The ability to read Keepa charts is an extremely valuable skill that will help you understand how and why prices for Amazon products change over time. The key is not only reading the chart, but also understanding and being able to interpret the information that Keepa gives us.
Whether you're a seller trying to price your own products for your online arbitrage business, or you're on the hunt sourcing more products to sell, analyzing the data in Keepa's graphs can help you make informed decisions.
In this article, we will take a closer look at how to read and interpret the different types of graphs that Keepa offers, including price history, sales rank, and more.
We'll also discuss some strategies for using this information to your advantage.
By the end of this article, you'll have a better understanding of how to use Keepa's graphs to make smarter buying and selling decisions on Amazon.
What is Keepa?
Keep is a web based, Amazon price tracking tool with both website features and a chrome browser extension. It tracks and monitors product listing and sales data for over 3 billion products on Amazon, from a variety of different marketplace locales.
Keepa gives you insight into a ton of product data points including, but not limited to, the following:
- Historical Sales Rank
- Buy Box Ownership and Price History
- Amazon Price Data
- FBA Price Data
You can also use Keepa to do the following tasks:
- Search the database for products based various attributes such as sales rank, price, brand, listing age and more.
- Track price drops on products and receive alerts at certain price points.
- Check reviews on products and see review numbers for specific product variants.
The features mentioned here are really only just scratching the surface, but the main objective of this article is to show you how to read a Keepa chart data and understand what it all means.
How to Read Keepa Charts
Here's the Keepa charts, in all their glory.
If you're thinking that it looks like a confusing hot mess, you're not alone. At first glance the Keepa chart can appear quite overwhelming, especially if you are new to Keepa.
So, let's toggle off some of the data using the right hand side menu and look at some of the main Keepa graphs that most sellers will use in their Amazon FBA business.
You can change the date range for Keepa graphs by going to the bottom right corner and choosing your desired time period.
Sales Rank History
Here you can see we have just left the Sales Rank history toggled on for this Keepa chart, depicted by a green line. The decline in the sales rank number shows an increase in popularity for this product, especially around the December Christmas time period.
The ability to view sales ranks is one of the most important features of Keepa.
Amazon Fulfilled Products
Now we've turned on the Amazon toggle, which is shown by the orange line and orange shaded area. This data shows if the product was being sold and fulfilled by Amazon themselves. The white gaps in the orange shaded area show times where Amazon have been out of stock for this item.
Buy Box History
Next, we've switched on the buy box history on this Keepa chart. The pink line shows the buy box history and when the pink line is aligned with the orange line, this means that Amazon held the buy box for this product.
FBA Seller Pricing History
Now it's time to see what's happening with FBA sellers for this product. When we toggle this on by clicking on "New, 3rd Party FBA" on the right hand side of the Keepa chart, we can see the orange triangles have been added.
When the orange triangles are aligned with the pink buy box line, this means that a 3rd party Amazon FBA seller has has priced their products to match Amazon. They may have even had Amazon share the buy box with them.
When you hover your mouse over the chart, a small box will appear with more data, as you can see from the image above. The box shows price history for the buy box seller and for Amazon at that particular point in time.
We don't really use too many of the other data points on this first portion of Keepa chart, but here you can see all of the possible data points you can switch on and off by clicking the colored circles on the right hand side of the chart.
You may have noticed that the Keepa chart is "split" into three portions or sections. The let's cover off on those and discuss the data that we look at.
Category Sales Rank Chart
The first part of the Keepa chart has the sales rank so we don't really use this second portion too much, but it is still handy.
As you can see from the chart, it shows us the sales rankings for this product across the top level category as well as it's subcategories.
This can be helpful to make sure that the product is "acting" right. On ocassion you will notice that subcategory ranks do not mimic top level category ranks and that can be an indication that something is off about the sales velocity.
New Offer Count and Review Count
The bottom portion of the Keepa chart has a couple of valuable data points that we like to review.
The purple line, New Offer Count, shows us how many sellers are selling this actual product. This is useful information because it shows precisely how many sellers you are competing against for that buy box.
The green line shows the number of reviews for this product which if increasing over time, shows an upward trend in sales volume.
Monthly Sales Volume
This is a brand new feature just launched in 2024. The yellow gold line on the second chart denotes the amount of units sold each month for the product you are currently viewing.
Keepa Advanced Data Table
Not only can you read and interpret the Keepa graphs until you go blind, you can also explore other information within Keepa's advanced data table.
