What is a good Amazon sales rank?

This means that in the “Electronics” category, there are 536 other electronic products that are selling better than this product, and in the “On-Ear Headphones” category there are 39 products selling better than this one. This product may also be classified in other categories, but might not rank in them.

It’s important to understand the difference between the Best Sellers Rank and how a product will appear organically in the search results. Just because your product has a high sales rank, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll also get a high organic ranking. If your Best Sellers Rank is high enough in a particular category, say within the top-10, you stand a better chance of appearing on the first page of results for a particular category.

You should remember there are other factors which are going to affect your search ranking which will increase your likelihood of getting onto page one.

What is a good Amazon Sales Rank?

There’s no definitive answer to this question, because it is relative to the number of products that appear in a category alongside your products. For example, if you have a product which has a sales rank of 50,000, but the category has over 700,000 products in it, you’re doing pretty well. However, if you have a product that ranks 50 in a category of 60, you’re not.

The rule of thumb here is the lower the BSR in relation to the number of product listings in a particular category, the better you’re doing.

Obviously, there are some signs that your product has a particularly good BSR. For example if you manage to score the coveted Amazon Best Seller Badge, you’re on to a winner as this means your product is one of the highest performing products of that type. You can read more about the Amazon Choice and Best Seller badge here.

How does Amazon calculate the Best Sellers Rank?

Amazon uses real-time sales data as the primary metric for determining the BSR of a particular product. It does use historical sales data as well by pulling data from the past 2 years worth of sales events of an ASIN or product, but it gives a higher weighting to the more recent sales. The more a product sells in relation to other products in this category, the higher the sales rank will be.

The Amazon Best Seller Rank is updated every hour, meaning if your product has a slow spell and doesn’t sell any products, it may drop in sales rank. This is why it’s really important to maintain a high sales volume on your products if you can.

Amazon doesn’t use metrics such as customer reviews to influence the best sellers rank. However, it’s important to remember that customer reviews will influence how likely other customers are to purchase your product. So if you have more reviews, you’re likely to get more sales which will result in a higher BSR. We’ll go into this in more detail later on.

What is a good Sales Rank to aim for as a Amazon Seller?

Many training courses out there will advise you to only look for the very best stuff – Top 1% Sales Rank, $10 profit, 50%+ROI.
Which on the face of it is a great play. However, there just aren’t many deals like that out there. And of course, that’s what everyone else is looking for.

There’s also a potential issue that if there are great profits to be made, your competitors will undercut you to make the sale. So you make less than you had expected. And of course, if there are many sellers on a listing, you’ll win the buy box less frequently (unless you undercut, which is the race-to-the-bottom that we want to avoid.

If there aren’t many Top 1% deals, then what should you do?

Over the years of talking to people via SourceMogul, it’s become clear that some of the most successful sellers on the platform take advantage of what’s known as ‘Uncontested spaces’

So, instead of a Top 1% sales rank product with 50 other sellers, they find a Top 20% sales rank with 2 other sellers. Then they simply buy a bit less stock to account for a slower sales rate, but focus on a greater variety of products – so for example they may have 30 listings that sell 3 a month rather than 3 listings that sell 30 a month.

How to improve your Amazon Sales Rank

As we said earlier on, the key to improving your BSR is to increase the amount of sales of your products. But, you can’t force people to purchase your products can you? Well, no, but there are some things you can do to influence their decision and help them to understand why your product is a better choice than others. Here we run through some of the top things you can do.

Choose the right product category

The placement of your product in a particular category will affect its overall sales rank. If you put your product in a category with a higher number of items available,  it will have a harder time to break through into the first page of products for sale.

Equally, you should avoid putting your product into less relevant categories hoping you might make some additional sales there because your product will still sell slowly and this could affect your overall product conversion rate.

Partly your choice of category is going to be influenced by the product you are trying to sell, for example if you’re selling “headphones”, trying to include them in the “books” category is never going to work. However, they will fit into product categories such as “Electronics”, “Headphones” and “Accessories”.

This is why it’s really important that you do proper product research before committing to buy inventory of a particular product and understanding how it will fit amongst other similar products in that category.

Optimize your product listing

Whatever type of Amazon business you’re running, whether its a wholesale model or an arbitrage model, one of the main pieces of advice we can give you is to optimize your Amazon listings. So, what do we mean by this?

Amazon product listing optimization is the process of making sure your products are as appealing as possible to potential buyers. It’s also known as Amazon SEO, because it helps customers quickly and easily find your products through the Amazon search bar.

There’s a few things you can do to influence this. Such as creating an optimized product title and description based on short and long tail keywords your buyers are searching for, using focussed bullet points to highlight key features of your products, and using imagery for your product which makes it feel more appealing.

