How to avoid misunderstanding the Amazon Salesrank

Most of the Amazon sellers makes mistake of misunderstanding the Amazon Salesrank. They would either completely ignore it’s importance or overemphasise its role in buying decisions. So, let’s try to figure out the importance of Salesrank in order to avoid the mistake of misunderstanding the Amazon Salesrank. Gathered from several sources along with my own experience, here is what I believe salesrank is:

The number of units an item sold that day.

Though there is no such official algorithm/chart/information from the Amazon which could tell the number of sales corresponding to a salesrank range. But, based on the data shared by various publishers online (who published and listed their books on Amazon), it was somehow possible to guess those numbers.

According to the data, a single sale will cause the Salesrank of any book to jump to salesrank around 100,000.

A book selling 2 copies in a day, will be ranked close to 30,000.

A book selling 5-10 copies a day, will be ranked between 5,000-10,000

In order to maintain the Salesrank, a book must keep selling half of what’s it is selling today.

In order to improve the Salesrank, a book must sell twice of what’s it is selling today.

If the book doesn’t record any sales the next day, it’s rank starts degrading.

So, a book ranked 500,000 and 1Million will both sell. It’s just that the book having 500,000 rank will sell faster than the one ranked 1Million. There are only books with those ranks at that moment.



Comparison of sales among ASINs.

The sales rank is a function of the number of sales of a particular ASIN compared to the number of sales of other ASINs within the same category. So sales rank doesn’t tell you the quantity sold of a particular ASIN; it just tells you a relationship among ASINs.


The ranks are constantly updating throughout the day. Any given rank at any particular time is only a snapshot of the relationship among ASINs at that particular time.

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