Originally published on February 7, 2018, updated January 13, 2020
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Amazon shoppers love to reference an item's sales rank. In addition to indicating popularity, sales rank is also very effective at mitigating buyer's remorse. After all, it's hard to feel guilty about clicking the Buy Box for a top-rated product!
Taking a page out of your customers' playbooks, sales rank should also be an important benchmark for running your Amazon business. In this post, we'll explore why this metric matters - and, how to leverage an Amazon sales rank tool.
You ventured into online retail because you enjoy selling stuff and wowing customers. For you, eCommerce isn't just a job. It's a way of life. It's therefore reasonable to assume that you like what you sell. This can be both a blessing and a curse - allow me to explain.
On the one hand, no one is more passionate about your product catalog than you. That's great news. This passion motivates you to identify new vendors, source complementary items and build new kits. You love what you sell, and it really shows. On the other hand, falling too far in love with your products can spell disaster. Just because you like something does not guarantee Amazon greatness. Sure, you've got a keen intuition; sadly, you can't be perfect every time.
A sales rank checker, such as our MarketScout tool, helps you to quickly verify assumptions about a product (or products). For example, let's say that you just received an electronic catalog from a new supplier. The catalog contains several products that you're particularly excited about. Rather than relying on a "gut feeling" or clicking through dozens of product detail pages, MarketScout goes to work for you. Just upload the catalog and MarketScout promptly returns a detailed sales rank report.
Sort by sales rank to see which items are the most popular on the Amazon marketplace. For additional analysis, download your report into spreadsheet format. Slice and dice the sales rank data in a way that makes sense for your business.
Sales ranking information is useful for stocking up; however, it's not everything that you need to make an informed decision. It must be weighed against other meaningful data, such as:
MarketScout aggregates and synthesizes this data for you. With such powerful information at your fingertips, you're in a great position to find the right balance between profitability and current demand.
It's worth noting one additional fact about Amazon sales rank. That is, it's constantly in flux. Just because something has a low rank today, it does not mean that will be the case tomorrow, next week or next year. Even a slight uptick in sales velocity can be enough to make a noticeable impact on sales rank.
With this in mind, some sellers use MarketScout to identify the "undervalued stock" of the Amazon marketplace. When evaluating items with low sales rank, consider asking these questions:
MarketScout helps you answer questions like these. Just sort your report to show only those items without a sales rank. From the online report, you can then click over to the existing product detail page on Amazon.com. This makes it easy to learn more about each product and determine if it's worth the gamble.
As you can see, Amazon sales rank can have a big impact on your sourcing decision-making process. By leveraging an affordable tool, such as MarketScout, you can efficiently keep a close eye on sales rank - without losing track of the bigger picture.
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