These things can all seem like a lot of effort, but we promise you they will be worth it. If your listing is optimized, your potential customers will more easily be able to find your product amongst all the others, and are more likely to buy it because you’ve helped them understand why yours is the best choice for them. And remember, the more you sell, the higher your sales rank on Amazon will be.

We’ve written a full guide on how to optimize your Amazon product page here, which is full of useful hints and tips on where to get started.

Improve customer experience

If you deliver your customers a better overall experience, they are more likely to purchase your products. That’s a fact. Optimising your listing is the starting point to this, but there are some other important factors to consider.

You should encourage customer reviews from people that have already purchased your product. Amazon has stated that 77% of consumers will read a customer review before they complete a purchase. As we said before reviews aren’t a direct factor in a products BSR, but the more positive reviews you have, the more likely it will be that you’re going to make a sale, which will improve the s

You should actively try to nurture positive reviews from your customers, but also use negative reviews as a way to improve your products and overall business. If customers all have the same negative things to say about your product offering or service, it’s a sign that you need to change something.

To further engage your customers, you should try and respond promptly to any queries and questions potential buyers may have about your product. If they ask a question and you’re quicker to respond than a competitor you stand more chance of making that sale.

Finally, offering more delivery options is a great way to improve the experience of your customers. Allowing them to choose Prime or fast delivery options means you’ve got more chance of giving them a positive experience, which in turn will result in positive customer reviews.

Customer experience is a key factor in improving your best seller rank on Amazon, if you engage with your customers and deliver them an exceptional delivery experience they’re more likely to rate you positively, which will help improve your BSR.

Consider seasonality

It’s a fact that certain products will sell better at certain times of the year. You’re less likely to sell snow shovels in summer, in the same way you’re unlikely to sell air conditioning units in the middle of winter. However there’s the odd occasion where you might.

If you have products available when other Amazon sellers don’t, you might make the odd sale here and there. Making small incremental sales during these out of season periods will all add up to your overall sales rank, meaning when you do get into a peak season for your product, you’ll already have a competitive advantage.

Make sure you price your product sensibly

At the end of the day, you could do all of the above steps to perfection, but if the pricing of your product isn’t right, you’ll struggle to sell it. Especially if it’s featured in a competitive category, so it’s really important that you always price your product competitively. The aim of the game is to make enough profit on the items you’re selling, whilst at the same time not overpricing your products so they don’t sell.

The easiest way of doing this is by using a tool such as SearchMogul. SourceMogul allows you to identify profitable products that are available for sale at many of the biggest retailers in the US and then compares this with similar products for sale on Amazon. It uses a suite of easy to use inbuilt analytic tools to show you the types of products you should be buying and at what price you can sell them at to make a profit.

By using SourceMogul to help with competitively pricing your products, you’ll not only begin to grow the sales for your online arbitrage business, but you’ll also stand a better chance of improving your overall Amazon best sellers rank.

Win the Amazon Buy Box

The Amazon Buy Box is a key part of the product details page. It allows customers to directly add an item to their cart and make a purchase. Winning the buy box can be an excellent way of maintaining a high rate of sales on your products which will then help increase the best sellers rating on your products.

This one is probably one of the last things you’ll be doing when you’re trying to improve your BSR, because being able to get the Buy Box in the first place relies on you already having a good and consistent rate of sale, well optimized products, and competitive pricing, alongside a range of other things.

However, getting the Buy Box helps increase the rate of sale on your products, so if you can win it, you’ll be in a great place to keep those sales coming in helping you to rank higher.

Amazon Sales Rank Frequently Asked Questions

How long does it take to get a sales rank on Amazon?

This really depends on a few different factors. Because the Amazon Sales Rank, also known as the Best Sellers Rank (BSR) is updated every hour based on real time sales data Amazon needs to build up enough data first before it can give you a rating.

If you have a product which you sell a lot of in a relatively short amount of time, you could get a BSR fairly quickly. However, if you have a slower selling product it might take you some time before you get one.

The category your product features in may also affect this. If your product is for sale in a category where the overall sales rate is slower anyway, Amazon will assess this as part of its algorithm to assign a BSR to the product you’re selling.

What does no sales rank on Amazon mean?

This isn’t necessarily a bad sign. It just means Amazon hasn’t got enough sales data to attribute a BSR to the product. If the product is a new product, that isn’t a reason for concern, however if the product for sale hasn’t got a BSR, it could mean that the product hasn’t been very popular and isn’t selling, which could be a warning sign.

Summing up

When it comes to deciding what is a good Amazon sales rank, there’s a range of factors that need to be considered as your rating completely depends on the type of product you’re trying to sell, how many other products appear alongside it in its category, and how long it’s been on sale for.

Your best bet when trying to improve your Amazon sales rank is to follow the advice in this article. Optimize your products, consider your categories carefully, make sure your pricing is competitive, and deliver an excellent customer experience. If you do all this, it won’t be long before you have a range of best selling products under your belt and you see your sales number keep on growing.