Keepa Price History

Rank history tells you whether a product sells. Price history tells you what you will get for it. This lesson covers the price lines on a Keepa chart, which ones matter, and two features that answer questions nothing else can.

Why the Buy Box is the line that counts

A reminder from the Getting Started module: the Buy Box is the price attached to the Add to Basket button, and the large majority of Amazon sales go through it. Shoppers rarely open the full offer list.

So the Buy Box price is what your stock will realistically sell for. Every other price line is context.

The lines, and what each is for

• Buy Box. The one to watch. Enable it and read its history.
• New. The lowest new offer on the listing. Often below the Buy Box price, because the cheapest offer does not automatically win it. Useful mainly when no Buy Box line exists.
• Used. Relevant if you sell used goods or collectibles. Most commonly used by book sellers.
• Third-party FBA. Prices from FBA sellers like you. Worth monitoring if your pricing strategy is to match the lowest FBA offer, which is a common approach.
• Third-party FBM. Merchant-fulfilled sellers, who ship themselves. Their prices behave differently because delivery is charged separately.
• Amazon. Shown as an orange shaded area rather than a line. Shading means Amazon was selling. Shading at the right-hand edge means Amazon is selling now.
• List price. A brown line, and the interesting one. See below.

The list price trick

List price is the manufacturer's recommended price. In practice only Amazon tends to price against it, and Amazon often sets it by matching what other retailers charge.

Which gives you a signal: a low list price alongside a much higher Buy Box price suggests the product is available cheaply somewhere else. Amazon's own data is telling you a retailer sells it near that lower figure. Take the product name to a search engine and go looking.

It is a lead rather than a certainty, and it costs nothing to follow.

The statistics and the data tab

The statistics panel gives average prices over the period. The example shows Amazon averaging £17.18 over 90 days and new offers averaging £15.72.

The Data tab breaks it down further: current and average prices for new, FBA, merchant-fulfilled, used and list, over several periods.

The figure to base a decision on is the average Buy Box price over 90 days. Not the price today. Today's price may be a spike, and the average is what your stock will more likely sell at over the weeks it takes to sell through.

Buy Box statistics: who has been winning it

Enable Buy Box statistics and Keepa shows which sellers have held the Buy Box recently, and at what prices.

This answers a question the price line alone cannot: can you get into this listing at all? Two products can have identical price charts and completely different prospects.

• If only Amazon appears in the Buy Box history, you are unlikely to win it, whatever your price. Move on.
• If the Buy Box rotates between several sellers, the listing is genuinely shared, and priced correctly you can expect a share of the sales.

The example makes the comparison directly: the first product shows only Amazon and is dismissed; the second shows rotation between multiple sellers and is described as attractive for exactly that reason.

Using the price range to set your repricer

This is the most practical use of the price chart and it is easy to miss.

Look at the band the price has moved within over the period. That band is what you should expect. Then:

• Check that the bottom of the range is still above your break-even price. If the price has historically dipped below what you need to make a profit, then at some point you will be choosing between selling at a loss and not selling at all.
• Use the observed low and high as the minimum and maximum in your repricer.

That turns the chart into settings rather than an impression. The repricer then follows the market inside limits you chose from evidence, which is the whole point of setting a floor.

Prefer products whose entire historical range sits above your break-even. Those are the ones you can hold without anxiety.

Do not read price on its own

A stable, healthy price on a product that never sells is worthless, and a good rank on a product whose price is sliding will not produce the margin you calculated. Price and rank are read together.

The next lesson adds the remaining signals, and the one after that puts the whole check in order.