One great feature of the data section in Keepa is the "Buy Box Statistics". Here you can see that Amazon has held the buy box for this product 59% of the time, with the second seller holding the buy box 37% of the time.
You also get links to the other sellers for this product so you can reverse engineer their store and products when you are sourcing products for your own business.
The product details section of the data tab provides us with loads of useful product information in addition to important statistics such as average sales ranks, current buy box price, buy box averages, review count average and much more.
Interpreting and Evaluating the Keepa Chart Data Points
It's one thing to be able to read a Keepa chart, but the true skill lies in being able to understand the data and use it to make informed buying decisions for your Amazon business.
Sales Rank Data
Often referred to as BSR (best sellers rank), sales rank history is one of the most important data points an Amazon seller can track.
The sales rank number tells us how well a product is performing within its product category and it will also show us things like seasonal sales trends. The lower the sales rank number (closer to zero), the better it is performing in its category.
Take a look at this Keepa chart showing the sales rank data. This product is a snow shovel and you can tell that it's seasonal based on the fluctuations in the graph.
A replenish-able product that people use every day or month and isn't as prone to seasonality is going to have a more steady sales rank with less fluctuations that a seasonal product. An example of this might be candy canes which sell much better during the holidays.
This doesn't mean you should avoid seasonal products, it just means you need to know your market and operate your Amazon business accordingly.
Supply and Demand
We already touched on how you can view both the pricing history and the new offer count for a product. Now let's look at how we can use this data to make better sourcing decisions and avoid getting stuck with stale inventory.
Let's first look at the area inside the red box. You can see here that the Amazon FBA seller price is quite high. This correlates with the low new offer count on the bottom graph. Multiple sellers dropped off so the remaining sellers were able to charge a higher amount for this product.
You can see inside the green box, the number of sellers increased again and the price the item sells for has now dropped.
When sourcing your products, and before you make a buying decision, make sure you look at all the data.
Imagine if you only looked at a small portion of the Keepa chart and you bought it based on an inflated selling price due to high demand. You'd either have to sell at a loss or just hold the product and sell it when demand increases again.
Another way to avoid a sourcing disaster is to visit the product details table and review the average buy box price for the past 90 or 180 days.
Even in this example here you can see that the current price is $5 higher than the average so unless you can profitably sell this product for around the $19/$20 mark, you might want to skip out on a large inventory purchase for this one!
Keepa Pricing
Back in the good ol' days, Keepa was actually free! But even though it's now a paid tool, it is by far one of the most valuable tools Amazon sellers can use in their business.
At the time of writing, Keepa costs €19 (euro) per month which is approximately $20.50 (usd).
You can still access some limited data for free on the Keepa website, but here is what you get as a premium user:
- Interactive graphs with sales rank, buy box, offer counts etc (as shown in this article)
- Current and historical stock offers
- Price increase alerts
- Increased search results for tools such as product finder and top seller searches.
Which Countries Does Keepa Support?
Keepa currently has over 3 billion products in its database across the majority of the major Amazon marketplaces, with the following countries being supported:
- United States (1,004,659,067 products)
- United Kingdom (332,527,828 products)
- Germany (361,158,991 products)
- France (334,169,201 products)
- Japan (368,168,459 products)
- Canada (182,041,504 products)
- Italy (187,076,743 products)
- Spain (361,473,410 products)
- India (124,728,537 products)
- Mexico (51,538,653 products)
- Brazil (6,842,160 products)
- Netherlands (7,120,976 products)
The Australian Amazon marketplace data is a common request, and Keepa once had AU data, but unfortunately they no longer do.
Can I Use Keepa on my Phone?
You can use Keepa on your mobile device now with their iPhone and iPad app from the Apple app store.
It's not the most user-friendly experience on mobile, to be completely honest. The app is fine but to get the most out of Keepa, it really is best suited to being used on a computer.
Conclusion - Reading Keepa Charts
There's a lot to cover when it comes to learning how to read a Keepa chart, but the information in this article is enough to help you make better buying and pricing decisions for your Amazon business.
Our best advice here is to spend some time exploring the Keepa browser extension and its features. Explore and decipher upward and downward trends, learn and understand things like average sales rank and find correlations between the different data that Keepa gives you.
Before you know it you'll be an expert at understanding even the messiest and most confusing looking Keepa graph.
If this article has piqued your interest and you want to take your Keepa knowledge to the next level, you should consider checking out our Keepa Academy. We even have a quiz that will give you completely free access if you score 100% on your first try!
Thanks again for reading, until next time!
