Recently, you might have noticed that your Keepa graphs have had some odd breaks and unreliable numbers in its BSR data. This is what you might’ve seen:
In an announcement on their website, Keepa has reported an issue with their system saying that “For about 10% of all products we can no longer update the main category sales rank of a product. This is likely a temporary issue.” This has resulted in the broken BSR data that you coul've possibly seen over the last week.
To combat this in the meantime, Keepa have added the current main and sub category ranks of a product along with the product’s placement within its categories below the main graph
As you can see, this has added a helpful feature of category percentiles to help sellers quickly gauge where a product places among its peers. This brings up an interesting notion. It appears that this slight malfunction has inspired some new and interesting changes in Keepa’s software.
Keepa has also instated a new way to view the best seller ranking for products. Instead of searching through the main graph they provide, Keepa has created a BSR graph that stands alone on the product page and is dedicated to the main and sub category sales ranks to increase readability. This does spell the end for the main graph that we have all become used to having. It has not been stated when this change will be made, but it does appear that this will be a gradual process.
Another big change to Keepa’s software is the way it collects it’s buy box data. These changes aren’t just vidual, it will alter the way we do our product research. According to Keepa’s Sales Rank and Buy Box Announcemet, “the buy box price history is no longer displayed using diamond symbols (indicating data updates), but with a continuous pink line. When hovering your mouse over the Buy Box legend on the right the graph will show vertical markers in the color of the owner of the Buy Box (Amazon, 3rd party FBA or FBM) for entries before March 7th and a continuous bar after.”
With buy box data becoming a constant stream of information rather than periodic data updates, this allows Keepa to provide a new and improved buy box data for deeper dives into those who win the buy box and when. They have made this a new tab in the Data section of your Keepa extension.
The new Buy Box Statistics tab will provide “Seller Statistics” on those winning the buy box. As you can see in the image above, this new data will list a product page’s buy box winners, data on when they’ve won the buy box, and what % control they had over the buy box. This will become very helpful to the 3rd party seller as it provides even more data on what to expect to out of a product’s sales when going through the research process.
This new format does come with some downsides that you should know about and keep your eye on. It was stated that “[Keepa] can no longer reliably access the current Amazon price if Amazon does not hold the Buy Box. This means that a gap in the Amazon price history can henceforth mean two things: Amazon was out of stock or Amazon did not own the buy box.” What this means for 3rd party sellers is an extra step when researching your product. In the current Keepa graph with can clearly see the orange line that represents Amazon’s price. This gave the 3rdparty seller a quick and clear indication that Amazon is on the product listing. A red flag for what we recommend to sellers. Now, you will have to take the extra step of checking the Offer Listings page to make sure Amazon is not selling the product in question. A small price to pay for more clarity on potential products.
Something to keep your eye on going forward:
Keepa mentioned that these changes could have an impact on price drop notifications saying, “The impact on price drop notifications by this should be minimal, as we continue to run dedicated Amazon price updates that circumvent this limitation for tracked products as often as possible.” This gives us the feeling that they are working on an update for this, but you should keep an eye on the product pages that you are currently on to make sure you aren’t missing out on any sales.
Keep on selling.
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