Becoming a seller makes it your main goal to keep up with all trends and prices in order to increase your revenue without having to waste money on slow stock. Figuring out what data to pay attention to and how to make sense of it is one of the most crucial steps on the path to a successful business on Amazon. Whether it is a small and little-known business or a giant and well-known company, keeping track of product movements on the Amazon marketplace is very important, especially taking into account its enormous competition. Pricing, buy box ownership, and sales rank are all key data points that might encourage or break a stock purchase or liquidation move.
Becoming a seller makes it your main goal to keep up with all trends and prices in order to increase your revenue without having to waste money on slow stock. Figuring out what data to pay attention to and how to make sense of it is one of the most crucial steps on the path to a successful business on Amazon. Whether it is a small and little-known business or a giant and well-known company, keeping track of product movements on the Amazon marketplace is very important, especially taking into account its enormous competition. Pricing, buy box ownership, and sales rank are all key data points that might encourage or break a stock purchase or liquidation move.
However, Amazon does not make it simple to monitor this data. Nevertheless, third-party tools are attempting to fill the void. This is where Keepa swings into action. While Keepa is able to carry out many activities, its main advantage sellers can benefit from is sales rank and price history charts. However, learning how to use the data provided by Keepa to make informed and relevant purchasing decisions takes some expertise.
In this article, we will go over what Keepa is, how to use it and what are its main benefits and features.
What Is Keepa?
Keepa, a website and browser extension, is an Amazon price tracking tool that monitors hundreds of millions of goods across all major Amazon marketplaces. Keepa enables you to keep track of product price fluctuations, and keep abreast of sales rank trends.
Having all this data at your disposal will help you figure out how quickly a product truly sells and save money with downward price notifications. It gathers a great amount of essential and relevant information on any stock you have a stake in and shows it in an easy-to-read graph style.
Most importantly, the data on Amazon’s selling behaviour is part of the information Keepa provides. You are most likely familiar with such a situation: you purchase stocks of a product only to discover that Amazon has begun to sell it itself at a price that no other average merchant could hope to match. But you have a great chance of escaping this fate by learning how to use Keepa.
How Keepa Works
Keepa is available in two formats: browser extensions and the website (keepa.com). Let’s take a look at both and find out how they differ.
The Website
Keepa.com is considered the powerhouse of both the website and the browser extension. Here you’ll find all of its features, however, depending on your needs and requirements, they may or may not be useful to you. Some enjoy using this website to conduct programmatic analysis with the help of API (Application Programming Interface). If you have a list of ASINs you would like to track, Keepa.com is an excellent place to do it.
If you’re in search of a good deal, the Keepa Deals website will offer you a plethora of options. This tool might come in handy if you’re looking for something to flip somewhere else. Not to mention their features that reflect Keepa’s historical pricing and rank tracking. Plus the amount of information and data they collect is mind-boggling.
The Browser extension
Keepa shines the brightest when used in the browser. Most major browsers provide access to high-powered, high-detail graphing and data. Keepa browser extension that is readily accessible for Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Microsoft Edge.
Keepa Browser Extension VS Keepa Web Site
Generally, a browser extension is reserved for mundane day-to-day tasks and simple product research, whereas the website is more convenient for high-volume data collection or analysis.
In addition, over and above its sales rank and price history charts, Keepa’s website offers other useful tools for product discovery, evaluation, and research. You can also look for the top goods or merchant storefronts by category since Keepa collects data from users every time they view an item.
This has contributed to one of the most extensive lists of goods and sellers on the Amazon market. Taking into account this additional component, it would be more appropriate to consider Keepa a data company that gives insights beyond showing price charts.
At the end of the day, the information and data available on the website are available on a browser extension as well. It all depends on where Keepa fits into your workflow, and how and what you want to use it. Try out both options to see which one works best for you.
What information does Keepa provide?
Keepa provides information on Amazon’s top-selling items and top-ranked sellers, as well as new offer price, used offer price, history and price sales rank, Amazon offer price, and a total of offers in general, and the list goes on and on.
