The Best Seller Rank (BSR) is one of the most important metrics that you should pay attention to when you buy products to resell them on Amazon. That’s why we use the BSR metric in our product research when we collect products for our Amazon Lead Lists.
Best Seller Rank or BSR is a metric that shows you how well a product sells within the category.
What is the Best Seller Rank (BSR) on Amazon?
The Best Seller Rank (BSR) is a numerical ranking system, which can tell you how well a product is selling on Amazon in its category. But how does Amazon come up with this number?
Well, it compares a single product with others in the same category. The BSR is updated hourly and reflects the latest sales data.
However, it is important to understand that each product can have multiple BSRs if the product is found in multiple categories. So, a product can have a high rank in a niche category but have a lower rating in a broader one.
Another important thing is how to read the BSR on Amazon.
A lower BSR number indicates higher sales. For example, if a product has a BSR of 1, it indicates that this is the best-selling product in the category.
So, if a product has a higher BSR, it indicates that the product has fewer sales compared to others in the same category.
How Can I See How Well A Product Sells on Amazon?
Every category on Amazon has a different number of products. Usually, if the product is within the top 1-1.5% in the category it should sell well.
So, a 50,000 BSR does not sell the same in Beauty and in the Home and Kitchen category, since in Beauty there are 14.000.000 products and in Home and Kitchen there are over 160.000.000 products. Therefore, the 50,000 BSR would sell a lot more in Home and Kitchen.
However, still the question remains, how much does it sell? There are different tools that have the sales estimator feature where you input the BSR, and the category and tool show approximately how many units the product sells per month.
Having said that, those are only estimates, there is no software that can tell you the exact number of units that the product sold. That’s the information that only Amazon has.
How can I make the decision on how many units I should buy if there is no exact number of units sold in the last month or the last 90 days?
Although there is no exact number of units sold in the last 30 or 90 days, the information provided by the software tools even though is estimated, is still pretty accurate, and you can consider the number of units that were sold provided by the software as relevant information.
There is also a new feature released by Amazon a couple of months ago called “Bought in the past month” that we will talk about shortly.
Why is the BSR (Best Seller Rank) so Important?
The reason why the BSR is so important is that even if you have outstanding profit that you could make from selling a product, you won’t make that profit if the item doesn’t sell at all.
Let’s say you run into an item that has over 300% ROI and with a simple investment of $1000 you would make a profit of $3000. If you plan to invest $1000 in this product and the cost per item is $40 you would need to purchase 25 units so you could invest $1000 in this product and earn your well-deserved $3000 profit. Pretty cool right? The only problem with that is the BSR.
What would you do if the BSR is 1,450,000? Would you still buy that product? If yes, would you buy 25 units or less?
That depends on other relevant information such as Are you looking into 90-day average BSR or current BSR? Why is the BSR so high? Does it not sell well? Or is there some other reason such as no one is currently selling that product and therefore the BSR is very high?
If you can find listings that were selling well recently, but the BSR is not very good at the moment, don’t avoid that listing.
You may have found a golden egg where the ROI is great and there is no competition at all, hence the reason the BSR is so high (The product can’t sell if there are no sellers selling it right?) You need to take all the relevant information into consideration to prove if the BSR is consistently high or the product is in deficit and that’s the reason for low supply and no competition for the product.
We’ve developed a special system looking at important metrics including the BSR, that can highlight profitable products that sell. If you want to learn more about our technique, check out how we do an Amazon product quality check and whether a product deserves a spot on our list.
Bought in the Past Month Feature on Amazon
This is a new feature that Amazon released a couple of months ago and it is NOT an estimate. This is relevant information that Amazon is giving themselves and is showing how many units has the product sold in the past month.
The only problem is that is not giving the exact number of units, it is giving a range. You may see that it shows “Bought in past month 50+” or “Bought in past month 100+” etc. When you see “bought in past month 50+ “that really means that the product has sold between 51 and 99 units in the past month. If it is 100+ instead of 50+, that means it sold between 100 and 199 units in the past month and so on until the 1000+ units bought.
When a thousand or more units are sold on Amazon, if you see 1000+ units bought, that means that between 1001 and 1999 units were sold in the past month. This is a pretty cool new feature that Amazon released that will furthermore help the sellers to make accurate calculations and decisions in regard to how many units should you buy from this product.
