Amazon Sales Rank Explained: What it is? & 12 Steps to Improve BSR

 There is one important question that most sellers will always have – how to improve Amazon’s sales rank and earn more revenue?

Both are valid questions but the key answer to them is by understanding and unveiling how Amazon’s A9 algorithm works.

So, here is a quick introduction to what it does.

Overview Of Amazon’s A9 Algorithm

Amazon’s A9 (more popularly known as the product search) algorithm is entirely different from how Google’s algorithm functions.

With A9, whenever a buyer looks for products on Amazon, the results are displayed via a 2-step process:

• The first step includes pulling relevant data from the catalog.
• The second step involves ranking them based on the relevancy.

Keep in mind that Amazon updates its algorithm now and then to maximize its revenue from every customer.

They evaluate their systems constantly “using programmatic analysis, human behavior, performance metrics, and business metrics.”

Key Features Of A9 Algorithm

As far as the A9 algorithm is considered, Amazon takes three vital ranking factors into account, which include:

• Relevancy: In order for your product listing to rank higher, know that your product has to be 100% relevant. This means that your product listing has to be completely optimized with the right keywords or the search terms that a potential buyer searches for.
• Conversion Rate: This is one of the most important factors to help a product rank higher on the Amazon SERPs. The vital factors for better conversion rates include product price, image quality, and customer reviews.
• Customer Satisfaction: Amazon takes ODR (Order Defect Rate) and the seller’s feedback into account for this. Good reviews and better seller feedbacks not only play a key role in keeping the customers happy but also ensure that they return for more.

Now that you have understood how the Amazon A9 algorithm works, let’s get into some more details as to how you can rank up on Amazon and grow your revenue over time.

If you’d like to learn more, read this article about Amazon SEO.

So, let’s get started.

Amazon Sales Rank Explained:

What Is Amazon Sales Rank or BSR (Best Sellers Rank)?

Amazon Sales Rank or also known as BSR (Amazon Best Sellers Rank) is one of the most researched and disputed metrics in Amazon’s arsenal. To be honest, many sellers have a hard time ranking their listings on Amazon. No wonder they have this love-hate bond with BSR.

Essentially, the Amazon Sales Rank (ASR) helps in determining if a product is popular or not within a specific category.

It exists for every product that you see on Amazon, even for the ones that are not a part of a particular category.

A product’s Amazon Sales Rank can range from 1 to more than 1 million. Now, the lower the number, the greater the sales, and the higher the number, the lower are the sales.

Besides having an optimized product listing, it also calculates the time your product was last sold. Now, if you desire to have a lower BSR, your sales period should also be small.

What Makes Amazon Sales Rank So Important?

As a seller, BSR or ASR matters for multiple reasons. As a beginner in the e-commerce world, it is a sign if your product is performing well or not when compared to your competitors.

Also, it tells you where you are in the online marketplace. Ideally, you should be having a low BSR score.

In simple words, think of this like your exam report card. Does your previous semester’s grade have an impact on the upcoming one? Certainly not! They just show you how were you performing earlier. And that’s exactly what we are explaining to you here.

Much like your report card, even your BSR doesn’t bear any information on the sales that you are going to make in the future. Also, it has nothing to do with your organic sales as well.

Additional Read: Amazon Advertising Grading Checklist for 2023.

How To Improve Amazon Sales Rank?

Follow these 12 steps  to boost your Amazon sales rank or BSR (Best Seller Rank)

Step 1: Optimized Product Title

Keep in mind that potential buyers tend to judge a product with the title that is written there for a product. Hence, it has to be creative, informative, and yet optimized with the right keywords. Now, this seems a little tricky to do it but once you know how to do this right, half of your work is done.

Make sure that you include the following elements to your product title:

• Brand name
• Product name
• Product’s features if any (size, color, dimension)

Step 2: Utilize Flywheel Effect For Your Advantage 

Huge and popular marketplaces like Amazon feature millions of items online. Now, when you publish big inventories with “known brands,” there will be some set of products, which get better visibility than others.

Now, this is because products with greater visibility benefit from the Amazon flywheel effect whereas the less visible ones remain hidden.

To keep your sales balanced, ensure that you cluster your inventories and build a flywheel for those less-visible products.

Now, this involves three key aspects:

• Publish a few products on the FBA in order to meet the eligibility for Prime shipping. This, in turn, will gain visibility.
• Make use of Sponsored Ads and Headline Search ads together for 2 to 3 weeks to boost your rankings.
• Implement a system that lets you question for feedbacks on the products.”

Recommended read: What are Amazon Prime video ads?

Step 3: Offer Competitive Prices

Price is yet another significant factor that Amazon considers helping a seller win the Buy Box. To stay ahead of your competitors, you must offer low prices than them.

Now, this “price” also includes shipping. So, never do the mistake of lowering the prices too low and increasing them in shipping. You cannot fool Amazon’s algorithm.

Some retailers tend to make use of Repricer tools – software, which automatically modifies the product prices based on the competition.

Step 4: Clear Product Description

Like product title, even the description of your product has a great impression on a shopper. Utilize this section in a way to maximize your results.

This is the part when you can play with. You can describe your products and expand them a little more by telling them about their features. And don’t forget to add those “keywords.”

Check this free to for Amazon Product Description

A clear product description has the potential to attract potential buyers and increase the overall sales of a product. It does play a key role in enhancing your conversion rates and customer engagement.

On the other hand, if a product’s description isn’t good enough to impress a buyer, there are high chances that you are losing a lot in terms of sales. So, make sure to get this right.

Step 5: Important Features In Bullet Points

Your product’s features, when described in bullets, can do wonders in terms of both attracting the customers and keeping the listing informative.