The ability to manage this software may significantly increase your chances of coming across high-quality items that will sell rapidly and ensure the projected ROI.
In this article, we are going to discuss many of the features and uses for Keepa, however, bear in mind that this is not an exhaustive list. We would recommend you devote the better part of a day to truly exploring everything this software provides, both on product detail pages with the extension and on the Keepa website. That way, you will find out how to navigate the data quickly and efficiently and can rely on it in the future when you need to analyze products.
Why is the information that Keepa offers important?
Frankly speaking, the product’s current sales rank and price reflect just a small part of the whole analyzing process.
Although the current sales rank and price might more or less precisely show a product’s selling in normal conditions, there are several things that might have a negative impact on the selling process in the future. For instance:
- Temporary supply shortage
- Seasonality
- Temporary supply excess
- Strong demand in the Q4
- Changes in the supply of competing products
- Current situation
Plus, it is impossible to understand the selling experience and potential of the product. For example:
Product A is a brand new product that was listed on Amazon less than a month ago. Today it was bought for the very first time, at last. After one sale, the rank decreased from one million to 50,000.
Product B has been on the market for some years now and has sold extremely well, ranking around 2,000 in its category. Recently Amazon has run out of stock, prompting other sellers to raise their prices. The selling of the product slowed down a bit, its rank decreased but it continued to sell at a higher price until those retailers also sold out as well. The remaining sellers are charging far more than the market will bear, therefore, the product has ceased to sell. A few weeks later, the rank has risen to 50,000.
If you had to make a buying decision based solely on the current rank, they would both seem equally appealing options, yet there are significant differences that the rank does not reveal. Product A has no sales history so far. Product B might start selling again if some sellers dropped their prices.
Above, we’ve listed only a handful of the factors that may cause short-term amendments in sales rank and price. Therefore, using only the product’s current sales rank won’t get you anywhere, let alone help you predict the future selling condition of the item. Having access to previous data, on the other hand, allows you to make a more accurate forecast of what might happen in the future.
Is Keepa Free?
No, Keepa is not a free tool; it costs €15 per month. This is their premium package cost, which includes all of their features. They do provide a free plan that gives you access to some information but does not cover all we have discussed in this post.
When you consider the data it offers you, Keepa is a really low-cost tool for your business. This investment provides an immediate positive ROI since it allows you to access the data designed to make your buying, research and pricing decisions as great as they can be.
How to Read Keepa Charts
Understanding how to use a Keepa chart to determine whether or not to opt for a specific option takes practice, not because it’s difficult or complex, but because you don’t know how to navigate the graph properly. Finding the right pattern that will provide the data and information you need can turn into minutes of staring instead of a few seconds of quick mental analysis and decision making. Here is a small guide to Keepa navigation:
- The product’s pricing is located on the left.
- The date can be found at the bottom.
- The sales rank (marked by a green line) is situated on the right.
You may change the date for any time period you want, from a single day to the whole product’s history on Amazon. Usually, somewhere around the middle is the most useful and efficient —one or three months are incredible options. After analyzing the past performance, you will be able to find out how often and regularly products are bumped up and down the sales rankings and how the price responds.
The Most Important Components of a Keepa Chart For Amazon Sellers
Sales Rank
Keepa’s sales rank history is for sure one of its most crucial features. Before making a final buying decision, it is extremely important to understand how well a product sells and the trends therein. Without this data you risk ending up with large amounts of surplus inventory you are unable to move unless you had been selling this product before.
The sales rank, also called the BSR, reflects how popular a product is within its category. Usually, the more in demand the product is, the higher it ranks, and the more units it sells every month compared to others in its category. You might notice the dramatic variability in the up-and down motions of the line on a Keepa chart. Do not let this scare you: the chart’s depiction of the sales rank scale is rather relative.
