Amazon Best Sellers Best Christmas

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: Everything You Need to Know to Succeed

September 26, 2018

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One thing sellers often ask me about is how to improve their Amazon Best Seller Rank. But before we can discuss a few solutions, we need to have a solid understanding of what the Amazon BSR is and how it functions.

Stefan James from Project Life Mastery is stepping in to break down the basics and share some insight. We’ve worked together before and his Amazon success makes him an excellent authority on the subject!

What is Amazon Best Sellers Rank? How is Amazon Best Sellers Rank calculated? What is the difference between Amazon Best Sellers Rank and organic ranking? How can I use Amazon Best Sellers Rank to estimate sales? What tools are available to calculate sales from Amazon Best Sellers Rank?

In today’s digital world, there are plenty of ways to make money online. However, in my opinion, Amazon FBA takes the cake. Amazon is the king of e-commerce, and it continues to grow on a massive scale every day.

Amazon has become the one-stop shop for the modern-day consumer. In a study published in early 2017, 52% of people said that Amazon is now their first choice for product searches.

Not only has Amazon made consumers’ lives a lot easier, but it has also created a lot of opportunities for people to become Amazon sellers and make a lot of money. A lot of people have the desire to sell on Amazon, but when it comes to product research, they don’t even know where to start. Well, I’m here to help!

Let’s get started with some of the Amazon basics. I want to show you how just reading an Amazon product page can help you determine how often a product sells on Amazon using a little number that Amazon gives us called the Amazon Best Sellers Rank.

If you already understand the Amazon Best Sellers Rank and are looking for a powerful tool to help you estimate sales, then skip ahead to learn more about Extension:

What is Amazon Best Sellers Rank?

Amazon Best Sellers Rank is a number that each and every product in their multi-million product catalog is awarded. The rank itself is based on a number of factors, but first and foremost it represents recent sales volume for a product. In addition, every department on Amazon has its own individual best sellers ranking system, as does each subcategory. Therefore, one product can have an Amazon Best Sellers Rank of 2,000 in Kitchen & Dining while a totally different product can have an Amazon Best Sellers Rank of 2,000 in Toys & Games.

Where can I find the Amazon Best Seller Rank for a product?

Go to an Amazon. com product page. That’s the page you see when you click on a product after doing a search on Amazon. Next, you will want to scroll down to the product details portion of the page. If you’re on a mobile device, you may need to go to the product description block and click on it.

This is what you should see (I’ve circled the Amazon best seller ranking for this product):

As you can see, the Amazon Best Sellers Rank for Patio, Lawn & Garden department is currently #1,699. Furthermore, it has a Best Sellers Rank of #280 in the sub-category Patio, Lawn & Garden > Grills & Outdoor Cooking.

This means that out of the hundreds of thousands of products in Amazon’s Patio, Lawn & Garden department, this particular product is ranked 1,699th. Not too shabby!

How to see the top-selling products by their Amazon Best Sellers Rank

If you wanted to see the top products on Amazon, all you have to do is go to the best selling products page for a particular department. For example, here are the best selling Amazon products for the department Patio, Lawn & Garden:

Everything you see here is currently doing incredible sales on Amazon. You’ll find that a lot of the products on the best sellers pages are usually disposable or consumable products. Also, there’s a lot of seasonal stuff here as well, such as bug traps. In the winter it may be a completely different line-up of products such as Christmas lights, windshield deicer, or snow shovels.

What does BSR mean on Amazon?

If you’ve ever heard anyone talk about BSR on Amazon, they are referring to the Amazon Best Sellers Rank. That’s all it is!

How is Amazon Best Sellers Rank calculated?

According to Amazon, the Amazon Best Sellers Rank and subsequent lists are a good indicator of how well a product is currently selling on Amazon. It’s updated hourly and it doesn’t only reflect current sales data but historical sales data, as well.

For example, if a product has 10 units of sales in one hour but drops to only 1 unit sale the next, that doesn’t mean it will automatically drop down to a BSR that’s for products that only sell one per hour.

Let me explain what I mean with an example with some hypothetical numbers.

An example of how Amazon Best Sellers Rank works:

Pretend we have a Product A that’s currently ranked #500 in Amazon’s Patio, Lawn & Garden category. It just sold 8 products in the last hour. At the same time, we have Product B that’s currently ranked #1000 in Amazon’s Patio, Lawn & Garden category. That product sold 4 products in the last hour. In the next hour, Product A sells only 4 products and Product B sells 8 products. Logically, you’d think that the two would swap BSRs, right? In other words, product A would now be BSR #1000 in Patio, Lawn & Garden and Product B would be BSR #500 in Patio, Lawn & Garden. However, Product A‘s Amazon Best Sellers Rank goes to #550. And Product B’s Amazon Best Sellers Rank goes to #950.

