Amazon Sales Rank: Everything You Need to Know

It’s estimated that around 3,000 new sellers join Amazon every day. The competition is vast, and its growth isn’t slowing down.

There are plenty of ways to stand out on Amazon, but one of the most important signals of success is ‘Amazon Sales Rank’.

This post walks you through exactly what Amazon Sales Rank is, and how it’s calculated, and we’re even giving you some tips on how to improve it.

Let’s get started with the basics.

What does sales rank mean on Amazon?

Before we dive into the details, let’s first make sure you have a solid understanding of what Amazon’s Sales Rank is. Also known as Amazon Best Sellers Rank (BSR), Sales Rank determines how well a product is selling on the platform and represents the product’s popularity in either its subcategory or main category. All products on Amazon receive a ranking for their subcategories, but only some products get a ranking for their main category as well.

How is Amazon’s sales rank calculated?

Amazon calculates the BSR based on the number of times the product has recently sold. The more sales the product generated a few days ago, the lower its BSR, which is a good thing.

Quick quiz…

1. If a product’s BSR is 1 is it selling well now?

Answer: Yes.

2. If a product’s BSR is 100,000 is there room for improvement?

Answer: Also, yes.

Think of it as similar to Google search—the first position (yes, the coveted #1) is the spot every site owner strives for because of its high click-through rate.

Why is your Amazon sales rank important?

You’d think BSR may influence the product page’s visibility on Amazon’s search engine results pages (SERPs).

Unfortunately, there’s little to no correlation between having a good Amazon Sales Rank and high organic rankings, as Amazon SEO is a different matter altogether.

If BSR doesn’t influence search results, why even bother with it?

Here’s why:

Shoppers don’t just buy the first thing that appears on an Amazon search. They check out other factors that help inform their purchasing decisions. Let’s look at a quick example.

If the product appears on top of Amazon search results but has a low star rating, only a handful of customers, and bad reviews, users are likely to look for the next best product from the results.

Amazon Sales Rank adds another layer to the buying decision.

A product with a good BSR is a sign that it’s popular among buyers. And if people have to choose between an unproven product with few sales and one with a lot of buyers, which do you think they’ll choose? Our guess is the latter.

How to find sales rank on Amazon

Simple. To see a product’s Amazon Sales Rank, go to its product listing.

From here, scroll down the page until you reach the “Product information” section.

What is a good sales rank on Amazon?

Ok, so we mentioned earlier that a good sales rank for your Amazon product is the closest to #1. But, it’s important to note that a product can have a separate BSR for its general category and its subcategory.
Here’s what that looks like. The product in the screenshot below has a BSR of #9 for its general category (Camera & Photo Products) and #1 for its subcategory (Monoculars).

This means that the product is the best-selling monocular and is in the top ten among the best-selling camera products on Amazon.

Ideally, you want to have the best-selling product in the general category to achieve the highest BSR for it. But getting a high BSR (or, in the example above, the best) for its subcategory is not too bad either.

Either way, your focus should be to get your product as close to a BSR of #1 as possible.

4 Tips: how to increase your Amazon sales rank

If anything, BSR is a way of Amazon telling you that you should do everything in your power to increase your product sales. Here are four of the ways you can do this:

1. Observe Amazon SEO practices

There are a hundred different parameters that affect your SEO on Amazon. Using the right keywords for your product pages is one of the most important factors that can make or break your search rankings.

First, start by finding out your product’s short-tail (or broad) keywords. For example, if you are selling a floor lamp then your broad keyword should be “floor lamp”. Then, add descriptors to your broad keyword to come up with all the possible search terms people would search for. For example, you may be selling an ‘LED floor lamp” or an “arc floor lamp”. These would become your long-tail keywords.

• Pro tip: Use Similarweb’s keyword research tool and Amazon keyword tool to easily find the keywords you need to target based on real search data. The tool shows you each relevant long-tail keyword and its search volume. You can export the list for each product and send it to your team in a matter of minutes.

