How to Increase Your Best Seller Rank and Win the Amazon Best Seller Badge
How to Increase Your Best Seller Rank and Win the Amazon Best Seller Badge
Getting the Amazon Best Seller badge is increasingly becoming a hallmark of success for brands on Amazon. As the global marketplace becomes more sophisticated - and more saturated - increasing your Best Seller Rank and winning the Best Seller badge is one of the primary ways to stand out from the sponsored products and competitor brands that dominate the first page - the place where most shoppers make a purchase. Everybody wants to be the “best”, and being best on Amazon means more than just ranking #1:
- You can’t buy Best Seller - Amazon awards the BSR based on sales data
- Best Selling products are rewarded with higher ranking
- Having the Best Seller badge sets you apart from the competition
- The Best Seller badge represents reliability and is trusted by shoppers
With BSR, success breeds success: selling more products will boost your BSR, and boosting the BSR will improve your ranking and chance of selling even more products.
What is the Amazon Best Seller Rank?
The Amazon Best Sellers Rank (or BSR) is a rank given to almost every Amazon product that has had at least one sale. The rank is based on the product’s Amazon sales compared to other products in the same category. The product that earns the #1 Best Seller badge means that it has recently sold more than all other products in that category or subcategory.
5 things you need to know about BSR:
- BSR is category-specific. In other words, a product’s BSR depends on its category or sub-category, which means….
- Products can have more than one BSR. A product that is listed in multiple categories will have a BSR for each of those categories.
- BSR is based only on sales, including current and historical sales, price changes and promotions, and comparative sales of other products in the same category
- BSR is updated hourly. However a sudden change in sales won’t necessarily impact the BSR; it depends on the sales velocities of all of the category products as well as the historical sales performance for that product.
- BSR is marketplace-specific. A product’s BSR rank on amazon.co.uk will almost certainly be different on amazon.com, amazon.it, etc…
5 Best Seller Rank Best Practices
Category taxonomy: Choose your battlefields.
Remember, winning the BSR is all about selling the most in the category. Of course, Amazon’s taxonomy is vast; there are huge numbers of categories and sub-categories, and they’re changing all the time. Your job is to understand the category taxonomy for your products and seek out those sub-categories where you can make an impact.
Best practice: Track your categories for you and your competitors so that you know where you stand.
Availability: Be there for your shopper
You’ve got great products, but are you able to forecast changes in supply and accommodate demand during peak periods? A surge in sales will only be a boon to your BSR if you’re able to accommodate increased demand.
Best practice: Track product availability at the SKU level so that you have visibility over trends and advanced warning so that you can be ready to accommodate an increase in demand.
Win the search traffic
Amazon search performance is a constant race that needs regular tweaking to deliver results. We’ve already seen that one fifth of shoppers don’t go beyond the first page of search results. Your goal is to dominate the first page at every opportunity. This means understanding the top trending keywords for which you want to rank and constantly tweaking to deliver improvement.
Best practice: Monitor top keywords to make sure your products are achieving maximum visibility. Watch out for other brands trying to hijack your search position.
Optimize Content: Win on conversion
The higher your BSR, the greater the expectation from shoppers, and the more factors come into play for maximizing conversion potential and maintaining that rank. Do you have visibility over all of the variables that affect conversion?
Best practice: Track all of the key conversion factors of your product card.
Track the competition: Identify rival strategies
Have an eye on rival products in your category, especially those that are changing quickly. Have they changed content? Pricing? Availability? Have you lost availability? Competing in a crowded marketplace like Amazon means knowing where you stand in the pack.
Best practice: Track rival SKUs to identify where and why they are overtaking your position.
Amazon Best Seller Rank FAQs
What is the difference between the Best Seller badge and Amazon Choice?
Both badges represent high-quality products, however, Amazon Choice is awarded based on the best match for a particular keyword, whereas the Best Seller badge is based on sales.
How fast can the Best Seller Rank be influenced?
The exact algorithm behind the BSR is a guarded secret by Amazon, so it’s difficult to anticipate exactly how quickly a product’s rank will change at any given moment. The rankings - including the winner of the “Best Seller” badge - for the top 10k products in a category are updated hourly. However, a sudden flux in sales won’t necessarily result in a sudden increase in your BSR. BSR is based on sales rate - that includes historical sales AND predictive factors on future sales (another secret guarded by Amazon). Since BSR is all about sales, one of our top tips is to make sure things keep selling by keeping on top of inventory management and never running out of stock. This keeps you in the game and allows you to have an edge on competitors who do let their stock levels fall short.
Is doubling down on advertising a sustainable way to grow rankings?
In short, yes! Since BSR is all about sales data, it’s a bit of a no brainer that if you can drive more sales through paid promotions, you stand a good chance of boosting your rankings. To make this an effective long term strategy, you need to make sure you consistently follow the principles of maintaining stock, pricing competitively, and optimising your content for conversion. You’ll also need to carefully consider your ad strategy. A limited-time discount will likely only increase your rank temporarily. Plan long term ad strategies that you can maintain to reap the longer-term benefits.
What is the correlation between BSR and sales?
By definition, Best Seller Rank is directly correlated with sales. But does it go the other way? Will increasing your BSR also help increase sales? There’s little research into this topic at present, though some studies suggest that BSR could be considered a predictor of sales, however, there are many other factors at play, and it’s certainly variable by category.
Download the eBook to learn our top strategies for increasing your Best Seller Rank and gaining that coveted Best Seller badge for your products.