The reason that the products don’t have drastic fluctuations in their Amazon Best Sellers Rank despite essentially “switching places” with their hourly sales is that Amazon’s Best Sellers Ranking system takes into account the number of historical sales the product had.

In the example above, while Product A may have dropped half its hourly sales count, it typically does an average of 8. So even a momentary drop isn’t enough to totally deplete its BSR.

What other factors does Amazon consider in its Best Sellers Rank?

Recently, some Amazon FBA sellers have noticed that when they offer their products at a discount via a promotion or a coupon, the product’s Best Sellers Ranking does not change as quickly even with high sales volume. While there is no official word from Amazon yet regarding this practice, expert suspect this factor may have been put into place to deter sellers from “gaming” the Best Sellers Ranking system using promotional giveaways to create phony sales velocity.

What is the difference between Amazon Best Sellers Rank and organic ranking?

One big thing that a lot of new sellers confuse when they first start selling on Amazon is the difference between Amazon Best Sellers Rank and organic ranking. Hopefully, after reading the information above, you understand what Amazon Best Sellers Rank is. I now want to take a moment to explain what organic ranking is and how the two are very different.

What is organic ranking on Amazon?

Organic ranking is where a product appears on Amazon’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) for a particular keyword. The product’s position on Amazon’s SERP has no bearing on the product’s current Amazon Best Sellers Rank. In fact, the products on the SERP are organized by what Amazon sees as the most relevant products for that search.

For example, if we did a search for marshmallow roasting sticks on Amazon, here’s what we would see on the SERP:

These six products that show up are organized by two factors: Amazon sponsored ads (also known as Amazon PPC) and organic ranking. The first three products are those that paid for ads to appear there. The bottom three are those whose products ranked organically. However, where they fall on the SERP is very different than where they rank with Amazon Best Sellers Rank:

The first organic product’s BSR is #1,672 And the next organic product’s BSR is actually better at #404. Finally, the third organic product’s BSR is still better than the first’s at #914.

Pretty wild, right? The reason for this is because Amazon sees the first product as a more relevant result when someone enters in the search term “marshmallow roasting stick” despite it not being the best seller of the bunch. This could be because the product has had better sales in the past, higher rates of conversion, or even better reviews.

Don’t mix up Amazon Best Sellers Rank with organic ranking!

Both of these values are important, but both have totally different functions. If you seek to create your own product on Amazon as a private label seller, then organic ranking is very important to you. Because the higher your product appears in the SERP, the more likely customers are going to click on it and purchase it.

Meanwhile, Amazon Best Sellers Rank is great for estimating the sales frequency of an individual product or an entire product category.

How can I use Amazon Best Sellers Rank to estimate sales?

By far, the most powerful function of the Amazon Best Sellers Rank–other than just giving you some awesome bragging rights–is using the value to predict how often a product sells on Amazon.

Consider this: say we have a product that has a BSR of #1699. And we know from our checking our own sales that a BSR of #1,699 translates to roughly 810 sales per month so long as our Best Sellers Rank stays roughly around that same value.

But just a month ago, our average BSR was #3,000 for about 30 days and we only did 510 sales that month.

However, last fall, our BSR was #500 on average for 30 days and we did 1,980 sales that month.

What can we learn from this data?

For starters, we know that if we see another product on Amazon other than ours that has a Best Sellers Rank of #3,000, that product should sell 510 products per month, or close to it. Because that’s what our own product did when its rank was #3,000.

And what about a product that’s currently ranked #500? Probably 1,980 sales per month right?

How to determine what sort of products to sell on Amazon using BSR:

Let’s say you have an opportunity to buy these two different books for $0.50 each.

The first book is Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Charlie Munger. The book sells for $59.95 on Amazon. Currently, its Amazon Best Sellers Rank in the Books department is #1,942. I know from experience that a book that has a BSR of #1,942 has 540 sales per month. That’s almost a book every hour. This means if you purchase the book and list it on Amazon at the lowest available price, in an hour you will have a sale. Literally that fast!

The second book is the old Dungeons & Dragon’s module The Tomb of Horrors. This book sells for more on Amazon at $64.99. So we’d make more profit. But its BSR is #1,256,348. That means this book only sells 2-3 copies per month. If you buy and list this book, chances are you might not see a sale for a month or maybe even longer.