Refer to Amazon’s style guide to find out all the different types of information users expect to see in your product description. This could give you great ideas for keywords.

You can also look at what your competitors are doing and which keywords they include in their product titles and descriptions. Do this for each product listing in order to maximize its chances of appearing on the first page of Amazon’s search results.

2. Optimize for the user experience

Keywords are just part of the picture. The way users engage with your product page affects your SEO. Let’s say your product listing started appearing top of Amazon SERPs. And then a few weeks later you notice it sliding lower and lower on the page.

You have all the right keywords, and your titles and descriptions are optimized, so what could be affecting it? The user experience.

Amazon ranks products higher based on how users engage with your products. Here are a few key questions to ask yourself:

• Do your images look good?
• Does your image quality match or exceed your competitors?
• Do you have any videos on your product pages?
• Do you have good customer reviews?
• Is UGC and social proof sprinkled throughout the page?

Look at what your competitors are doing and see if you could optimize your Amazon product listings for the user experience. That should give you a good boost in organic traffic.

3. Continue to A/B test

Success on Amazon is not an exact science. Search algorithms and user preferences change very quickly and you need to continuously test different elements on your product pages.

Amazon has a feature called Manage Your Experiments which lets brands run A/B tests or split tests. One example of an A/B test is creating two variations of the product title and seeing which one performs better. The first variant could have the format “brand-product name-keyword,” and the second variant could be “keyword-brand-product name.”

Decide on your variants and let your test run for 4-6 weeks. During this period, Amazon will take care of equally splitting visitors into groups, each of which will see a variant of the element being tested.

The beauty of A/B testing is you can keep running tests even after concluding the first campaign. You can take the winning variant and pit it against a brand-new variant to further see which version would convert better.

If the “keyword-brand-product name” variant won in the initial campaign, you can run it against “keyword-brand-product name-keyword 2” to see if the additional keyword could help get you more sales.

Aside from Amazon’s Manage Your Experiment feature, consider using a more advanced tool that features shopper intelligence insights. It will help you make more informed decisions. How? It’s an advanced ecommerce marketplace intelligence tool that allows you to identify:

• The best-selling products, units sold, revenue, and conversion rates for different product categories.
• Your competitors’ best-performing products and key ecommerce benchmarks.
• The most high-traffic and profitable marketplace keywords that drive sales for your competitors.
• Search engine ranking insights.
• Consumer behavior, shopping trends.

These insights will empower you to make data-driven decisions, invest your resources in winning products and optimize your product listings for keywords guaranteed to attract traffic.

While A/B testing is a time- and data-intensive process, it is a necessary part of your ecommerce conversion rate optimization efforts. Use it regularly and you could see your BSR slowly climb up the ranks.

4. Promote your products on other channels

Finally, you want to leverage other online channels by driving traffic from them to your Amazon product listing.

You should use organic social media and paid ads on Google and Facebook as well as Amazon PPC itself to get more traffic to your listings.

The upside of these methods? Paid ads allow you to showcase your product on your target audience’s feed for greater conversions. This is also a great way to introduce your brand to people who haven’t heard of it.

The downside? Paid ads require ad spend and need to generate ROI. So, your ads must earn more money than you spent on them.

Whichever channel you use, make sure that they all point back to your Amazon listing where they can purchase your products. When the user buys your item from Amazon it can improve its Best Sellers Rank.

Takeaways

Amazon Sales Rank matters a lot, so you should track your sales rank for several categories per product and keep track of it all in one place.

Use SEO best practices, optimize for the user experience, continuously A/B test your product listings, and promote your products on other channels to increase your sales and grow your Amazon store.

FAQs

How is Amazon Sales Rank calculated?

Amazon calculates the Best Seller Rank using the product sales over a given time. It takes into account the product’s current sales and its sales history.

How do I increase my Amazon sales rank?

You need to generate more product sales. You can do this by optimizing your product listing for its target keywords to increase its Amazon search position for those terms. Also, promote your Amazon listing on other channels like social media and paid advertising campaigns.