Now that you’ve purchased a subscription to Keepa, it’s time to learn how to understand those charts! When it comes to books, your typical YouTube video or blog post on Keepa charts may not really explain this in a way that benefits the average bookseller. That’s what I’m writing this little article for. As a bookseller, you will deal with a lot (if not all) “used” condition inventory. In contrast, most other teachers of Keepa will most likely be focusing on “new” inventory.
Settings for Keepa Charts for Book Flippers
To begin with, I suggest you go to settings so that we can all be on the same page. To get to your settings, go to Keepa.com and make sure you are logged in. Once there go to your user name in the top right of the page, hover over it, and then click on “Settings”. You should then see a menu with NOTIFICATIONS, SUBSCRIPTIONS, ACCOUNT, and WEBSITE as the options. Click on “Website”. Below you can see a screenshot of my exact settings and adjust yours to match. These settings will affect graphs on the main Keepa.com website as well as the free Keepa extensions that I highly suggest you use as well. These extensions will let a Keepa chart automatically pop up on any item you view on Amazon.
You can download the extensions here:
Quick Tip: On the “Range” section I recommend switching it to “Custom: Days” and typing in 730 so that you can see 2 years’ worth of a book’s graph history.
The Visible Categories of A Keepa Chart
After you’ve downloaded one of the Keepa Extension plugins, make sure it is working by going to a book on Amazon (I’m going to give you a freebie, check out ISBN 9780133500431 as this book has been a decent-selling book over the years). You should see the Keepa Graph display somewhere on the Amazon listing page if the extension is working correctly. When looking at the Keepa chart, you will see a list of categories on the right side of the chart that you can toggle their visibility on or off simply by clicking on that category. Below is a screenshot of the categories I prefer to see when looking at a Keepa chart on a potential book buy. You may want to adjust this to your liking, but over the years, the image you see below is what I use 99% of the time when looking at a potential book flip.
As you can see, I like to be able to see the Sales Rank, Amazon, New, Used, Warehouse Deals, and List Price. Under those categories, you can also see the section that has New Offer Count and Used Offer Count. If you don’t see this part of the menu, go to the bottom of your extension pop-up and there is a section that says “More Historical Data.” Click on this and it will open up a second smaller graph below the main Keepa graph. At this point, you can toggle the New Offer Count and Used Offer Count so that it will show.
The Basics of Reading A Keepa Chart
Now that we should basically be looking at similar charts with similar settings, I can start explain to you what the graph is actually showing you. Remember, my graph is not going to show up exactly like yours as most likely you won’t be looking at the graph the very day I write this, so your graph will have a different time range. You should still be able to get a basic understanding nonetheless.
To start, you need to understand the basic layout of the Keepa Graph. The left side will have the Price section. The bottom is the Timeline. The right-hand side has the Sales Rank values.
To get the exact values at a specific time, you can hover your cursor over the graph in that spot and it should show all of the different values. This helps you to know the exact date, rank, and prices at that moment. The image below shows what I’m talking about. Here you can see the specific values for Friday, March 10th. The date is shown at the very bottom of the line that I’m hovering at and all prices and stocks are shown for that exact date on that vertical line.
Sales Rank:
Sales Rank is the green line on the graph paired with the ranks (numbers) on the right side of the graph. As of writing, the numbers go from #0, in increments of 200,000 all the way up to #1,000,000. If you don’t understand what I’m referring to see the screenshot below. I honestly don’t place much emphasis on the actual numbers when looking at a graph. I mainly just look at the trend of the green line and when is the book selling more or less. However, I just wanted to point out for the beginners that these numbers were associated with the Sales Rank
The lower the green line goes on the graph, the lower the Sales Rank is for the item at that current point in history. A lower sales rank is better. This means the book is getting more sales! If you look at the sales rank graph above, you can see that the rank for this book is going down at that point in history. This means that the book was steadily selling better and better every day. In this instance, it is due to this being a High School book, and entering into July and August, the demand for this book skyrocketed. For online book flipping, it is a must that you start being able to spot the trends with Sales Rank to be successful at flipping books that have consistent yearly trends such as high school, college, and holiday books.
