Breaking Down Amazon’s “Best Sellers Rank”

Breaking Down Amazon’s “Best Sellers Rank”

We talk to hundreds of entrepreneurs daily. Some are selling on Amazon, but many who haven’t started that leg of their personal journey yet. Most of those who aren’t yet selling on Amazon don’t realize Amazon will literally tell you what to sell.

Think of it from this perspective, if you can look at a product and know that it is selling well – all you have to do is go out and find that product cheaper. If you can do that, the distance between your buy price and sell price (minus applicable fees) is your profit. Amazon tells us what to hunt, all we have to do is find it cheaper and make money.

So, how does Amazon tell us what is selling?

They use a system called “Sales Rank”, or sometimes referred to as “Best Sellers Rank”, or BSR for short.

The Amazon BSR is an incredibly easy-to-understand system. It is a linear comparison for products in a given category, where the lowest sales rank (1) is the best-selling product.

Check this out:

A product ranked #1 in the Home and Kitchen Category is the best seller in that category. Whereas, a product ranked 4000 in Home and Kitchen is the 4000th best seller, so on and so forth.

That being said, it is important to note that a product ranked in Home and Kitchen does not compare or have any correlation to a product ranked in the Baby category. This ranking system strictly compares products from the SAME category, in a true ‘apples to apples’ comparison. The last thing you have to remember here (to get started), is products without a rank have not sold.

Sales rank is on the product page on Amazon. Go to the page, and scroll down until you see product details.

See for yourself in the example below:

prod details

Now that may appear to be a bit tricky, right? This product is ranked #2383 in Health and Household, but also shows #7 in Health & Household > Sports Nutrition > Endurance & Energy > Powders. This is absolutely CRITICAL. You only care about the top-level category rank, and should completely ignore sub-ranks.

So, for that product, the ONLY rank we care about is #2383 in Health & Household. Now, we have to determine what that means.

We use a site and app called Jungle Scout. They actually have a free tool that will provide you with an estimate of how many units that product sells each month through that listing on Amazon.

You can see the free tool here: www.junglescout.com/estimator

For the product mentioned above, that rank translates to approximately 1801 sales per month at the listed sales rank.

bsr

In our experience, this app and tool is incredibly accurate generally with around a 5-10% margin for error.

That being said, think about it; If you were selling that product, you could potentially sell 1800 units per month!

I will leave you with that for the day. Definitely go through and check out some products, use the free tool and imagine the possibilities!