So which product sounds better? Poor Charlie’s Almanack which is almost guaranteed a sale in its first 24 hours at $59.95, or the Tomb of Horrors which may take months to sell on Amazon at a marginally higher profit? Ultimately that’s your decision, but personally, I’d rather go with Poor Charlie’s Almanack!

How to estimate sales for an entire product niche.

Okay, so now you understand the basics of how Amazon Best Sellers Rank can help you make the best decision on which products to sell on Amazon. But what if you wanted to create a product that’s never existed before? There’s no way of knowing what its BSR is, right?

Fortunately, we can estimate that, too, by taking the average sales for each product on a search results page.

Pretend we’re doing a search for “marshmallow roasting sticks” again. If you checked out the Best Sellers Ranking for each product on that page, here’s what you might come up with:

Then you could find the average for each of those eight products which would be roughly 2,240. Now, going back to the data I discussed earlier–where I had a rough idea of what products in the Patio, Lawn & Garden category sell for, we can probably make the following assumptions using just a little math:

We know that products that have a BSR of #1,699 have 810 sales per month. And we know that products that have a BSR of #3,000 have 510 sales per month. Therefore, we can guess that if a product category has about probably 510 – 810 sales per month.

I know what you’re thinking! “Stefan, this seems like a lot of work.” And you’re right. It is.

Way back when I started selling on Amazon this is how everyone had to do it. Fortunately, easier ways were invented to help you do all this quickly.

In fact, you can do all of this in just a few seconds with the right tools.

How to calculate product sales using Amazon Best Seller Rank (the EASY way).

Back in 2015, estimating Amazon product sales involved a whole lot of homework: spreadsheets, calculators, and a whole lot of guessing and frustration. Fortunately, Greg Mercer of Jungle Scout created a better way. A successful Amazon seller himself, Greg created an application that could take all the information I presented to you above, automatically toss it into a spreadsheet, and immediately calculate a product category’s sales.

All at the push of a button!

Going back to our SERP for “marshmallow roasting sticks”, this time, instead of spending half a day checking out each individual product page and guestimating the sales totals for each of those products, I’m just going to click this little button here:

Once I click on that button, check out what happens:

Isn’t that amazing? It opens up a big spreadsheet that shows you the following information:

The average monthly sales for each product on the page. Plus, it gives you the average Amazon Best Sellers Rank, too. If that’s not enough, you’ve also got average sales and review counts. Plus a whole lot more!

Now, instead of spending hours and hours putting together similar spreadsheets, this program does it all for you in a matter of seconds all at the push of a button.

This Extension and it’s helped hundreds of thousands of sellers all around the world, including me!

What tools are available to calculate sales from Amazon Best Seller Rank?

All right, now you understand how the Amazon Best Sellers Rank works and how it relates to finding sales estimates on Amazon. Here are some tools to make life easier for you:

First up is Extension, which I already demonstrated for you. This powerful application is fed data from Jungle Scout’s AccuSales™ Amazon data science engine. It takes the information on each of Amazon’s Search Engine Result Pages, organizes it, averages it out, and gives you information to help you make the perfect product purchase decision.

Jungle Scout FREE sales estimator.

If you want to get your feet wet first, then consider trying out Jungle Scout’s FREE sales estimator tool. While it doesn’t estimate the sales for an entire category like the Jungle Scout Chrome Extension, it can make sales estimations simple for you if you prefer to do things the old-fashioned way.

Plus, if you want to just get a feel for Amazon and sell only a couple products at first, this might be the best way for you to go.

Jungle Scout Web App

But what if you’re not sure what to sell? That’s where Jungle Scout can help. This time, instead of finding a product to sell on Amazon using Amazon Best Sellers Rank and random searches, you can put in the Amazon Best Seller Ranks that you’re interested in targeting and reverse engineer a high sales product niche.

In addition to that, it also has tools to help you track competitor products’ daily sales, find profitable keywords, and organize the Amazon product catalog anyway you see fit.

How does Jungle Scout get its data?

Since 2015, Jungle Scout’s Amazon sales estimation tool AccuSales™ has processed millions of points of data. Then, Jungle Scout’s team of expert data scientists who have over 30 years of data science (as well as a handful of PhD’s) between them takes that data and creates the world’s most accurate Amazon sales data anywhere.

In fact, the only place that has better data than Jungle Scout’s data is Amazon itself!

Conclusion

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of the Amazon Best Sellers Rank and how it can help you estimate product sales on Amazon. Your next step is to either use one of the tools mentioned above to start finding products that can help you get the life you want to live or learn a little bit more about the Amazon sales process. I’ve included a link below that can teach you all about How to Sell on Amazon FBA.

