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Sales rank on Amazon has its own term, “Best Seller Rank”, or simply BSR.

BSR is what you’ll see used most often.

BSR: What Is It?

Amazon Best Sellers Rank (BSR), also known as the “Amazon Sales Rank”, is a score which indicates a product’s sales rank on Amazon in a given category.

Amazon assigns this score to a specific product. BSR ranks a product based on sales and historical sales data – which fluctuate hourly.

You can find a product’s BSR listed on Amazon in multiple places, including:

  • On a main Best Selling Products page
  • On a product’s detail page
  • On a category-level Best Selling Products page

How Does It Work?

BSR is calculated by the number of recent sales and historical sales data relative to any other products in the same category.

Plus, of course, the predictions of Amazon’s top-secret algorithm as to the potential success of a product.

This is why a new product can sometimes rank higher. Amazon is making a prediction that the new product is likely to do better than a more established one which may have bad reviews or slow sales over a recent time period.

And so time in the saddle isn’t a guarantee of scoring a higher BSR.

Sales rank shows how well a product is selling relative to other products in the same category. A product with a BSR of #1 in a category is the most-purchased product. Again, that ranking is dynamic, and applies only to that specific category.

A product with a BSR of #5 is the fifth most purchased product in that category, etc.

In other words, sales rank on Amazon tells you at once how many other products are selling better than your own. If you’re #5 for a given category, there are 4 more products selling better than yours.

Is BSR Important?

All this means, really, is that you can’t put much stock in your product’s performance in a single category.

Amazon created these BSR lists to, according to them, “highlight an item’s rank in the categories or subcategories where it really stands out.”

That means not necessarily in relation to other, similar items.

So, how important is BSR?

Let’s put it this way, you don’t want to focus on winning Amazon BSR as a way to generate sales for your products.

Customers find your products through search. They’re typing in keywords to find what they want, and those keywords are matched against search terms for listed ASINs.

Because of that – the way people search – there are things much more important than BSR. Such as ranking for those money-making keywords.

Are you winning those search results? Do you have solid organic content? A strong advertising strategy?

If not, your BSR will suffer and you’ll need to work on the above.

And so your biggest focus should be on things like targeted advertising and your ability to get good converting sales (not spending a ton of money to get a sale).

Get those rocking, and your BSR will likely rise as a result.

Working It

So what is BSR good for, then?

The answer is that it’s an excellent indicator for how your product is doing.

That’s right. Noticing when your BSR changes can tell you something changed – for better or worse – and it would be wise to find out exactly what did.

And that sort of insight is what being a successful seller on Amazon is all about.

 

To your selling success.