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Sometimes it is not enough to know simply what you are buying but what the overall sales of the items you are purchasing are. It is great to find that one comic book you have been looking for, but especially for retail making sure that comic book moves quickly is more important. One of the things we are looking at in our wholesale companies is what is the relative sales rank of the items we are wanting to sell to see how fast they will sell. When you have a big hit on your hands and you cannot keep them in stock, for retail and online this is a good thing.
As an example, Amazon provides a tool called sales rank that can help retailers find the right comic book for them, or indeed just about any product in the Amazon catalog not just comic books, with a high sell through rate and a positive set of feedback for that product.
I Feel Sick 1 has a sales rank of 190,000 when we looked this morning with seven positive reviews. I Feel Sick 2 has a sales rank of 242,000 roughly when we looked this morning with three positive reviews. According to Foner Books, that means one I Feel Sick sells about every 2 or 3 days with a substantial markup over retail of at least 5 dollars for the lowest new and a markup over retail of 3 dollars for used. This is exactly the kind of comic book you want to carry in your store, or sell online. Ebay copies of I Feel Sick are about the same in terms of pricing and sell through using Terrapeak, with 14 copies sold in the last three weeks. There are limited quantities on the market, not a lot of seller crowding and selling thousands of copies, meaning this is a comic book that even if you can’t sell it in your physical store is a book you want to carry.
The lower the sales rank, the quicker the item is selling, the more demand for that title or toy, the easier it will be to sell at least online. For people clearing out the overstock from the holidays this is a strategy that matters. Those things that sell well online at a premium over retail are always a good product to carry. Those things that have a sales rank of over 3 million will take a significant time to sell online, which might be better off if they were put up on craigslist wholesale or at a small loss to get rid of the stock.
If when you are shopping for the latest and greatest for your store, a good measure of what the public is buying in general is Amazon’s sales rank. If you have bulk items that you need to look up a quick and easy tool is Aaron Shepard’s Sales Rank Express tool. You can use Aaron’s tool to also check sales rank across all the Amazon sites from Canada to Japan to see how the product will do internationally if you choose to sell to an international market.
So rather than thinking this is going to be an awesome title to carry in your store, sales rank and the tools around it makes a very good way to see if that product will actually be an awesome title to carry in your store regardless of platform. Shopping using Amazon sales rank and the data off Terrapeak over on Ebay will help you make better buying decisions, and allow you to leverage the best of your physical store with what people are looking for, and for fail over to online if the product does not sell in your store.
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