Amazon Sales Rank and velocity of used book sales
Do you ever pay attention to Amazon Sales Rank when buying or listing books? I was a full-time seller for at least three years before I ever gave it a moment's notice.Here's the first numbers I've ever seen on the distribution of sales according to Amazon Sales Rank. It was sent by a reader who operates a brick-and-mortar textbook store that actively sells on Marketplace.
The store's order-management software has a new feature that automatically pulls the Amazon Sales Rank for each book on the day it sells. The table show here is based on the first 1,300 sales. It shows that books in the top 5,000 in Amazon Sales Rank accounted for more than 45 percent of sales. Another way to look at it is, more than 99 percent of the sales were for books ranked in the top 400,000.
As you know, an Amazon Sales Rank of 1 is the fastest-selling book on Amazon, and the slowest-selling book is 3.5 million and change. Books with no recorded Marketplace sales have ranks of "None."
I'm not sure how useful these numbers are to those of us who aren't full-time textbook sellers, but it's interesting nonetheless. Of course this is the time of the year when textbooks are in highest demand.
It's ironic that books with high Amazon Sales Ranks or even a rank of "none" tend to be valuable, since it's often a seller's market. These are the books that are hard to find, and with little competition, we're free to price sky-high. The only problem is waiting for that one-in-three-million buyer.
UPDATE: Here's some fresh data reported this morning. It shows 83 percent of transactions were for books with Amazon Sales Ranks under 50,000.
posted by Steve Weber at 9/06/2006
7 Comments:
Steve: I find your charts on sales ranking very enlightening. Thanks for sharing.
While I believe that the sales rank should be the single most valuable piece of information on a book, Amazon's sales rank formula leaves a lot to be desired. I have repeated asked them to tell me what it means and they won't answer even the most simple of questions.
Does the formula take into account the lifetime sales for books?
Do all sales of all conditions count?
If so, are they weighted the same in the formula?
Are all books with no sales rank higher than 4,000,000?
There are lots of really relevant questions that make a huge difference in the meaning of this number and they refuse to answer any of them.
It was about a year ago that they announced a change to their formula. Prior to that, the number was fairly stable. Now the sales rank of a book can jump tens of thousands in a single day. As the chart shows a very low ranking book is one that you should strongly consider buying. On the other hand a book with a sales rank over 300,000 should probably be skipped. The problem is, the same book can be both places only a few days apart.
If you noticed, Amazon just dropped the "Yesterday's Sales Rank". It made it too obvious that their sales rank formula was really messed up.
If Amazon can't use a more meaningful formula, at least they should let us know what their formula means.
A sales rank of NONE does not mean that the book has never sold on Amazon before. I guess they just stop computing the sales rank at around 4 million or so.
I have repeatedly sold books that had a sales rank of none before and AFTER my transaction. In one case, I even sold two copies and the sales rank is still none!
My guess is that the book has never sold on Amazon before (no wonder, since they never carried it and never will). Marketplace sales do not figure in here, otherwise how can a sales rank continue to be none?
IMNSHO, sles rank is prtetty meaningless. If you have a rare book, not many copies will be sold. If you have a common book, lots of copies will be sold but the price will be low. I buy books in bulk at estate sales and auctions or wherever I can find bulk lots. So I could care less about the Amazon sales rank, what i am concerned about is the price because that dtermines the marketability of the item.
I'd be really curious to know what formula/software they are using. Honestly, rank doesn't mean a lot to me--I've sold books with 0 ranking. I really think it's based a lot on your business model. I'd love to run my sales through something like that and see what the numbers show--bet they'd be a lot different.
Does anyone have any estimates or guesstimates of the relationship between sales rank and how fast a particular book might sell once listed? Intuitively the better the sales rank the faster it should move off the shelf. It would be interesting to see the average numbers of days it takes for a book ranked 50,000 to sell and one ranked 600,000 and so on.
The basics of making money sellng books has to do with supply and demand. I would much rather have a book ranked 1,000,000 with only a supply of 5 or 6 other books, than a number one seller with 10,000 competitors. I always look at ranking as the demand side of the equation, a 1,000,000 ranking might mean only 1 or 2 books a month are sold, but if you are close to the lowest priced supplier of half a dozen available books "supply" then your chances of selling are higher than a lower priced bestseller with a lot of competitiors. Its a combination of supply and demand, not just demand (ranking"). There are statistics on how fast a book sells based upon ranking, I have it somewhere.....its about 1 book a month for 1,000,000 and one a day for 50,000, so you can estimate using ratios for the other rankings, for example 2,000,000 might be close to one book every two months, and 10,000 might be 4-5 books a day. Compare that to the total books up for sale and you have a good idea on how fast it will go; this is a great way to laugh at the people who sell stuff for .01 and don't have any patience in the business. I just sold something for 19.95 that had about six competitiors listing it for .01 priced ahead of me, and three months later, wa-la I make 20.00 and the bottom feeders who sold their books for .01 lose money - do the math, its almost impossable to make money selling a book for .01, its not mathamatically possible if you just use a person's opportunity cost as working at McDonalds for minimium wage. Everyone easily forgets TIME has value too - you are better off spending a few extra hours hunting good books rather than listing, shelving, and packaging worthless books.
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