Many online booksellers wonder about the mysteries of the Amazon Sales Rank.  These booksellers ponder the deep philosophical questions of what is the Amazon sales rank – how is it calculated, when is it calculated and what does it all mean and when will my book sell.

The bottom line on the Amazon Sales Rank is this – the lower the number the faster the book should sell.  What this means that if you have a book with a 40,000 sales rank and another with a 600,000 sales rank the one with a 40,000 rank is in higher demand.  Does this mean the lower rank will sell first? Not neccesarily – you need to factor in supply, your price point  and the books condition.  The lower ranked book likely has many more of them for sale on the Amazon marketplace so your copy needs to be priced to move as other copies are going to be listed after yours  and they will likely beat your price. 

 I recently got a copy of Tom Dorsey’s book Nuclear Jellyfish (I still have it unfortunately).  I listed it on Amazon to match lowest price for its condition and expected it to sell in a day or two given that the book had just been released.  Weeks have gone by and the book is still on my shelf because the price dropped on it almost immediately and I am terrible at repricing my books with any regularity.  There are, of course, dozens of copies of the book for sale and it is likely heading to penny seller territory soon enough.  Its sales rank at the time I listed it was below 10,000.  Usually the book sells quickly but sales rank alone is not a guarantee.

I have had books with high sales ranks (in the millions) go immediately.  This is often books that are out of print and there are no other copies for sale or the copies that are listed are prohibitively expensive.

Amazon Sales Rank is predominately a buying tool for me.  Sales Rank and price are the two main factors in considering what books I buy.  If it has a high resale value I will generally buy a book regardless of sales rank.  The lower the resale price the lower the sales rank needs to be.  Generally any book that sells for less then $5 I will not bother with regardless of rank.  Between $5 and $10 the sales rank needs to be very low and above $10 I am willing to have books be between 400k and 800k in rank.  Above that the book needs to be at least $12.  All of this is fluid and depends on how much inventory I have and how sales are.

So does it matter how Amazon calculates sales ranks? No.

Textbook Season Ending & Return Season Starting
There is almost never a case when I do not accept returns - most markets require you to accept them (see Amazon's A-Z policy). I keep my return policy simple. The only time I have not accepted a return is when a significant amount of time has passed between the purchase date and the return date or if the books condition is materially different from when I sold it (such as full of highlighting). Sometimes it is easy to lose sight of the customer experience when I run a business from home and do not interact with the customers. Continue reading
Amazon Charge When Shipped (Amazon CWS)
What does CWS mean for us booksellers? Not much. You will not have your account credited until you ship a book. If you use The Art of Books or a similar inventory management system Amazon should be automatically updated when the book is shipped. There are a couple of downsides to Amazon's Charge When Shipped - you do not get to send your own confirmation email to the buyer and the buyer can still leave feedback on a canceled order. Continue reading
Is the Amazon Kindle bad for Online Booksellers
Sales of the Kindle are one thing but it remains to be seen if people are actually going to adapt to using it as their primary way to read - as we have seen with Amazon recenlty deleting Orwell titles there are several issues with the Kindle that will effect its popularity. Continue reading
Tags:Amazon sales rank,amazon sales rank and book sales,Booksales and the economy,bookselling guide,bookselling inventory,guide to selling books online,how to sell books online,make money selling books,online bookselling,Selling books,selling books on amazon

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