No matter what your position is in eCommerce, more often than not, you need to monitor Amazon listings. As a professional, it can be helpful to know how many sellers offer a certain product, how often your competition adjusts their sale price, and to make sure no one is breaking your agreements on the Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) by checking your own brand. You might even monitor Amazon listings as a consumer by checking for the best prices and comparing them to similar products on the marketplace.
It’s possible to monitor Amazon listings manually, but there are easier solutions with browser extensions. Depending on your browser of choice, you can find many of these extensions in the Chrome store or even linked directly from the extension creator’s site. Most of these browser extensions have free versions. The paid versions often grant access to more data and more times per day to do a scan or “scrape” of Amazon listings.
A great place to start is with Keepa. Links to Keepa’s extension are available by going to their site and selecting your browser. Keepa is a company based in the U.K. that has access to the Amazon API. If you’re a Chrome user, here is a direct link to download and install the extension.
The free version is easy to install. Once the extension is installed, go to any product detail page on Amazon, and after a moment, a data chart from Keepa will load underneath the product image and bullet points:
Even with the free version, you can look at the product’s pricing history through various date ranges, see how long the listing has been on Amazon, when new third-party FBA and FBM listings appear, as well as whether or not Amazon has a Warehouse (open-box or refurbished) offer available.
To install Keepa, you should create an account, and as of right now, you do not have to provide payment data for the free version. Creating an account makes it possible for you to “track product.” This means that you have the ability to receive email alerts when the sales price changes on the product. If you’re curious whether or not the same item is offered on eBay, simply click the grayed-out “eBay” tab, and a new window will pop up, showing any listings of the product that exist.
If you look closely at the bottom of the graph, you can also see how many people are tracking the product listing using Keepa, as there is a small number next to “Community tracking.” For access to other data, such as Buy Box Statistics, you will need to sign up for a paid subscription. Also available with paid subscriptions to Keepa are API tokens, which are helpful for developers who need to build reports and queries with Amazon’s API.
Another useful extension is available through Jungle Scout. If you’re a Chrome user, you can find the extension here. When you’re on the Jungle Scout website, you’ll see that they are a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that has many offerings, so it can be difficult to find the free version of the extension.
Jungle Scout offers the paid version upfront first. There is a seven-day free trial, but if you aren’t interested in providing your payment information and are not considering paying for the extension, there is a free version available. I found it easiest to find in the Chrome store and not the Jungle Scout site itself, so check your browser’s extension/plug-in stores to see if you can find it easier that way.
Once you have it installed, you get information about Amazon product listings without having to click on the page. Once you search for a product on Amazon, the extension will populate data directly underneath the products in the search results.
From this view alone, you can see how each product ranks within its product categories, its Best Seller Ranking (BSR), how many sales are made daily and monthly, and even if there are multiple sellers for the product. This is helpful if you’re doing research on launching your own similar product on Amazon, seeing how your competitors perform, and in some cases, even figuring out the dimensions of the product.
If you click on a product detail page, you’ll see a “JS” button on the right side of your screen. If you click on it, the Jungle Scout extension will scan the page.
From here, you can get more details about the listing, such as the average price, monthly revenue, and if there are variants of the product on the same page. On the left-hand side of the pop-up, you can click on the plus sign to add this to your product tracker, similar to how you can get email alerts from Keepa’s product tracker. As you can see, you can only use this function so many times a day on the free account. The free Jungle Scout account has 50 scans available, so you may need to purchase a subscription if you need to scale up.
If all you’re looking for is to track historic pricing and want the option to receive email notifications when sales prices change on Amazon, the folks at camelcamelcamel bring you the Camelizer.
Simply install the extension, and you can navigate to the product of your choice on Amazon. You’ll also be able to see historic pricing and opt-in to receive notifications when the sales price changes. The Camelizer is simple and free to use.
Whether or not you decide to use the free or paid subscription versions of these extensions, these extensions can give you great insights into your own products, your competition, and pricing fluctuations – just like a pro!
