What is Amazon BSR (Best Sellers Rank)?

Introduction

With hundreds of millions of products listed in 30 different categories, Amazon is undoubtedly the top e-commerce platform for sellers. In addition to those huge numbers, Amazon sellers can gain another huge boost in their product sales when using a special ranking system called the Best Sellers Rank (BSR). What is the best Sellers rank, you ask? More importantly, how can it help your Amazon FBA business? For the answers to these questions and more, look below to see how Amazon BSR can be a massive boost to your growing brand.

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What Does BSR Stand For?

Amazon BSR stands for Best Sellers Rank. Amazon assigns a BSR to a product, which also indicates its sales performance within its specific category.

Also, keep in mind that Amazon BSR uses an ordinal scale. A lower BSR on a product indicates that a specific item has high sales. A product with a BSR of 1 is the top in that category since it receives enormous sales.

What Is BSR on Amazon?

The Amazon Best Sellers Rank is a very important number that most, if not all, of Amazon’s products have. This number is given to a product when it achieves at least one sale. The ultimate purpose, though, of the BSR (Best Sellers Rank) is to show how well a given product is selling on Amazon.

In short, the lower a product’s BSR, the higher its sales. This is actually an amazing metric that Amazon provides anybody who browses their website or app so that you know what are the best selling products on Amazon. No other selling platform has something like this available that allows anybody whether they are sellers or buyers to know at any given time what are the best selling products in a certain category. The best seller rank or BSR is calculated at the category and sub-category level. For example, if you were go to amazon.com into bestsellers, you’re going to go into a page where you can see the bestselling products top 100 for any major category such as appliances, health and household, home and kitchen. But you can also go deeper into these categories, into subcategories. For example, I can go into the beauty and personal care and then actually go into the gift set subcategory. And then I can see what are the top 100 BSR items that are selling. 

How Is BSR Calculated?

Even though Amazon does not state specifically how the Best Sellers Rank is calculated, a few factors are likely to contribute to it.

These are:

• The current and historic sales of your product
• Your product’s price changes and promotions
• Your product’s competitors

However, the biggest influence on the BSR is undoubtedly the current sales trends—in addition to historical sales volume. It should also be noted that BSR is calculated throughout the day. 

Every hour you are going to see a different number there. So what the BSR for a product is at 5 p .m. is going to be different than what you might see at 7 p .m. And that is how you can calculate sales, and that’s actually how Helium 10 and other tools are able to give estimations on sales without knowing the exact sales from the sellers. The way BSR fluctuates also represents how many products you are selling or this product is selling in comparison with the other products in the category and subcategory. Let’s say that a product right now has a BSR of 100 and it’s 2 p.m. right now. Basically what that means is I am the 100th best-selling product in this category or subcategory at this exact time. Now what if at 3pm my BSR goes to 200, well that means that now there are actually almost 200 products that sold better than me between 2pm and 3 or 4pm. So again BSR is changing throughout the day based on how your sales are doing compared to the other products in your category. 

What Is a Good BSR?

There isn’t a definitive way to define a “good” BSR (Best Seller Rank) because it’s a relative metric, used to compare your performance to that of your competitors. Sellers pay attention to their BSR because it provides insight into how well they’re performing within their niche or category. 

Imagine it’s November, and you’re excited because your daily sales have jumped from 80 to 100 units, a 20% increase. However, before celebrating, consider your BSR. If your BSR was 500 last month and is now 1,000, it may suggest that, while your sales increased, your competitors’ sales may have risen even more—from, say, 80 to 120 or 150 per day. In this case, your BSR shift signals that you’re not keeping pace with your competition.  

Conversely, if your sales drop from 100 to 50 units per day and your BSR stays constant at 1,000, it’s likely a category-wide trend, meaning everyone’s sales declined. This is why BSR is a valuable metric: it helps you understand your performance relative to your competition, even as sales fluctuate. 

How to Find BSR on Amazon

You can easily find a product’s BSR by heading to a product page on Amazon, scrolling down to the ‘Product Information’ tab, and finding the information below.

Above, you can see that this product’s Amazon Best Sellers Rank is 305, which may sound bad but is actually really good considering the tens of thousands of competitors selling in that Amazon category. 

How to Use BSR to Estimate Sales (link to our free Amazon sales estimator)

Many Amazon sellers agree that the most significant benefit of the Amazon Best Sellers Rank is the ability to predict the value of any given product on Amazon. 

For example, let’s look at these LED outdoor lights using our Sales Estimator. This product has a BSR of 2,429 in Tools and Home Improvement. If we input 2,429 in the minimum field and put 2,500 in the maximum, we can see that the average sales are around $2,515 monthly. Pretty impressive!

However, the revenue estimates assume that the BSR stays the same. If the BSR drastically changes, either up or down, the revenue for that product will dramatically change.

Even though using the Sales Estimator is a great way to tell whether a potential product will be profitable, it is still only one piece of the puzzle. It’s also crucial that you examine the historical sales data for that product to ensure your future success.

How do you do this? It’s simple! All you need to do is use our free Helium 10 Chrome Extension. Specifically, when you’re looking at a product listing on Amazon and using the extension simultaneously, you’ll notice a section titled ‘30-Day Revenue’ above the product images.

By clicking on this, you’ll see a chart that shows monthly sales, the BSR of that product, and the review count. These three aspects will help you easily determine if the product you’re looking at is a winner.

How to Improve Amazon BSR

To take your Amazon BSR to the next level, you’ll need to sell sell sell! Remember that if you sell as many products as your competitor—no more, no less—your BSR will never improve. Check out these four essential tips for enhancing your BSR quickly and efficiently:

1. Optimize your listing

To improve the odds of shoppers finding and purchasing your product, you’ll need to optimize your listing with popular keywords within compelling copy. However, don’t overstuff your copy with keywords!

2. Competitively price your product

Sit down and map out a winning pricing strategy for each product. Do not overprice your item compared to your competitors; this lousy practice will not help you sell more products or boost your BSR.

3. Optimize your listing images

Selling products online means customers can only hold or even see your items after buying them, so optimizing your product images is essential. Think carefully before you add any, as these will go a long way in determining whether someone buys your product or passes it up for one of your competitors. Be sure to focus on your main image since that will be what entices buyers to click on your listing.  

4. Attach a video to your product listing

Adding a video to your product listing instead of one image is helpful. When you add a product video to your listing, you create an enhanced—and professional—customer experience that’ll have them returning repeatedly.

Conclusion

If you’re interested in an e-commerce business but unsure what to sell, that’ll get your product on the list of the top 25 Amazon products, so don’t worry! Helium 10 can quickly provide the e-commerce tools you’ll need for every stage of the selling process. Using our Sales Estimator tool, for example, you can avoid randomly searching for BSR products. Instead, you can quickly put down the desired BSR you want to search for in our tool, and then we’ll reverse-engineer the answer for you!

Helium 10 can also help you track your competitors’ daily sales via the FREE Chrome Extension, discover highly profitable keywords using Magnet, and create a compelling and informational product listing with Listing Builder that will attract customers to your brand.

No matter how you sell on Amazon, remember to do as much research as possible to be fully prepared for any eventuality on your road to success and financial freedom.