How To Read the KEEPA Chart to Find the Right Products On Amazon 2024
author
Feras Al-Musa
published
November 15, 2022
Selling on Amazon requires analyzing the market and finding the right product, you can find one product that can generate so much money for you, and some other products that will barely move. It all depends on you, and how you can use tools in your favor to sell on amazon profitably
When you buy products and send them to Amazon warehouses you’re only excited to see your products sell fast the moment they go live. But the reality is a bit different. Things can change overnight with products selling on Amazon. When you use scanning tool to Look for products you might not be seeing the full picture.
It’s easy to over look important factors that scanning tools have missed, and aren’t design to look for them. So you commit to a product not knowing how many sellers are selling the products, how much does the price of the product fluctuate.
It sure doesn’t show the fluctuation of ranking. It might show you who’s on the buy box at the moment of the scan, and the ranking at the moment you looked at it. But thats how far it goes.
So what could have gone wrong?
Well for one, the rank at the time you shipped your product drastically changed, causing you to not being able to move any items.
This could be a direct reason of price reduction, meaning one of the sellers might have dropped the price dramatically to get rid of the product from their inventory, which could lead to increase in sales volume, and as a result shows great product ranking.
We look at the BSR ( Best Seller Rank) to determine the salability of the product. Now as you may know the lower the BSR the better for you and for the product.
Another issue could be that one of the sellers that you might have missed was Amazon itself. and at the time of the scan it didn’t show them simply because they were out of inventory.
This happened many times to me and other sellers as we started selling on Amazon.
But the Good news is, you get to do it the right way!
Using Keepa Plugin has been a game changer in the the way we source, list and sell products. It offers the best chances to succeed on Amazon.
Selling products on Amazon should never involve guessing or gut feeling. There are metrics and key indicators you MUST take in consideration if you want to be profitable on Amazon. And KEEPA helps us do just that.
UNDERSTANDING THE KEEPA EXTENSION
If you’re not familiar with Keepa, I’m going to break it down to you so you can download and use it.
KEEPA Is tool, a Chrome plugin, you can use to look at product’s rank and price history. It also shows the historic seller activity of that specific product. What that means, it will show previous and present sellers of the product you’re researching, including Amazon. KEEPA provides you with a chart that shows right under the product image on Amazon product page on your Chrome browser. Just to be clear the chrome browser is the browser owned by Google I highly encourage you to use chrome because it works well with plugins, and works well with Amazon seller central.
Understanding the graphs, and being able to read the data correctly will help you avoid losses, and allows you to find profitable products.
Most importantly, as I mentioned, the goal is to remove doubt and any guessing when it comes to selecting your next winning product.
Displaying KEEPA Extension on Amazon
Once you download the KEEPA extension on your google Chrome browser, the KEEPA chart will start displaying directly under the product detail page on Amazon. The image below shows where KEEPA chart displays and what information it shows for the free version of the plugin
Keepa Free Account vs Keepa Paid Account
Before we go into details of every feature on the Keepa Chart, I want to go over the subscription options on this tool. That way it will help you understand why they charge for specific tools and what you might need to have a successful Retail arbitrage selling experience on Amazon.
When I started using Keepa it was a free account, but at later years they added the paid membership to include more advanced features. Below I created a table to breakdown what is included in paid and what is not in the free account.
The free version of Keepa will provide you with fundamental features such as
- Price Tracking
- Sales Rank History to some extent.
The Paid Account However Will give you the following: – Access to interactive Sales Rank history graphs
– Access to detailed Buy Box Statistics and offer details
– Access to interactive eBay price history graphs
– Access to interactive Offer Count, Review / Rating history graphs
– Basic access to Keepa API with 5 token/min
– Price increase tracking
The Paid Account has two payment options:19
Breaking down the Chart
Alright, lets take a closer look at the chart and start by understanding the graph axes. If you look at the top graph left side you will see the price point of the product $5 being the lowest and $30 being the highest for this particular product. On along the right side you will see the ranking of that product, or what we refer to as BSR ‘ Best Seller Rank’.
Now if you look on the far right side you will see some option items to choose from to customize the data you are looking for. So for example If you need to check only Amazon as a seller you would click the orange circle where it says amazon, and a graph will show only amazon selling the product. Same with other colors, each one represent data you would like to see. To see new 3rd party FBM (blue line), New 3rd Party FBA (Orange line), and Sales Rank (green line). You can combine all of them in one graph.
Keepa allows you to control the time frame for the product sales, so you can choose Day, Week, Month, 3 month view, Year and even All history. I personally start with 3 months, because it gives you a good indication of consistency.
You might ask ” how do I see specific changes on an any given day?” And I would say: thats a really good question!
Keepa gives you the option to hover on the chart and wherever the mouse stops it will give you data points based on your filter you chose.
Let’s take a deeper look on the next graph blow. for example on Tuesday July 25th Amazon Listed this product at $9.97, and New seller also listed at the same price of $9.97 but we can also see that there are new FBA seller listing it at $19.98, and a new FBM seller listing at $18.97.
We can also see that the sales rank is 107 and the buy box was granted to amazon.
So what is this Keepa chart showing Amazon Sellers?
