How to read Keepa charts, and why it's important

So let me start this off by saying I have 3+ years of experience sourcing products for Amazon FBA, and everything changed about 2 years ago when I learned about the Keepa App/Extension.

Keepa is a third party software that gives detailed price, sales ranking, and buy box charts for all of the items listed on Amazons marketplace. Using this software can tell you how frequently an item sells, what price it sells at, what price the BuyBox has been, and so much more.

Sourcing wholesale products specifically with this software is much easier and safer.

One the far right side of the Keepa graph (as shown above) are multiple different menu options that you can use to customize the look of your chart. For example, you can see that I have the "Buy Box" option (pink circle) selected above, this shows you what price has held the buy box. You can see that this specific product has stayed consistent at around $23-$25 for the last 3 months. You can then change the time frame as well, if you want to know what this price has been All time, the last year, month, day, or week.

With the combination of the Buy Box Line and the Sales Rank Line, you can see how often an item sells, and for what price clearly. This will help you project how much inventory you should purchase, and help you avoid making mistakes.

Sometimes an item will look profitable on the listing, but when you check the Keepa graphs you could see that the average buy box price is actually significantly lower.

Keepa will also show you if Amazon is in stock as well, another huge factor when making purchases. My general rule of thumb is to avoid Amazon at all costs, but sometimes it might be unavoidable and in that case, make sure that you are willing to compete heavily for the buybox.

As you can see above, Amazon has been on this listing for the last 3 months at $10-$11, and when they run out of stock the sales rank increases and the sales slow.

If you can manage to keep these 3 key factors in mind when reading a Keepa chart, you could potentially save yourself from losing hundreds or thousands of dollars on products that might not be as profitable as they seem.