Additional Keepa Features

Rank and price are the main lines. Keepa carries four more signals that are easy to miss and that answer questions the two main charts cannot. This lesson covers them.

Open the second chart

On a product page, click more historical data. A second chart appears below the main one, and it holds most of what follows.

1. The number of offers, and what it predicts

The offer count is how many sellers are on the listing over time. Plotted against price, a pattern appears that you can act on.

When the number of offers falls, the price tends to rise. That is simply supply and demand on a single listing: fewer sellers competing means less downward pressure on the Buy Box.

Which makes a falling offer count a forward-looking signal, unlike almost everything else on the chart. A product with a good sales rank whose offer count has been dropping recently is one where the price is likely to be higher when your stock arrives than it is today, and where you will have fewer competitors to share the sales with.

This is worth actively searching for. Most sellers assess a listing as it is now; the offer trend tells you where it is heading.

2. The review rating, as an early warning

The rating history appears on the lower chart. In the example it sits at 4.9 and holds steady, which says the product is well received and should keep selling.

The useful case is the other one. A rating that has started to fall is a warning that arrives before the sales rank moves. Buyers stop choosing a product some time before that shows up in the rank, so a declining rating on a product whose rank still looks fine is a reason to be cautious.

Common causes are a change in manufacturing, a competing product that is better, or a run of counterfeit units on the listing damaging the reviews. None of them are good news for stock you are about to buy.

3. Click the Buy Box line to see who held it

Where the Buy Box line changes, click the point of change. A window opens showing which seller held the Buy Box at that moment and at what price.

This turns the line into a history of the competition. You can see how often it changes hands, whether the same few sellers hold it, and what price each of them was at.

The zoom trick for Amazon listings

Here is a specific technique worth knowing. On a listing where Amazon is present, zoom into the chart and compare the Buy Box price against Amazon's own price line.

If the Buy Box price is lower than Amazon's price, Amazon is sharing the Buy Box with a third-party FBA seller. That is not visible any other way, and it changes the conclusion: a listing you would otherwise dismiss because Amazon is on it may in fact be one where FBA sellers do get a share.

4. Competitor stock levels

The most surprising feature. Open the list of available offers on Amazon with Keepa installed, and it shows how many units each seller is holding.

This is the missing piece in a buying quantity decision. Suppose a product sells 40 times a month and has 5 sellers. On the face of it you would expect 8 sales a month. But if the other four sellers are holding 3 units each and you are about to send 30, the picture is completely different: they will be out of stock within days and you will have the listing largely to yourself.

The reverse matters just as much. Four competitors sitting on 200 units each means your 30 will sell slowly however good the rank looks, because the supply on that listing already exceeds months of demand.

So the combination to look at is sales per month, number of sellers, and how much stock those sellers hold. Only the third one tells you whether the competition is about to disappear or is entrenched.

Putting these to work

None of these four is a decision on its own. Together they answer questions the main chart leaves open:

• Offer count trend: is competition arriving or leaving?
• Rating trend: is demand about to fall before the rank shows it?
• Buy Box history: is the position actually winnable?
• Competitor stock: how many units should I buy?

The next lesson runs the whole check on one product from start to finish.