For Amazon sellers, Best Seller Rank (BSR) and estimated monthly sales (EMS) are very important while deciding to invest in a product or not.
BSR information is shared by Amazon, but this is not true for the estimated monthly sales numbers. They are kept as a secret. For this reason, the estimated monthly sales numbers given by different sources always conflict with each other, so most of the Amazon sellers do not trust these numbers at all, including our numbers.
In this article, we’ll discuss the reasons for these differences and discrepancies and explain our approach to give you more flexibility.
Amazon Product Categories
There are many product categories and subcategories of them on Amazon. Most of the products are listed under more than one category or subcategory by default. On the other hand, there is no balance in the listing counts of these categories. Some popular categories like books and clothing have more than 50,000,000 items but some others like Appliances have less than a half-million listings. For this reason, knowing only the best seller ranking information can be misleading most of the time, because even a 1 million BSR may mean a decent monthly sales amount in the Books category but 5,000 BSR may mean almost zero sales in the Appliances category.
Estimated Monthly Sales (EMS) Calculation Methods
Due to the need that we explained above, many software solutions that serve Amazon Professional Sellers have their own algorithms to estimate the sales numbers for these categories and subcategories. There are many methods to estimate these numbers and also verification algorithms. For instance, picking some private label products in each category as a reference point and following their real sales numbers from the sales reports or tracking the total inventory of the products of many items in different categories by web scraping, etc. Since each and every company uses different approaches, there is no way to list all of them here and evaluate if they are good at this or they are just “guesstimates”.
The most critical point is that EMS numbers are always changing in each and every month. Regular months are totally different than special time periods like Prime Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. For this reason, even if one of these solutions gives you a perfect number for a regular month, it most probably fails for the next month. That’s the main reason why we hear from our customers that “the numbers of Software X is better than the numbers of Software Y” in some months and the exact opposite in some other months. Even better, if the seller sells in more than one marketplace, they may say that Software X is better in the UK and Germany but in the US and Canada, software Y is definitely the best.
Amazon Sellers say these very frequently because they know their own real sales numbers and when these estimates are in parallel with the real numbers they support a software solution or start to criticize if there is a huge difference between the real and estimated numbers.
What is the approach of Turbo Piranha?
We’re doing our best to give you the most accurate numbers all the time using various data collection and verification methods and update these numbers as needed but as we explained some of the reasons above, there is no perfect way to give you 100% correct numbers and make you fully satisfied with just numbers even if we update them regularly and frequently.
For this reason, we have gone a little bit further and made our numbers editable. In this way, if you appreciate our estimations you can continue to use our numbers but if you are pretty sure about your numbers are better for some categories based on your experience or real sales numbers, you can just edit those numbers and Turbo Piranha calculates estimated monthly sales using your numbers after that point. Even better, you can replace all these numbers with the numbers of another software company, if you trust their numbers more.
How to edit the estimated monthly sales?
To change these numbers per your needs, please follow the steps and also check the images carefully. In the sample below, we will update the numbers of the Beauty category in Amazon Germany (DE) marketplace.
- Open C:\ProgramData\TURBOPiranha\BSR.json file with a decent free text editor, such as Notepad++. (Notepad is also good and enough, but you can easily collapse or expand the nodes with Notepad++ which makes your edits easier)
- There are categories and BSR numbers for each country. Please find DE for the DE marketplace and collapse other nodes.
- Now, find the Beauty category and their BSR numbers.
- Change the numbers based on your sales numbers and save your changes.
- Restart the Turbo Piranha if it was already running. It will start to use your updated numbers in the next analysis processes.
Return to Factory Settings
At some point, if you want to return to our default values, just delete this file (BSR.json) and Turbo Piranha will create it from scratch with its default values.
If you have further questions, please contact us.