to stir into a drink, the social media cortisol cocktail as a ready-made mix. Amazon files them under weight management, right among the add-on products from the beginning - they are part of that category’s growth.
The purchases still go to the classics. For many products, Amazon shows how often they were bought last month. The six established ashwagandha and stress products among the results add up to more than 20,000 purchases, the 14 new ones to more than 3,800. The ashwagandha capsules from natural elements and from ESN alone each sold more than 8,000 times.
Ashwagandha is the common thread, in the new products too. So customers search for the goal and end up buying the ingredient they know, mostly from established sellers.
The fast and the proven
Why do the new products rank at the top, and why do people still buy the proven ones? The new sellers are fast because they analyze trends continuously and serve them right away: for new cortisol terms, they are the first in the search results. Almost all of them are manufacturers or merchants from China, and most have only been listed since July. And they take the clicks. For every search term, Amazon reports which three products are clicked most often and what share of the purchases they get. For “cortisol senken”, a single new product took almost 40 % of the clicks in September, and for “cortisol senker” another one took more than 90 %. Both were hardly ever bought there.
The new sellers understand Amazon. Their product titles repeat almost word for word what customers type in: cortisol senken, abnehmen, cocktail. That is intensive work on the listing, and one reason they sit at the very top. On top of that, they compete on price: the new products cost €14 on average, the established ones €22. Many disappear as quickly as they came. Of 20 new products that led the clicks between June and September, more than half can no longer be found on Amazon.de.
The proven ones do it differently. The organic ashwagandha capsules from natural elements, a Düsseldorf company, have been listed since 2021, have cost around €27 for months with hardly any change, and have more than 11,000 reviews. For “cortisol senker” they got only about 1 % of the clicks in September, but 8 % of the purchases.
Nobody should rest on that. Our experience shows that new competitors gain momentum through their positioning alone and quickly become serious rivals. In the last issue we saw how a young nasal strip brand overtook the original via search.
The fast get the clicks. The proven get the purchases - for now.
What this means for manufacturers
This story is not in any single data source. We only found it once we brought market data, search terms and product pages together: the category showed where something was moving, search showed the motive, the purchases showed the winners. For manufacturers, that means:
- Connect your data sources and spot trends early. “cortisol senken” was on its way up for more than a year before most of the new products arrived.
- Set up listings and campaigns in your customers’ language - within what the rules on health claims allow.
- Review your range where it fits. Drinkable powders are still missing among the established results; the new sellers get clicks for them, but hardly any purchases.
That was the second issue of the S&S Healthcare Monitor. The next one follows in November, again with the most exciting story we find in the data.
And your own market? What we show here for cortisol, we can analyze for any healthcare market on Amazon - right down to your products and competitors. If you want to know what your data is telling you: Book a conversation