What is the Amazon Sales Rank and How It Can Benefit You

Amazon Sales Rank

The Amazon Sales Rank is one of the most valuable tools that you will find in the online book selling world.  The Amazon Sales Rank helps you make better buying decisions for new inventory, it tells you approximately how fast a book is likely to sell and gives you an idea on how many more copies are selling than any other book in Amazon’s catalog for comparison purposes.

Some online book sellers focus heavily on this number yet others don’t spend as much time with it.  Everyone has their strategy, but I, personally, focus heavily on the Amazon Sales Rank.

The Amazon Sales Rank is a number that Amazon assigns to all books in it’s huge catalog of millions.  It is a number set to give you an understanding of the volume of sales a particular book is getting.

Amazon has being tight lipped about exactly how this number is calculated but there is a basic understanding that the higher the number, the more recently the book has sold.  The number is NOT about how often it is expected to sell or how many copies it is selling.  It is simply an indicator of the last time a copy has sold.

In my opinion, the Amazon Sales Rank only gives you the answer to 1 question.

• When was the last copy of this book sold?

There is no other voodoo about it.  It’s also a good indicator of future sales, but that is not it’s explicit purpose.  There have been a few studies that try to understand it such as this study on understanding Amazon’s Sales Rank.  Also, as you can see from the comments on this blog post about how Amazon’s Sales Rank is hotly contested because no one really understands it fully besides Amazon itself.

Don’t forget about the recent Amazon Sales Rank fiasco.  People were in an uproar about gay and lesbian books myseteriously losing their sales ranks.

It helps many people including online booksellers, authors, publishers and the like but to give it some perspective to us, online booksellers, take away these points.

• Don’t necessarily think that a book’s sales rank will automatically classify it as a quick seller or not
• If you come across a book that has no sales rank at all, this means it has never sold on Amazon before.  However, do not let that sway you from buying it if you get a great deal.  That customer just might come along and be looking for it.
• Don’t use the Amazon Sales Rank as your sole indicator of which books to put in your inventory.  Factor in the lowest 3 used prices as well as the sales rank to make an accurate balance between the time you expect the book to sit on the shelf, your overall storage space and the amount you are paying for it.
• No matter how much research people do, no one will ever know for sure how this number works.  Do some testing of your own.  Pay close attention to a particular book’s sales rank when you buy it, monitor other sellers’ listings on that book to see if you can estimate other sales of the same book and finally notice it when your copy sells.
• Use TitleZ.com to track the trending sales rank of a book.  As I mentioned in my previous post, TitleZ will give you a timeline of what a books general popularity is to give you an idea of future sales.

If you previously haven’t paid attention to Amazon’s Sales Rank in the past, now is your chance to.  It is yet another powerful tool in your knowledge arsenal to make more money selling books online!