Amazon:
When looking at a Keepa chart, Amazon and its prices are marked by a shaded orange on the chart. In the image below you can see where Amazon began having this book in stock and also the price at which they were asking. The prices are the numbers listed on the left side of the chart. In this example, it goes from $0 at the bottom, all the way up to $200 at the top and is marked in $50 increments. Along the bottom, you see the timeline to which this section of the chart pertains. You can see that between Feb-Mar, Amazon jumped on this listing with their own offer and it was priced around $180-190. Then in mid-March, the price dropped to around $125 and shortly went back up to about $135-140. Where you see no orange line, it means that Amazon was not selling this book at that time.
New:
New is marked by a blue/purple line on the chart. This line is in reference to the lowest price of any New condition item on that listing at any given time. For example, if you look at the graph above where we were showing where Amazon is on the listing, you can also see the blue/purple line going across the graph. This shows that from November to about mid-February the lowest New offer was around $130. Once Amazon jumped on the listing the lowest new offer dropped to around $110 and hovered somewhere between $90 to $125 for the remainder of this chart.
Used:
Used Offers are an extremely important part of your research when searching for books to flip on Amazon. In all my years of reselling books on Amazon, I have never sold a book in New condition and I doubt I ever will. It is good to know where the prices from Amazon and New offers sit, but Used should be one of the biggest factors when determining to whether you should buy a book or not to flip. Used is marked by a black line on the Keepa chart. Similar to Amazon and New, it represents the price at any given time. In the same graph image above that we’ve used for Amazon and New, you can see that the Used price hovers anywhere between around $30 at the beginning to maybe $12 or less. In that case, you could actually zoom in on the chart. See the video below for how to do this.
Warehouse Deals:
Warehouse Deals are used items that Amazon is selling. When it is not book-related, I love to buy Warehouse Deals as I’ve gotten great deals on many items that may be like new, but at a good discount. Warehouse Deals are marked with a purple “X” on the graph as seen below. When it comes to books, Warehouse Deals are one thing you need to pay attention to. Sometimes they can end up being a good, profitable flip. Just remember to NOT buy them with your main Prime account as that is a flag that Amazon may get you on, you will need to use a non-Prime account and actually pay the additional shipping to be safe. More often than not, they are not profitable, but can be an indicator that the book may be on the decline. See the image below to see how to spot when a book has Warehouse Deals offers and remember not all listings will have Warehouse Deals. The Warehouse Deals in this example appear to be around $34 or $35.
List Price:
List price is another very important factor in determining profitable books to buy. Many new sellers don’t pay attention to the List Prices and end up with Stranded Inventory (inventory that Amazon pulls aside and is not able to be sold without you changing certain aspects of your listing such as the price). To make sure as many of your books stay live on Amazon, you need to pay attention to this value. List Price is marked by a brown line on the chart. Many times this line disappears or moves so it can sometimes be confusing as to what the actual List Price is on an item, so I’m usually looking at the most recent List Price on the graph and use that as my criteria. You can see an example of the List Price below. In this example, you see the List Price (brown line) comes and goes, but it shows a List Price of about $40 for this book.
New Offer Count and Used Offer Count:
In the smaller chart under the main Keepa Chart, you can see Rating, Review, and New and Used Offer Counts. If you’re not seeing this smaller graph under the main Keepa chart then you need to look for where it says “More Historical Data” at the very bottom and click on it and the chart should open up. With this chart, I’m only looking at New Offer Count and Used Offer Count so those are the only two you will need toggled to show. This will show how many sellers are selling this specific book at a certain time. The Blue line represents the New Offer Count and the black line represents the Used Offer Count. Below you can see that the Used Offer Count ranges between around 24 at the start, down to 5, and then back up to about 13 in this one time period. The New Offer Count in this example seems to stay at 5 or less for the entire period. Remember that offer counts are showing how many sellers have an offer of this book. It doesn’t show how many they have in stock. For instance, it could show only 1 Used Offer Count, but the seller could still have 100+ in inventory, so that is something you need to pay attention to. You can usually see a seller’s inventory amounts on the Amazon offer page where it shows each seller’s price.
Now You Know The Basics For Reading a Keepa Graph
Hopefully, you can now understand the basics of understanding or reading a Keepa Graph. I purposely did not go into how to find profitable books using a Keepa Graph. That is a whole different topic for another day. Feel free to contact me through the Contact Us page if you ever have any questions on this and I will do my best to get back to you.
If you are a beginner bookseller and need some tips on what you actually need to have in order to start actually selling books on Amazon, I highly recommend you take a look at this article titled Using Keepa To Flip Books On Amazon: What You Need To Start.
Have a great day and sell lots of books!