How Amazon Sales Rank Can Lie

Why there’s more to a book’s demand than Amazon sales rank, and relying entirely on “best seller rank” (BSR) can be deceiving

When is a book’s Amazon sales rank not the rank?

These are the questions we’re going to answer:

• When is Amazon sales rank lying to you?
• When is Amazon sales rank not a measure of a book’s demand?
• When is there actually more demand that a bad Amazon sales rank indicates?

We are going to talk about how to profit from “reading between the lines” of Amazon sales rank – and reveal books that might actually be higher demand than sales rank indicates….

Example: A common book sales rank dilemma

• You’re out sourcing and you find a book.
• It’s Amazon sales rank is really bad. Like 10 million.
• The used Amazon price is pretty high, like $99.
• You like the price and potential profit, but you don’t want a book languishing in your Amazon inventory for 5 years.
• You put the book down and walk away.

(Sidenote: Hat’s off to you if you’d buy the book anyway. That’s what I would do. But this article isn’t for Amazon sellers like me.)

The question is: Is there really only one Amazon buyer for this book every few years? Or is there another way to read the data on your scanning app and get the real story?

Here’s where I’m going with this…

Often books that have steady demand don’t sell because they are priced higher than the market can bear.

In other words, its not that Amazon customers don’t want the book. It’s that they aren’t willing to pay the price Amazon sellers are asking.

With many of these books, as soon as the price on Amazon drops, the book sells withing weeks (or hours).

Example: Book With Bad Amazon Sales Rank That May Be Deceptive

An Amazon sales rank of 9 million. Pretty terrible.

Next we have the used and new prices on Amazon:

 

Let’s say you’re paying 50 cents for this book. What do you do?

There are three types of Amazon booksellers in this world….

1. The kind that would fixate on the book’s rank and say “no way, I’m not buying or selling this book on Amazon.”
2. The kind that fixate on the price, and say “I’ll let this sit at Amazon for years if I can get $90 for it.”
3. The kind who say “it depends…”

This is an article for those who are #3, who are often on the fence with low-demand-high-value books, and how I analyze books like this.

How to analyze a book with a poor Amazon sales rank and a high price

There’s two approaches to buying a book with terrible Amazon sales rank. The “I’ll drop the price and see what happens” approach, or the “I’ll look for clues in the data” approach.

Approach #1: “I’ll drop the price and see what happens.”

So you have a book with a bad sales rank and a high used Amazon price that found for cheap. Cool.

All you do is cut the price in half, and ship it in.

Often that book that hasn’t sold in years will sell in days or weeks.

I’ve seen this happen a thousand times.

What you’ve done is revealed pent up demand for a book – demand that was constrained because the price was out side what its potential readers on Amazon were willing to pay.

(On this note, this often happens with low-demand books in your Amazon inventory. Often its just that your price is too high. Drop the price, and they can often sell almost right away.)

Reminder: There is such a thing as a book almost no one wants.

I’m not proposing this as a way to sell any slow-moving title on Amazon. Tons of books won’t sell well at any price. Just to repeat: I’m saying that this works books where there is a demand, but the price prevents that demand from being expressed by buyers.

Approach #2: “I’ll look for clues in the Keepa data” approach

This is where we turn to Keepa for clues this book might have that pent-up demand we’re looking for, and a book that would sell on Amazon if we dropped the price.

First stop: The Keepa “all time” sales rank chart (you have to pay for this part of Keepa, btw).

You can see that this book has sold exactly once on Amazon in the last 1200 days / 3.5 years since this book was published. Not a good sign.

But that doesn’t tell the whole story…

Second stop: The Keepa “all time” Amazon price history chart

You can see here in that same 3.5 year period, the price has barely budged from its Amazon price of around $80.

What did we learn?

Here’s what we didn’t learn: “No one wants this book.”

All we learned was that no one wants this book at $80. Remember: The price has been steady for the entire duration of the book’s existence.

Does that mean the book will sell if we price at $40? Or $20?

Not necessarily, but we just got a great clue that the Amazon sales rank many not reflect actual demand. The “market” hasn’t been given the opportunity to express itself at a price lower than $80 – ever.

Can we prove a book will sell fast on Amazon if we price at 50% off?

We can’t.

There are some ways to get strong evidence it will (see my older article on “The 4 Laws Of Book Value” for this formula), but we did confirm no one has ever been given the opportunity to buy this book on Amazon at $40. So chances are good Amazon buyers want this book, but its just too expensive.

My “long tail test” is probably too big to recap for this article, but one of the major questions you’re asking are:

Is this a book on a niche subject that is unlikely to be replaced by any other title in existence?

Look at our example above:

I would say that definitely applies. So there are going to be people looking for this book on Amazon. It’s not obsolete. That’s a great recipe for pent-up demand.

Theoretically, if you listed a low-demand book on Amazon at a 50% lower price, you could see that book with a 10 million sakes become a book with a 1 million sales rank.

That’s how pent-up demand works.

The takeaways

• Amazon sales rank for books can be deceptive.
• Bad Amazon sales rank doesn’t mean low-demand, it means low demand at the current price.
• Don’t pass on a book that has bad sales rank but high price, IF Amazon buyers have not been given a chance to buy at a cheaper price.

-Peter Valley