An Eye on Amazon
Aaron Shepard’s Blog for Sales Rank Express
“The Most Useless Widget Devised by Human Hands”Jan. 17, 2008
GalleyCat has once again honored Sales Rank Express, this time by dubbing its new Web Widget “The Most Useless Widget Devised by Human Hands.” Thanks, GalleyCat, for another great plug!
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S.R.E. Web Widget 1.2 Now AvailableNov. 17, 2007—Updated Jan. 18, 2008
The S.R.E. Web Widget is now available. Here’s your chance to display Amazon sales rank, customer rating, and more, right on your own blog or Web site. Show one item or many, including any book, CD, DVD, or anything else listed on either Amazon.com or any other Amazon site worldwide. Your Amazon affiliate ID can be included for commissions, too. The widget is easy to install and won’t ever slow down your page.
After this, who knows? Maybe there will be S.R.E. widgets for your desktop and iPhone.
Update—Version 1.1 improves compatibility with Blogger and other blogging environments, and also with Web pages using DTDs for HTML 4 Strict and XHTML. Version 1.2 improves compatibility with Blogger when not placed in the sidebar.
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S.R.E. Does TagsNov. 12, 2007
All of you Web 2.0 social networkers know that tags are hot. Users get to identify sites, products, and just about anything else by applying their own words or short phrases, to help themselves and everyone else find them. Amazon.com introduced its own tagging feature earlier this year and has shown increasing determination to use the tags to market similar products. But where has Sales Rank Express been?
Well, we’re finally catching up. Starting now, Sales Rank Express has a new entry in the Scores column of its results page: “Taggings.” This tells you exactly how many times a book has been tagged by Amazon customers. And guess what? You can’t get that ready-made figure on Amazon’s own site! Yes, Amazon will tell you how many unique tags have been applied to a book, and how many customers have applied each tag to it. But you can’t get the book’s total number of taggings without counting them up yourself—or, now, getting it from Sales Rank Express.
I figured you wouldn’t want the S.R.E. results page cluttered up with every detail about tagging, so the total number is all I’ve included. But of course, that number includes a link to the full listing on Amazon.
Due to Amazon’s implementation, this feature of Sales Rank Express does have limitations. (Which is why I’ve been dragging my feet about adding it.) The tagging number is not available yet when you search for paired titles with the “Get Pairings” button. Also, tags are so far part of Amazon.com only, not Amazon sites in other countries. I’ll try to keep an eye on that to show the info for other countries as they come on board—but if you notice tags on those other sites before I do, please let me know!
By the way, if you’d like some fun, first check a book’s taggings on Sales Rank Express, then go to Amazon.com and add a tag yourself, then come back to Sales Rank Express to check it again. Unlike most S.R.E. data, which is updated by Amazon hourly, the tagging number changes at once!
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S.R.E. Comes to Large (and Small) ScreensOct. 20, 2007
Sales Rank Express was initially designed the way most Web sites are: to look best on an average desktop monitor set at average resolution. The problem with this approach is that more and more people are viewing the Web on screens that depart farther and farther from that average.
The change is hitting Web designers from two directions. On the “large” side, screens are getting bigger with denser resolutions. On these displays, the standard Web page looks too small. And this will get much worse in the coming years, with monitors taking advantage of “resolution independence” such as is being introduced by Apple this month in its Leopard update of Mac OS X.
Ironically, the strongest challenge in the other direction comes also from Apple: the use of a standard Web browser on a handheld. Won’t people want to use Sales Rank Express in Safari on the iPhone? You bet! And don’t I want them to? Right again!
If you’ve already tried to use Sales Rank Express on a much larger or smaller screen, I probably don’t need to tell you that the results have not been pretty. So, this week I took up the challenge and overhauled the code that controls S.R.E.’s screen layout.
The result (I believe) is that Sales Rank Express now scales fairly gracefully to any screen on which you would find a standard Web browser. The effect isn’t perfect, and on small screens you will still need to scroll sideways for some functions, but I doubt you’ll have many complaints. (If you’re curious how I did it, I specified nearly all linear measurements with CSS using ems, a typographic unit that the browser will scale along with text.)
To take advantage of this site’s new adaptability, simply use your browser’s text size or zoom commands to shrink or enlarge the display. Internet Explorer has both kinds of command—neither of which work as well as on the other major browsers—but the zoom command will probably work best for you. Just don’t use both kinds of command on that browser together, or you’ll get a real mess!
