Why Does the Average BSR in the Chrome Extension Change So Often?

Amazon Best Sellers Rankings fluctuate constantly – they change every 30 minutes or so, and sometimes even more often than that. Amazon is constantly updating the overall ranking list based on the latest sales data of the products sold on their platform.

For example, if a book that has not sold in a long time suddenly sells 2 copies, it’s ranking may jump significantly. It’s ranking may have been around #400,000 (has not sold in at least a few days), and with 2 sales, it may move up to around #80,000 or so.

Here’s a historic BSR ranking graph showing constant fluctuations over a timeframe of one week. This is quite normal for any book on Amazon.

Amazon Historic Best Sellers Rank in BookBeam Chrome Extension

The average BSR is an average of the books that Amazon shows in search results. This list also changes, since Amazon displays search results in a dynamic way, to give exposure to a wider range of books. This means that in one search you may have happened to have a few higher or lower selling books than in another search of the same keyword, leading to different average BSRs.

These 2 factors combines cause fluctuations in the average BSR numbers.

To help self-publishers manage these fluctuations, we have created a feature that allows you to deselect certain books from the average calculation. Just click the blue checkmark box to exclude a book from the average calculation.

BookBeam Chrome Extension Checkboxes