Stefan James is a internet entrepreneur, life and business coach, philanthropist, and world traveler. You can learn more about his awesome story at Project Life Mastery.

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Founder at Jungle Scout. Loves all things FBA. Amazon Data Nerd. Caffeine Enthusiast. Happiness Fanatic. Tweet him @mercer_greg

3 coments on “ Amazon Best Sellers Rank: Everything You Need to Know to Succeed ”

Great article. I learned a lot about Amazon BSR and organic search results. I recently self published on Amazon. Thanks

Your article was informative and I’m interested. I have a product I will private label and supply. If I want to estimate the current sales of similar products on Amazon, which tool do you recommend? We are writing the business plan and are trying to determine the size of this eCommerce market. In our case– organic fertilizers for Home and Garden. Specifically Shrimp and Crab meal.

Thanks,

Art

In this paragraph, “The reason for this is because Amazon sees the first product as a more relevant result when someone enters in the search term “marshmallow roasting stick” despite it not being the best seller of the bunch. This could be because the product has had better sales in the past, higher rates of conversion, or even better reviews.”

I wonder which product you are mentioning?. First ranking product or the best seller ranking

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Honor 7X Becomes Amazon's Best Seller During Christmas

Honor X-series have achieved over 40 million unit sales in the global market with the Honor 7X being recognized as the best-seller during the Christmas week sales on Amazon according to the company.

Updated:December 28, 2017, 10:42 AM IST

Honor 7X becomes Amazon. in No. 1 Seller during Christmas (Image: Siddhartha Sharma/ News18.com)

Huawei sub-brand Honor announced that the Honor 7X became the No. 1 Seller on Christmas on Amazon and because of this stellar response, the company has decided to extend the open sale for the Honor 7X till January 05. Honor has decided to further extend the open sale by seven more days until January 05 exclusively on Amazon. in. The Honor 7X, priced at Rs. 12,999 (for 32GB Version) & Rs. 15,999 (for 64GB Version), was launched at an event in London and has sold over 40million since its launch in early November.

Honor X-series have achieved over 40 million unit sales in the global market with the Honor 7X being recognized as the best-seller during the Christmas week sales on Amazon. in according to the company. Now with flash sales in the association, no cost EMI with Axis, Bank, Citibank and HDFC Bank (Credit) the Honor brand is providing monetary benefits along with 90GB Airtel data, and 80% off on eBooks up to Rs 300 on the Kindle app.

As for its specifications, the Honor 7X is powered by a HiSilicon Kirin 659 octa-core SoC and will run Android 7.1.1 Nougat, topped with EMUI 5.1. The storage variants of the smartphone include 32GB, 64GB and 128GB options, with the capacity of expanding the memory up to 256GB using an external microSD. Following the industry trend, the device boasts of a 5.93-inch near bezel-less, Full-HD display with an 18:9 aspect ratio. It will run on a 4GB RAM and will be backed by a 3340 mAh battery.

Optics of the smartphone include a dual-lens camera setup at the back, with a 16-megapixel primary and a 2-megapixel Secondary lens with features like PDAF, LED-Flash, Face Detection, HDR and 1080p video recording @30fps. There is also an 8-megapixel shooter at the front, while the fingerprint sensor of the device has been shifted to the back. Connectivity options on the Honor 7X include 4G-LTE, Dual Nano-SIM (Hybrid), Wi-Fi Direct, Micro-USB 2.0 and Bluetooth 4.1.

Watch: Tech and Auto Show | Ep 24 | Honor 7X, TVS Apache RR 310, Volvo XC60 & More

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Amazon Best Seller Ranking: A Gu >

No matter how you slice and dice it, the exact secrets to Amazon’s algorithms will generally remain, well, secret!

One that concerns sellers is that of Best Sellers Rank (BSR). We’re competing to improve that number and to get our products into the buy box, but what does all of this really mean? Should we be worried about it?

Most importantly for sellers, it’s about your bottom line. Will BSR impact how many sales you make and your success overall? Let’s take a look:

What is Best Sellers Rank?

Best Sellers Rank (BSR) is a ranking of how an individual product is doing against other similar items. These rankings form best seller lists for categories and subcategories which give buyers a clearer idea of popularity outside the main Amazon Best Sellers List.

The BSR of a product in its applicable subcategories can be found under “product details” on the product page, as seen below:

How is BSR calculated?

BSR is calculated based on number of sales of the product over a given period of time, as compared to other products in the category or subcategory. Amazon updates rankings hourly as a reflection both of recent and historic sales of the product.

That’s really it.

