Crack the Amazon Sales Rank Code

So you finally put your foot in the door and started sourcing products to sell on Amazon. You found a widget with an awesome profit margin and you were able to grab 12 of the item. You just couldn’t wait to walk through your door and get them listed on Amazon. You finally list them on Amazon and now you are just waiting to see the widgets fly off the shelves.

The next thing you know a month has gone by and you haven’t sold one single widget.

What happened? You priced your items competitively with the other two sellers but there doesn’t seem to be a buyer in site.

This sounds like a classic case of not paying attention to the Amazon Sales Rank of the widgets you bought.

Whenever you are trying to source items to sell on Amazon you have to pay attention to the Sales Rank. Amazon sells over 488 million items and there is a very big difference between how many sales the #1 Book and the #700,000 Book gets.

First we need to know where to find this all important Amazon Sales Rank. When you get to the product page for the item you are thinking about selling you simply scroll down the page until you get to the Product Information section. Once you are there you want to look for the “Best Sellers Rank” and the number next to that will be the Sales Rank.

So we finally found our all powerful Amazon Sales Rank but what exactly does it mean? Amazon calculates a products sales rank by the number of recent sales that the product has had in its respective Category. This number is reported to be updated every hour.

Each product is given a rank based on the Category that it lies in. This is very important to understand because the #100,000 product in the Books Category might sell a lot more than the #100,000 product in the Appliances Category.

“Why is that?” Here’s an example

In the picture below you can see that there are 56,459,275 books listed in Amazon’s Books Category. That means that the #100,000 ranked book was selling in the Top 1% of Books. That’s pretty good!

Now let’s take a look at how the #100,000 ranked product compares in the Appliance category. As you can see in the picture below there are 916,800 products in the Appliances category. That means that the #100,000 ranked Appliance is selling in the top 11% in its category. That is also pretty good but the amount of sales that the Appliance would get would be nowhere near the amount sales that the Book would get.

Paying attention to the Amazon Sales Rank of a product is one of the most important aspects of successfully selling on Amazon. A product ranked #10,000 in a Category may be selling 40 times a day on Amazon while a product ranked #100,000 might sell once a month.  This is very important to incorporate into your Amazon selling strategy. No one wants to get stuck with products that won’t sell!

Great! Now you have a basic understanding of Amazon Sales Rank to help you decide which products are worth reselling. In our next article we are going to dive into some online tools that will allow us to figure out even more about a products performance based on its Sales Rank.