There are many items that sell but have no sales rank. This is a fantastic opportunity for us because most of our competitors don't know this!

Sales rank fluctuations do not always mean a change in sales for the product. The number is relative to all other items in that category. The item selling 10 may be stable, but the rank could go up (ie: 1,000 to 1,202) if other items in the category are selling differently (which they always are).

The only time we see consistently stable sales ranks over long periods of time will be for items ranking towards the absolute top of a category. For instance, many products hold the #1 rank in their category for long periods of time.

Sales rank is unique to each marketplace. The sales in one marketplace do not affect sales rank in another marketplace. Any sales on Amazon.com, for instance, do not affect the sales rank of the same item on Amazon.co.uk.

Reviews can be indicators of potential sales. If reviews are steadily increasing, we can assume safely that sales are also stable and consistent.

The exact number is not known, but data suggests it is in the 85%+ range. The purpose of this question was to highlight the importance of owning the buy box. 

Amazon to Amazon flips should always be done from an Amazon business account WITHOUT Prime benefits and not purchased from a 3rd party seller, just Amazon.

Drop percentages can really mess with you. I actually had to double check my work several times when I tripped myself up over thinking it! Remember, we start with the lower number and move up to the higher number. If we go the other way (like 70-50) we would see 0 results. Negative values in terms of 90 drop% will actually be price increases (think of it as a double negative making a positive). This was by far one of the most difficult questions on the test for most people and the best way to answer it would be to actually open up Keepa and experiment with the numbers yourself. 

More often than not, we will all see the same buy box, but it is not a rule. Things like regionality (proximity to certain fulfillment centers) can cause Amazon to show different buy box offers to different customers who are looking at the product at the same time from different regions. 

NOTE: Everyone except me gets this question correct! It was worded incorrectly. Keepa does not update items every hour for every item. Just tracked ones AND sometimes it's multiple times per hour. This question should have read as "Keepa updates sales rank on tracked items at least every..." which we have since updated.

The keyword here is "exactly." There is no way to estimate future sales exactly, we are just working with the best (but always incomplete) data that we have to make more educated buying decisions. 

One slip up that sellers come across is not understanding whether 3rd party shipping fees are included. If they are not included, the price shown can be wildly misleading. This cute little truck lets us know that shipping has been added into the price already. 

This one became more confusing than I had intended. Reviews refer to items that have product reviews and ratings refer to the actual 1-5 star rating left on the item. Ratings can tell us whether a product is at risk of being refunded (3 star and below, for example, will have higher refund risks). 

However, Keepa uses both reviews and ratings mildly inconsistently and how they count them changes (variations count ratings differently). 

So, I've made this answer another freebie for everyone. 🙂 

The correct answer is 18. Again, this is an estimate, not an exact number. If an item is receiving 3% of all ratings, it is logical to assume it is accounting for 3% of all sales. 3% of 600 is 18. (.03*600)

There are several other pieces that we'd like to know to say for certain, but we definitely need to know what the buy box competition is like. It doesn't matter how many units are being sold if we can't get the buy box. For example, an item selling 10x per month that we have 100% buy box ownership on can be a better purchase than an item selling 100x per month that we have a 5% buy box ownership of.

Sales rank is based on units sold and not on raw number of orders.  

The biggest reasons for review count to plummet is because amazon has removed what they consider being fake or low-quality reviews or an ASIN being orphaned. An item's sales velocity will not cause the number to number of reviews to drop, it will just decrease the rate of new reviews coming in. 

Emphasis here is on the word "perfectly." Although we are big fans of tools that offer estimated units sold per month, none of them are "perfectly" accurate. They are based on their own algorithms. They will tell you this if you ask 🙂 

Keepa estimates drops per month based on the last 90 days. This timeline is ideal because it reduces the impact of randomness for a shorter time scale and doesn't get skewed as much by seasonality as a year long average might. 

Another question that can trip you up if you overthink it. Remember that "improvement" in sales rank means the number is getting closer to 1. We use these positive percentages for sales rank drops with the smaller number first and the larger number second. 

It's a myth that Amazon won't price above MSRP. Although they usually do not, it isn't a guarantee. However, it seems unintentional when they do list over MSRP and these types of listings typically end up with suppressed buy boxes. 

If an item has a statistically significant number of ratings and a low average score (>3 is a decent cut off) can signal a higher risk of refunds. 

Drop percentage is not connected to any one metric. It can refer to a number of them. 

I resisted putting "price change in dollars" as to not isolate our friends who are using other currencies. This filter shows total price change as a monetary total such as $100 etc. 

This filter causes a lot of confusion because it doesn't consider categories. It just compares sales ranks by numerical value and filters them accordingly. An item could be a 1 in musical instruments and it will show up ahead of an item that is 2 in grocery, even though the grocery item will sell much more.

Keepa lets users track up to 5,000 items at a time. You cannot open a second account to track more than that unfortunately. 

Lightning deals require Prime benefits and we can get in trouble if we use those for Amazon flips. However, this is "subjective" I suppose, so I've given everyone credit and written this off as a poor question.  

Keepa does not tell us where to purchase items from.  Tools like Tactical Arbitrage can do that. 

When the shaded area disappears, we know Amazon has left the building. 

A rare but beautiful case of Amazon being on a listing and giving the buy box to a 3rd party seller anyway. 

Amazon being out of stock is the only thing (from the choices) that we can infer from this graph.