No wonder you see those products’ key features mentioned in bullet points rather than chunks of paragraphs. Bullet points are indeed an incredible way to boost conversion rates.

Check out this guide to know how to write great Amazon bullet points that boost your sales.

Step 6: Use HD Images

So, you have your product little done right, key features described in bullets, put up a competitive price, and written a creative description. Now, what else?

Well, there is another important aspect to help increase the sales, which is none other than your “product images.”

No matter how much effort you put into the other segments and finally, fail not to do this right, you are never going to increase sales.

Remember, “a picture speaks a thousand words.” This is so true when it comes to online marketplaces like Amazon. This is the ultimate deciding factor for a potential buyer. If you fail to impress him or her in this, it is hardly going to take a few seconds for them to close your product listing and choose the next.

Now, that’s something you don’t want to happen right? So, make sure that you follow the guidelines given below:

• Though Amazon recommends your product image to be of 2560 pixels wide, you can have it at least of 1000 pixels. Anything less than 1000 is not good.
• Your product image should be in a clicked in a way that it fills 85% of the image frame that they offer.
• The background color of your image should be white.
• Your product’s image format should be in JPEG/PNG/GIF/TIFF.
• Every picture of your product has to be professionally clicked under a good light setting.
• Your image file name should not include any blank spaces, hyphens, underscores, or special characters.
• You cannot include logos, borders, watermarks, or mannequins in your images.
• Keep the image quality simple, attractive, and high quality.

No matter how incredible your products are or how much money you invest in Amazon SEO, if you fail to put up some awesome pictures out there, you are going to crash the entire idea to rank your products in one go.

Product images that lack professionalism can have a negative impression on the buyers, and they will never get that intention to purchase. Let not your money, time, and efforts go in vain.

Step 7: Differentiate Your Images

When it comes to online marketplaces, know that you are competing with millions of different brands out there. Hence, you require every edge to explain your product’s story through images and compel the buyers to buy.

So, we would suggest you play a little here. Yes, of course, you have to keep your images on a white background and adhere to all Amazon’s image requirements, but it is also vital to look different from your competitors.

Imagine if all your pictures are only in white background? Else, let’s say that you have only one model posing with your product at the same angle? Looks boring right?

Therefore, to keep the listing interesting and appealing to potential shoppers, target putting up 2 – 3 HD white background pictures and 4 – 7 lifestyle images each posed by a different model, ensuring that he/she poses in all angles at different locations.

Taking images of a product from different angles and showcasing them to your buyers will not only help them imagine how they are going to use your product but also helps you look unique from your competitors.

Step 8: Include Innovative Graphs

This is something not many sellers do. However, apart from HD images, including infographics or graphs is a great opportunity to increase your sales.

Highlighting core values within your product’s pictures help users to get a clear understanding of what the product is all about in just a glance.

So, emphasizing key features with neat visuals allow buyers to quickly comprehend your product’s overall value. Also, this is a great factor for shoppers who do not prefer to read big chunks of information or text.

Step 9: Answer Key Questions That Customers Have

If you have been on Amazon, you certainly must have come across plenty of product listings that answer some important questions customers have. This section comes after you scroll down – that is after the product features and description.

Now, most potential buyers will check this section out and if they are doing this, it means that are interested.

But if they still don’t buy after scrolling through those Q&As, it only means that you have not established adequate value in or her mind to purchase.

Now, here is how you can fix this problem:

List all the objections or concerns that your potential prospects have. Next, answer every objection in your product’s sales copy. Now, each time you do this, you will have a better conversion without exception.

Step 10: Offer Prime

The subscription-based Amazon service is one of the most prominently positioned filters out there. Whenever a visitor filters non-Prime products, most items vanish, and they don’t have any chance of showing up on the results once the filter is set.

Now, this is somewhere you can be. This matters because Amazon features 63+ million Prime members, outnumbering the non-Prime users. This huge amount of audience is something that you as a seller cannot ignore.

Step 11: Run A Few Giveaways

Launches or giveaways are one of the greatest ways to boost your product listing’s rankings for any major keyword.

Try putting about 80-90% off for a week. Yes, you will be hit very slightly but in the long run, this will help you rank more and alter, you can revise the pricing.

High discounts are listed first and this will eventually, rack the sales up, moving the rankings organically. While the ultimate goal of your product launch is only to improve rankings of the keywords (which is very important than generating sales organically), an enhanced BSR is often a drawback of any promotional campaign.

Step 12: Optimize For Google Too

Last but not least, do not forget about Google. When sellers get highly involved with popular marketplaces like Amazon, they most likely tend to overlook Google. It is a search engine that keeps a great eye on the entire content of every website.

Hence, Amazon, as a website is no exception. Everything that you perform on Amazon is indexed by Google too. Now, just because you are selling products on Amazon, do not ignore the typical SEO methodologies. Believe it or not, it makes a big deal.

Though the search engine algorithm of Google and Amazon work in different dimensions, there is still a big association.

Just type any product on Google, and you will always have a few Amazon product listings show up. This is another great way to pull buyers to you.

Although these strategies can help small and mid size sellers, enterprise sellers would be hard pressed to scale their brand as they most likely would have already implemented these strategies. However, enterprise sellers can always use Amazon Sales Data API to collect the necessary data and make quick changes to skyrocket their profitabilty and sales.

Other Important FAQs

How To Find Product Rank On Amazon?

You can find the product rank for any item on Amazon. Go to any product listing and scroll down to the bottom, and you shall see a piece of information like this:

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: 1710 in Shoes, Jewelry & Clothing

To estimate Amazon sales just find seller rank put it into this Sales Rank Estimator Free Tool

If you’re a Walmart seller looking to optimize & rank your listing for better sales checkout this Walmart SEO Guide

Additional read:

How Is AI Bringing Change to E-commerce?

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