An Amazon parent category is defined as the broadest classification of category that any product can be filed under. Amazon has 30 different parent categories at the moment, but there are four categories that you should treat differently when it comes to Best Sales Rank (BSR) research.
Books.
Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry.
Kindle Store.
Watches.
The main reason that people are told to avoid selling in these categories is because there is too much product diversity. However, that isn’t always the reason you should be wary of these categories during your product research.
For categories like “Books”, and “Kindle Store”, there might be astronomical BSR numbers, but there is a lot more competition from publishers, authors, and even Amazon itself. There is also smaller margins due to different shipping and storage costs, as well as higher fixed fees for book selling. It is basically a completely different business than what we teach, especially when first starting out.
For “Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry” and “Watches”, data is different to other parent companies due to the sheer volume of different product variations in these categories.
For example, when a sale of a pair of shoes is recorded on Amazon, a Parent ASIN gets credit for the sale and thus a lower BSR. But, most shoes come in over 10 different sizes. That means a BSR in the shoe category usually isn't the BSR for size 9 of a shoe but instead it is the BSR for all sizes of a particular shoe!
From an Amazon sellers perspective, we only care about the BSR for a specific size shoe because we will need to buy a specific number of each size from our supplier. So, while a BSR might show us that a shoe sells 1,000 pairs per month, that shoe might only sell 10 size 9s so we do not want to buy 1,000 size 9s.
As you can start to see, this will exponentially increase the BSR of different products even though most variations of certain product might be in the "dead zone."
The phenomenon above can happen in many categories but is most prevalent in “Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry” and “Watches."
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