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Amazon’s New Benefit for its Consumers – and for Suppliers

Amazon is making public on its website and app the approximate sales for each product. The new metric is social proof that helps popular products stand out. At present it is testing a new product label that highlights how many sales a product has had recently. For example, “100K+ bought in past month.” The sales number is rounded to hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands and is capped at one hundred thousand; the time range is either a week or a month.

The new metric is a clear popularity signal to shoppers. Amazon products have always had a publicly visible sales rank, a relative popularity rank in the category, which indicates its recent sales. A feature that originates from ranking books by popularity, however, the sales rank is one of the many details on the product page. Thus, most shoppers are unaware of its existence or how to read it. Seeing how many other shoppers bought the product makes buying from an unfamiliar brand easier. AliExpress, Temu, and some others have a near-identical feature. Estimating Amazon’s sales volume has been critical to 3rd-party sellers’ work. Many use product research tools that approximate sales volume from the sales rank data. Amazon’s new sales metric does not replace these, but the tools will likely start improving accuracy. The data is not yet available to sellers through Seller Central or APIs.

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Alastair Tempest

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