Originally published on June 16, 2020, updated June 30, 2020
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The first step to earning customers on the Amazon marketplace is selling something people actually want. While Amazon sellers face a lot of different factors that influence success, picking the right products is one of the most important.
Amazon provides some basic tools to help you understand what kinds of products are the most popular with their customers. To gain insights into the product offerings most likely to pay off on the platform, look to the Amazon Best Seller rankings.
An Amazon Best Seller is a product that sells at the highest level in its respective category on the site. Amazon provides a list of the best selling products divided by category. You can peruse a listing of the top 100 products in each of the top-level categories they use for classification, as well as within the subcategories they’ve created for each. For example, you can check the top sellers in Toys and Games, or go a level deeper to see the top products in Stuffed Animals and Toys.
In addition, on the product page for each item on the site you can find the item's best seller ranking in the Product Information section of the page. It lists the product’s rank in each relevant category and subcategory.
Amazon’s Best Sellers rankings look at both the quantity of products sold in a recent time frame, along with historical data on sales. The rankings are determined in comparison with products in the same category. A product in the electronics section is ranked based on its performance against other electronics, not books or kitchen supplies.
If you see a big uptick in sales of a product, but fail to see much change in your ranking, it likely means other products in the category also sold more.
Amazon updates all the Best Seller listings once every hour.
The vast majority of Amazon buyers use the search bar rather than navigating to the Amazon Best Seller page when deciding what to purchase, so how do these rankings influence sales? The main way is that items on the Best Seller list in a category earn an Amazon Best Seller badge.
The Amazon Best Seller badge is an orange marking that shows up at the top of the product listing, which makes it stand out from other products in the results. It shows consumers that others have chosen your product, which can boost their interest in it.
There’s no big secret to earning an Amazon Best Seller Badge, you simply have to sell the most in your particular category. But there are steps you can take to increase your odds.
While earning an Amazon Best Seller Badge can certainly feel like a big accomplishment and could lead to a boost in sales, it shouldn’t be a primary goal. The rankings change frequently, and the badge is likely to play a small role at best in how consumers decide what to purchase. Don’t let it become a distraction from more important goals, like increasing rankings and getting more reviews.
If you want to use the Amazon Best Sellers Rank list to help make decisions about what inventory to stock and sell, you may find it’s an imperfect tool. While it provides insights into what people are buying, the fast-moving nature of updates makes it hard to understand which items sell consistently over time. The layout, which shows fifty items per page, per category, makes it hard to identify trends at scale. For businesses serious about stocking a lot of products that want large-scale, long-term insights, it’s not the best option.
MarketScout is a tool specifically devoted to making Amazon market research easier and more efficient. You can gain insights on how well different items are selling, and how much you’re likely to profit if you add them to your inventory.
And instead of needing to do hours of research and continually reload the Best Sellers page, you gain insights within minutes and get updates automatically.
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