Green line represents the sales rank
In the graph above you can see the sales rank in the past 3 months has remained consistently below the 1000, which is performing really well. Remember the lower the sales rank the better the product is selling.
What this tells me, is that this product is very popular and shoppers purchase this toy frequently, especially when it’s priced at $9.97.
You can see the sales rank was above 3000 in June when amazon was out of stock.This shows how rank can change significantly over the course of days based on who is selling and at what price point is it selling at.
The Orange shaded area represents amazon inventory in stock, and the white Gap indicates out of stock
The shaded area in orange shows amazon selling this product and is stocked up with inventory.
In the graph above you can see a small gap end of June that lasted for few days. This is the period in which amazon ran out of inventory and were no longer in stock.
You can also see that this is the same period of time Sales rank went from 107 all the way to 3000 because the price changed in that period of time.
What this tells me is that Amazon knows how valuable this product is and how frequently it sells, and they like to stay in stock with it. This is a product I would not have known how risky it is to sell it without knowing how often amazon runs out.
The Blue line shows new lowest offer by 3rd party sellers, FBA, and FBM ( not the price the item has sold for)
This line shows both FBA and FBM 3rd party sellers entering the market with this product. the new offer captures the lowest price, not the price they sold for.
From the graph above your will see blue and orange triangles, these represent which type of sellers listed this product. The orange Triangle represents the FBA sellers and the.
For example in the previous graph above. a new FBA party listed the product at $19.98, while on the same day a new 3rd party FBM seller listed the product at $18.97
As a side note, being an FBA seller will give you the advantage of selling more, since your product will be considered prime and Amazon favors FBA sellers even if they have a bit higher price than FBM sellers.
I will cover this next in details but I want you to keep in mind that you don’t use the FBM pricing as a benchmark for your prices.
Lime Green line shows the review count of the product
This line represents the number of reviews over time. Now to me the review count is a major indicator of how the product is selling. Typically on average review rate hovers around 3% so for every 100 unit sold only 3 people will leave a review. and when you see a product with increasing review count it tells you how well this product is selling. Sometimes you might see a dip in review count. This happens when amazon is auditing shoppers’ accounts and remove bad reviews.
The Green line shows the Sales Rank History
On this chart above, we can see that the rank is trending up (which means it’s getting worse) when Amazon goes out of stock, especially if the 3rd party New prices increase. In fact, now that Amazon has been out of stock for over a month, the rank has continued to climb. We can see that this toy was ranked at 30,000 when Amazon was last in stock on February 9. But now on March 20, the rank is 120,000.
This tells us that shoppers buy this toy quite frequently when it’s priced at $25 instead of $40. This shows you that rank is merely a snapshot in time and can change significantly over the course of a month or even a week based on who is selling it and how much they are selling it for.
Another way you can look at the green line is that when you see each spike in sales rank from a higher number to a lower which means (better)in this case, usually indicates at least one sale. You can try to count the “low points” on the green line on a Keepa chart to count the spikes. You’ll note that when the rank is really low in January, it’s almost impossible to count the spikes. For a rank that low, we can guess that there are many sales happening with each change in sales rank.
View Buy Box and Merchant Fulfilled (MF) Prices for more information
So far, we’ve only looked at the lowest New offer and Amazon’s price. But Keepa has a lot more to offer if you explore the options on the right.
For example, when you turn on the Buy Box data, you’ll get even more valuable insights, showing how the Buy Box price changes over time, which is key for making smarter decisions about pricing and competition.
Here’s what we get when we turn on the Buy Box data in the settings.
The first thing I notice is that on February 9, the Buy Box was awarded to an FBA seller at $39.98 even though Amazon was also in stock at $24.99. This leads me to believe that Amazon was back-ordered on their own inventory at this time. So Amazon let the higher priced 3rd party seller have the Buy Box so that the customer can get the toy faster.
This also shows me that there are large periods of time when there is no Buy Box offer at all. There hasn’t been a Buy Box offer since early February. There was also no Buy Box offer the week of Christmas. So clearly Amazon is suppressing the Buy Box when they think the price is too high. It seems like $39.99 might be the highest I can price this while still hoping to get the Buy Box.
Another thing I can change in the settings is to view the lowest New price but only from MF or FBA sellers. For this toy, I wanted to check out the FBM (Merchant Fulfilled) price history
When We look at February 9, for example. We can see Amazon gave the Buy Box to a FBA seller even though they were priced higher than the MF seller. Of course, the MF seller may have been charging for shipping which would price them higher than the FBA price.
If you want to view the history of low FBA offers, you can simply turn on the “New, 3rd Party FBA” setting.
Check the Year view or All view for more data
Sometimes, it’s helpful to zoom out and look at a longer time frame. If you’re making seasonal buying decisions (like toys for December, textbooks in August, or Easter candy in March), switching to the Year view on Keepa can give you a better understanding of price trends and patterns across the full season.
so if we zoom out to the year for the same toy. On Dec 1st last year, the low offer New price jumped up to $46.85 with a rank of 11,749.
and we can see that Amazon was out of stock on this toy for few weeks during the peak holiday period, but the product still sold with a Buy Box price of nearly $40. This kind of data is really helpful to have when you’re sourcing for holiday season or for the Q4 sales.