Oh, and no, I haven’t yet redesigned this page for scaling, or any of the other subsidiary S.R.E. pages. But I’ll try to get to it soon.
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Author Videos on AmazonOct. 9, 2007—Updated Oct. 16, 2007
If you want to know what the next big thing will be in Amazon promotion, I’ll tell you right now: author videos. Amazon has already introduced video into customer reviews. It can only be a matter of time—and not a very long time, I’m guessing—before video becomes an option for AmazonConnect.
To get ready for that day, I’ve already purchased a Flip Video Camcorder, which Amazon has been pushing for use on customer reviews and is now selling for $150 or less. This beauty and other devices like it are going to blow the lid off online video. In ease of use and quality of output, it is nothing less than a revelation.
If you’re already handy with a conventional camcorder, forget everything you know. This thing has just four controls: a red on-off button, a play button, a delete button, and a circular direction pointer. There’s no manual, and you hardly even have to read the quick card that comes with it. Super simple.
The camcorder has a built-in USB plug, and the camcorder itself acts as an external USB drive. Its editing software is on the camcorder itself. You can run it from there, or just pull the AVI files onto your computer for editing with other software. There’s no tape, no discs, nothing but flash memory. Neat!
But what truly amazed me was that this camcorder produced video of decent quality that was ready to go, right out of the can. Sure, you can compress it further to save space and transmission time, but it already comes in a somewhat compressed, computer-ready format. If your videos are under a few minutes, you can send them as is. And even if you wind up compressing them further, the computer-ready format means you don’t have to be super careful about your settings to avoid ruining them, as I’ve discovered is easy to do with video from more expensive camcorders.
The big test, of course, is how it looks online. So I uploaded a video to YouTube. The video certainly doesn’t look as good there as it does on my computer, but it’s still very acceptable—and this is on a video that was shot without a tripod (which would have helped a lot). Check it out:
I could go on and on, but you get the idea. The bottom line is: If you’re going to be promoting on Amazon, you’re going to need one of these things—or something very like it!To comment or receive notice of new entries, subscribe to SRE-Talk.
Faster Checking with Save and RecallOct. 9, 2007
It’s been quite some time since I’ve had to type anything for my main search on Sales Rank Express. I used to have a private version of the S.R.E. form on my computer with my entries built in as defaults—but with all the tinkering I do with the form, maintaining a version with permanent differences got to be a hassle.
Then I figured, why don’t I add a button that fills in the fields for me automatically? So, I did that—but again, it was a difference between my private form and the public one. I finally solved the problem by adding a secret button to both forms. (Can you can guess where it is?)
Having a button like this turned out to be tremendously useful, because I could change my entries to check other books, then revert to my main search with the click of a button. In fact, it was so useful, I started feeling guilty that other S.R.E. users didn’t have the benefit of it.
So, now you do. The new Save buttons on Sales Rank Express enable you to take a snapshot of your entries at any point. You can then make any changes you like for a different check, then revert to your saved entries by clicking a Recall button. And, going one up on anything I had devised for myself, you can save and recall two distinct sets of entries. I’m already finding that extremely useful!
A couple of caveats: The entries saved are only those that apply to all countries—author, publisher, title, ISBN, and availability. Also, make sure you’re reaching Sales Rank Express by the exact same address each time. As with S.R.E.’s other memory functions, your browser will store settings differently for “salesrankexpress.com” and “www.salesrankexpress.com.”
Of course, if you never vary what you check, you won’t need these buttons, since Sales Rank Express will remember your settings anyway. But if, like me, you often switch from one check to another, this should speed up your work quite a bit.
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N.Y. Times ReduxSept. 3, 2007
Sales Rank Express today made The New York Times for the second time in a month as Lyndon Stambler published a follow-up to his Aug. 6 feature on Amazon sales ranks. The new article is “Amazon Drops Inventory Data, Irking Writers.”
It’s actually about the withdrawal by Amazon Web Services of the stock numbers featured mostly on Sales Rank Express—a withdrawal that apparently occurred in response to the first article. But since The Times had already given us a big plug, they wanted the S.R.E. angle played down—which perhaps leaves some readers scratching their heads as to what it all means.
Anyway, the article still gives our address, so hopefully it will bring more traffic. And my redesign of the S.R.E. form came out just in time for it. (What a coincidence!)
