For years, many Amazon sellers have been relying on the Keepa Chrome extension to track historical product sales data.
It's great for getting a quick glimpse into how well products have been selling over time. This is great for projecting inventory levels for your FBA SKUs that require you to make monetary investments to purchase inventory up front, often up to 60 days before the inventory is available for sale on Amazon.
The chart below shows the information that Keepa used to make available for free on any Amazon product listing page that they were tracking.
* click to expand
The most important line on the spark chart was the green one, representing best seller rank or "BSR" for short which is representative of how well a product is selling at a point in time.
The lower the BSR, the better the product is selling.
Unfortunately, in February 2019 the people in charge of Keepa decided to put BSR historical data behind their pay wall. The chart below is what the free version of Keepa now looks like.
* click to expand
This left thousands of Amazon sellers stuck with making a choice between paying the monthly fee, or finding a free alternative to Keepa (myself included!).
I've done some research and believe that I have a qualified free Chrome extension for those of you opting not to pay for Keepa's Premium graph types.
* click to expand
P.S. if you do decide to pay, feel free to use my affiliate link =)
Free Alternative to Keepa
My personal recommendation for those of you looking for a free way to track historical BSR is to check out the Helium 10 Chrome extension.
Setting it up doesn't take long at all!
- Visit the Helium 10 website & create a free account
- Install the Helium 10 Chrome extension
- Go to an Amazon product detail page & click the Chrome extension, if it's working it should look like this
- If everything is working, you should see the Helium 10 spark chart - they call it "Xray" - loaded in above where your Keepa chart should be
You'll notice 3 different colored lines on the chart:
- Red: Sales Rank
- Blue: New Price (actual price)
- Yellow: List Price
Additional Helium 10 Tools (FREE)
This is unrelated to tracking sales information, but Helium10's chrome extension also comes with some additional tools:
Revenue Calculator
Selling price - Amazon fees = Net profit.
Inventory Tools
Monitor other sellers on the buy box' offers.
Profitability Calculator
Additional price+cost related data points for products.
Review Downloader
Extract reviews to a new tab in Chrome.
Using Helium 10's FREE Plan
The Keepa alternative is not actually called X-Ray, but I've been digging through Helium 10's suite of tools and can't find a name for it.
The last thing I need to make clear is that if you plan on heavy usage of Xray (the Keepa alternative), you may end up needing to eventually pay anyways.
Per Helium 10's pricing page, the free tier only allows up to 1,000 monthly uses of Xray.
That means, every time an Amazon product page loads & the Helium 10 chrome extension is enabled, Xray will load the spark chart and 1 of your uses will be deducted from your monthly allotment.
If you're a fan of Helium 10 and want to sign up, make sure to use my coupon code & save 50% off your first month or an additional 10% off your annual plan!
RYANHCS50
- Doesn't expire
