Your Guide to Amazon’s Best Sellers Rank (BSR)

The Amazon Best Sellers’ Rank is a custom calculation which is based on the Amazon.com sales for each product. It updates each hour to reflect the most recent as well as historical sales of all the items sold on Amazon. Although this Amazon Best Sellers Rank can be a pretty good indicator of how well each product is selling on its own, it won’t always express how well an item is selling among other similar items. Categories and subcategories of best seller lists will also highlight each item’s rank where they can really stand out.

At Egrow, we want to share our understanding of the intricacies and science of the Amazon marketplace with you, our valued members. Our Amazon sales estimation algorithm uses some of the same features that drive the Amazon Best Sellers Rank, which can help you understand what to do to get your products to rank on Amazon.com. This tool can be extremely helpful when identifying new opportunities and doing competitor research to understand how other items are ranking on Amazon.

What is the Amazon Best Seller Rank?

Each product on Amazon has a “Best Sellers Rank” (BSR) which can be found on the details page of the product. As shown above, products are often listed in more than just one category, so each one will calculate a score for how well the item is selling within the category or subcategory. There’s usually a main category (#3,825 in Sports & Outdoors) and a subcategory (#5 best seller in the subcategory Exercise & Fitness > Yoga > Blocks). You may even find products within multiple subcategories or even in more than one main category. When calculating sales estimations, you’ll want to pay more attention to the main categories before the subcategories which are listed below.

How is the Amazon’s Best Sellers Rank (BSR) Calculated?

Each “Best Sellers” product for each category will have a BSR of #1 in that category, while the second “Best Sellers” product in the category will have a BSR of #2 in that category. Amazon will calculate the product’s “Best Sellers Rank” by primarily considering how many orders were made for that product when compared to other products available in the same category during a certain amount of time.

• New items without any sales will not be evaluated with an Amazon Best Sellers Rank.
• Best Sellers Rank for each product will update within 2 to 3 hours following a sale.
• The Best Sellers Rank weighs recent sales more heavily in each calculation, although each product’s historical sales will still hold a considerable weight in these calculations.
• When it comes to listing variations, some variations may not have their own Best Sellers Rank, but they will roll up all sales onto the parent ASIN, while still other variations will simply not have a Best Sellers Rank at all.
• Best Sellers Rank is dependent on orders placed, not the total number of units ordered.

The Amazon Best Sellers Rank should provide both an indicator of how well each product is selling in the recent past, as well as providing an idea of how well it is likely to sell over competitors in the same category or subcategory. Since this Best Sellers Rank will often fluctuate so dramatically and frequently, it’s next to impossible to tell anything with certainty from an individual product’s Best Sellers Rank at any given moment.

Amazon Best Sellers Rank Fluctuations

In order to illustrate how the Amazon Best Sellers Rank is calculated between two items, let’s take, for example, two products: Product A and Product B. If Product A has been selling steadily at 40 units each day in the Patio, Lawn, and Garden category for the past 6 months, while Product B has only ever made 1 sale 31 days ago.

If, for example, Product B were to create some promotions and really started selling their product, and it were to sell 120 total units over the next two days. In this example, we would then expect for Product B to have a similar Best Sellers Rank to Product A, even though Product B will have only sold 120 units over the past 30 days, and Product A sold 1,200.

Since there are millions of products in each category, it’s possible for two ASINs to have the same number of sales while being attributed very different Best Sellers Rankings.

Best Sellers Rank Is Not Great For Sales Estimation

By attempting to create the most accurate sales estimation algorithm, we had to brainstorm all of the possible indicators for sales on Amazon’s platform. First, we estimated the expected sales based on the assumed review rate per marketplace. If an average of 25 reviews had been added to the product per month, and then it was assumed that the review rate will be 1% of all organic sales, we would then presume that there had been 2,500 sales that month.

Each time that Amazon pushes an update to the way Best Sellers Rank is calculated, each product’s rank could fluctuate wildly. For example, a product’s Best Sellers Ranking was observed jumping from a low 98,000, all the way up to 38,000 in one hour because of one sale. In the next hour, the Best Sellers Rank then fell back down to around 76,000.

The Amazon Best Sellers Rank can be an extremely volatile measurement from hour to hour, from day to day, or from week to week. In order to build our Amazon sales estimation tool with a high degree of accuracy, we first had to create a tool that would take into account any wild fluctuations in the Amazon Best Sellers Rank that happens each month, and Egrow has accomplished just that. Nightly updates allow our calculations to remain consistent with the natural trends of the Amazon marketplace.

You’ll Still Have To Work Hard To Make Sales Happen

We simply can’t stress to you enough that you should avoid making the same mistake that many buyers do by placing too heavy of an importance on the Best Sellers Rank. It may be tempting to get caught up in the rush when items are flying off the shelves but your products still have a low rank number, because there’s still so much more involved in it than that. You’ll still be competing with other sellers to attract buyers for the same products.

Of course, you can try your best to climb the ranks of Amazon Best Sellers lists, but remember to use the metrics as an estimation rather than an exact number. Because of all the volatility in score calculation from all the items and sales happening on Amazon.com, there is no need to worry yourself with the exact number you are at, or make determinations on what to buy based solely on the number. Our tools aim to have the most accurate reflection of these Best Seller Rank numbers, but those numbers are again based off an aggregate which is only temporary and should be used as a measure for the overall process.