There seem to be all sorts of myths floating about, suggesting that things like price, reviews or keywords are taken into account with BSR. That’s simply not true, BUT those are all factors which can impact the number of sales you make, therefore they do indirectly affect BSR.

Is BSR really important?

There are a few ways to approach this question. First of all, let’s start with the customer: will the customer make a purchasing decision based on the BSR of your product? Honestly, it’s unlikely that they’ll even take that into account – would you be focusing on that “product detail” box as a customer? Perhaps they’ll notice if the product is in the high thousands for BSR, but it’s more likely that’s something another seller would notice.

We know that customers will place heavy importance on the reviews for the product, as more than 88% of online shoppers incorporate reviews into their purchase decision. This means they’re probably scrolling right past that BSR and down to the review section.

One thing to also note is that BSR includes all sales, which means that even “free” sales of Kindle books count. Authors commonly use the giveaway tactic to boost their profiles, but that BSR boost in itself certainly isn’t improving their financial gains.

The same could be said for an increase in sales if you run some kind of promotional discount. Your run of extra sales might help to boost that BSR, but the discount may mean that it’s not doing a lot for your bottom line.

BSR might be an indicator of the health of your product, particularly if you see it improve over time. This will usually go along with more reviews, competitive pricing and maintaining an account status in good standing with Amazon, all of which play a role in winning that Buy Box (something important in order to be visible to the customer).

Another thing BSR can be good for is when you’re trying to make decisions about stocking new products. Looking at the BSR of similar products can help give you an indication of how many units they are selling each month, a factor that is used in Jungle Scout’s sales estimator. In this case, though, it’s other people’s sales rank that is of value to you, rather than your own.

What about those offers to improve BSR?

Sometimes we’ll see sellers getting excited about the idea of improving BSR, having received an offer of promotional services for that purpose. If improving BSR is the sole purpose of the promotion, you’re probably wasting your money.

The crux of the deal is usually to run a promotion offering heavy discounts on your product. Of course your BSR should improve by drawing more sales, however, you just offered that product at a discount – you’ve probably made a very small margin, if any at all.

Once the promotion is over, you’ve got a higher BSR, but that in itself is not going to drive future sales.

When might these promotional services be valid? One good reason would be if you want to drive more reviews for your product to improve against competitors. Overall, your sales depend on good reviews and visibility to customers (that is, ranking well in search and/or winning the buy box), neither of which are impacted by BSR.

What is important for sellers?

You could look at BSR as a symptom rather than a cure. It can be a good marker to let you know how you’re doing over time, but what really matters is that you’re improving your overall sales and hitting your financial targets.

BSR is mainly a vanity metric – you might be #1 in a subcategory, but what if it’s a tiny category with very few sales?

An important point for sellers is not to get too caught up in BSR because there are other, better metrics that are more important. For example:

Your organic ranking for keyword searches on Amazon. There are more product searches starting on Amazon than on Google, so it’s important for you to rank well for relevant keywords. Your success rate holding the buy box (buy box percentage). This is important because 82% of sales on Amazon. com go through the buy box, while this figure is even higher on the mobile app. The number and quality of product reviews you are getting. As stated earlier, reviews are important because customers use them to make buying decisions. On Amazon, there’s another good reason that they’re vital and that’s because they help inform the A9 algorithm that is responsible for search results. In other words, positive signs of customer satisfaction help to improve your search ranking. Your performance metrics. These help influence whether or not you hold the buy box. You might be an FBA seller with the cheapest price, but it’s possible for your overall performance to keep you out of the buy box. Your pricing. It’s important to have a handle on your pricing strategy because this is also a known factor in holding the buy box. This means monitoring and adjusting as necessary, possibly using an automated repricing solution if needed. Your financial metrics. Reaching your financial goals and maintaining healthy metrics will be the bottom line that says whether or not you stay in business. Your BSR could be 10,000 or more, but will that really matter if you’re nailing your financial targets?

As you can see, there is plenty of work to be done in managing metrics that matter more than BSR!

Final thoughts

To get back to those questions we asked at the beginning:

What does BSR mean? It’s a measure of your sales velocity compared to others in the same category. Will a boost in BSR also increase your future sales? No. Should we be worried about BSR? Not really!

While BSR is a nice, vanity metric to have (it’s kind of cool to see your product suddenly jump to a much lower number!), it doesn’t give a good indication of overall performance and it certainly doesn’t impact your bottom line.

You might use other seller’s BSR while researching the possibilities of a new product, but this is just a tool to give you an indication of their monthly sales.

Make sure you’re monitoring metrics that really matter to your overall performance and don’t get too caught up in BSR!