This ranking (with 1 meaning the greatest and highest-volume-selling product in its category) represents the item’s status as “best selling.” When items are sold, whatever the category they’re in, listings on Amazon will always bounce around and jostle for position, so-called place in the sun. For instance, an item with a BSR of 2,456 would then become the 2,457th best-selling product in that category.
A Keepa sales rank, also known as BSR feature, demonstrates the upward and downward trends of a certain ASIN’s sales rank. The scale can be between one and 10,000 or one and 1,000,000, depending on the time’s window displayed. In addition, with time, it becomes even harder and harder to notice small movements and changes.
Amazon is rather dumb on how a product is rated, but we can draw a few assumptions:
- A product’s sales are considered for the computation of N best-selling for a specific time period. We just don’t know how long that time window is open.
- The number of units sold has a direct (positive) impact on an item’s sales rank in that category, moving it higher up the list and down.
- The category’s sales rank is most likely logarithmic in the number of units necessary to achieve a given place.
Amazon’s position (orange, shaded)
For some sellers, the fact that Amazon is on the listing and their pricing may be quite discouraging and repulsive. If Amazon is selling an item sellers have been considering acquiring, they will abandon that idea right away, without doing any further research, since Amazon is a pretty vicious competitor, and it’s extremely difficult to top their prices. On the other hand, some merchants aren’t bothered by this and can even interpret Amazon price data as a hint of possible competition.
The Buy Box (magenta diamond)
Each mark denotes a spot where Keepa saw a change in the buy box. If you hover your cursor over these points, you will be able to see what Keepa noticed at that period of time. A steady buy box level suggests that the price is well supported. If you have noticed slow and consistent drops that do not rebound, there might be a penny war going on.
A penny war, often called a “race to the bottom,” occurs when many sellers set their repricers to lower the current buy box price by $0.01. As each seller’s repricer adjusts to take the buy box position, the sellers’ repricers adjust accordingly and drop the price by a penny. Frequently this leads to a continuous decline in prices, margins, and profitability, as well as a toxic and unfriendly selling atmosphere. A well-configured repricer will return to a truly high level. A better repricer configuration will help you to follow that trend, enabling maximum competition without inflating an item’s price and worth.
New, 3rd Party FBA (orange triangle)
In many cases, this symbol will correspond to the buy box in position on the chart. It means that an FBA offer is priced competitively enough to merit the buy box for their listing. Sometimes, an FBA offer is located considerably above the buy box position, meaning that the offer is overpriced, thus, it lacks competitiveness (in Amazon’s opinion).
New, 3rd Party FBM (blue square)
This part of the chart does not get as much attention, but it might be quite useful for sellers doing Amazon-Amazon flips. From time to time, you can see FBM merchants offering items at far lower prices than the FBA/Buy Box pricing, therefore leaving money on the table and a possibility for profits. Checking out this indicator might be very helpful for the booksellers who perform this type of flipping.
Cross-Referencing Charts with the Advanced Data Table
We’ve already discussed the components of a Keepa chart, but we haven’t yet mentioned the Data table that goes with it.
The Data table contains all relevant data and information about an ASIN, such as its brand details,category, measurements, listing data, UPC, and more. Furthermore, with the Data table, you can access even more useful sales-related data, such as average and peak sales ranks, as well as offers. All these additional metrics enable you to make more informed and smarter decisions about how a listing is performing. The average sales ranks will reveal a lot about the company’s long-term viability.
Final Thoughts – Why Should The Amazon Sellers Use Keepa?
Keepa is one of the most versatile and effective tools you could ever find in an Amazon seller’s arsenal. I’d even say it’s mandatory. The ability to track a product’s BSR and overall sales profile on the Amazon marketplace can contribute a great deal to a seller’s success and grant the ones who use it wisely a major competitive advantage. The last thing any merchant wants is stale inventory or a pile of goods they have no idea what to do with.
Nowadays, most sellers prefer to engage professional agencies that can assist them in developing a successful and lucrative business plan and growing their company. If you wish to stay competitive in the Amazon market, Nuoptima would be happy to help you succeed. Sign up for a free discovery call with one of our specialists right away!