Guide: Keepa Graph Basics & Charts to Recognize
Become fluent in Keepa to source Amazon products more quickly and accurately.
Greetings, fellow Amazon sellers!
This post is long overdue since Keepa is so fundamental to sourcing products on Amazon. In fact, if there’s one skill you should learn, it’s how to read a Keepa graph. This post will be for both new and veteran sellers, covering the most common types of graphs you should be able to recognize quickly.
What is Keepa? Keepa is a service that visualizes price and seller data over time for Amazon product listings. Thanks to Keepa, you can see whether the price and sales rank you are seeing is a temporary spike or is the true demand and price of the product. Keepa is essential to avoiding products that tank.
As you become fluent in reading Keepa graphs, it will be the first thing you look at to vet a product. But to become fluent, you need practice.
In this post, we’ll review the basics of how to setup your graph + 7 graphs to recognize. Yes, there are other types of graphs you’ll encounter and some advanced nuance we can cover in future posts. But these will get you 90% of the way there.
Read more: Looking for Keepa Product Finder? Check out our other guide.
Basics of Keepa graphs
Keepa is like the Swiss Army Knife of Amazon tools, and its graphs are the blades. At first glance, they can seem overwhelming with lines crisscrossing like spaghetti on a plate. But once you understand the elements, it becomes second nature.
Keepa graphs show three main elements:
Price History - changes in price of a specific product over a set period of time. It allows you to track the pricing trends of the product on Amazon.
Sales Rank - reflects the popularity of a product compared to other products within the same category or subcategory on Amazon. It's calculated based on recent and historical sales data of the product.
Competition History (Availability) - the number of new and used listings at any given point in time.
Setting up your graph
When you first load up a Keepa graph, you’ll notice it comes with a lot of data points. But we only really need a few of them.
On the right hand side of the graph, start by turning off everything. Then, only leave the following data points turned on:
Sales rank
Amazon
Buy Box
New, 3rd Party FBA
If you’re mainly an FBM seller, you would turn on New, 3rd Part FBM instead.
What to look for in graphs
Amazon out of stock
A stable or upward trending price
Sales rank within your range, with a lot of drops
Stable or downward trending number of listings
Keepa graphs to look for
Stable price and demand
Steady, fluctuating price + steady, fluctuating sales rank
Pricing: If we were to hover over these FBA prices on this graph, you’d see price fluctuating within a $3-4 range over the span of several months. This represents price stability that we can feel confident with.
Even if there were temporary dips in price, as long as we see pricing rebound quickly then that’s okay. That typically represents a single seller unloading their stock.
Demand: Also note the sales rank (green line) here. It’s well within our target for this category. It has a lot of fluctuation/dips, which represents sales activity. It fluctuates within a consistent range (15k-30k).