By the way, the article also gives a very nice plug to our friend Steve Weber and his wonderful Plug Your Book! Congratulations, Steve!
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No More FTP Info!Aug. 28, 2007
Still smarting from the loss of Amazon’s stock numbers, S.R.E. must now also withdraw its Book Covers FTP Request Form. This form automated your requests to Amazon for FTP info from all six Amazon sites, for submitting book cover images. Sadly, the automatic responses from Amazon’s email addresses no longer return FTP info but simply provide links to the site’s Publishers and Authors Guide, from which FTP info was removed months ago.
But even though Amazon no longer tells you how to access them, most of the old public FTP accounts are still active, if you can just get hold of a username and password. I’m not going to jeopardize Sales Rank Express by posting any here, but you still find some on the Web by searching on “ftp.amazon.com” and “ftp-1.amazon.com” (with or without the quote marks).
Is this latest loss more fallout from the recent publicity for S.R.E.? Maybe, but I doubt it. It’s more likely just the inevitable final step in Amazon’s process of hiding this info from the public.
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A Measure of FameAug. 12, 2007
I finally got my Web site traffic stats for the past week, so I can now tell you the immediate effect on Sales Rank Express of the week’s publicity in The Times, Seth Godin’s blog, GalleyCat, and elsewhere.
Total visits for the week—that’s visits, not hits—was 10,043. That’s over ten times the past month’s weekly average of close to a thousand. Twenty-eight percent of that traffic was on Monday (the day of the Times article and the GalleyCat posting), and 34% was on Tuesday (the day of Seth Godin’s posting). After that, it trailed off, but after a week, it’s still several times higher than in the past.
Below are the week’s top referrers (sites from which visitors followed links), with the number of visitors sent. These are all the sites that sent over 5% of the week’s traffic. Note that GalleyCat doesn’t show up, because it linked only to the Times article, not to Sales Rank Express.
- www.nytimes.com—2,497
- sethgodin.typepad.com—1,704
- www.google.com—990
Did Sales Rank Express have trouble keeping up with demand? Nope. The site is designed for minimal bandwidth requirements. It could have taken a whole lot more activity without a shudder. And hopefully, that’s what it will eventually be doing!
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Say Good-Bye to Stock Numbers!Aug. 10, 2007
The biggest downside to this week’s publicity for Sales Rank Express—at least, so far—is that Jeff Bezos was perusing The Times over breakfast, came across the phrase “whose Web site can tell authors how many of their books Amazon has in stock and track sales,” and freaked.
At least, that’s how I imagine it. But however it happened, the Amazon E-Commerce Service of Amazon Web Services ceased to supply stock numbers on the evening of Aug. 8, two days after the Times article. And today, in response to inquiries about this in the ECS forum, “Matt@AWS” wrote, “For business reasons, we can no longer return the Quantity for Amazon offers. While this is certainly an interesting piece of data it is not core to promoting products on Amazon, which is the primary intent of Amazon ECS.”
So, this extremely helpful data is no longer available in Sales Rank Express or anywhere else outside Amazon. I can’t say I’m shocked—I always figured it was some kind of oversight that Amazon would reveal it. Still, I wish they’d given me notice before pulling the plug!
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S.R.E. Hits the Big TimeAug. 10, 2007
Sales Rank Express hit the Big Time on Monday, Aug. 6, when The New York Times Business section ran Lyndon Stambler’s article “The Highs and the Lows of Rankings on Amazon.” Not only did the article mention S.R.E., it placed it in the first paragraph and ran with a picture of yours truly gazing lovingly at an S.R.E. results page!
The story was almost immediately picked up by GalleyCat, an influential publishing industry blog. They even ran the photo from The Times. (Huh?)
To capitalize on the publicity and spread the word farther, I sent out a press release on Monday and Wednesday. This made its way to Seth Godin, founder of Squidoo and legendary author of Unleashing the Ideavirus, who mentioned S.R.E. on his blog.
I don’t have traffic figures yet—I’m only set up for a weekly report—but there certainly has been enough email flurry to convince me that S.R.E. is getting a lot of extra visitors.
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Tracking Sales by Sales Ranks and Stock NumbersMay 9, 2007—Updated May 10, 2007
I’ve heard a lot of questions and speculations over the years about how soon a book’s Amazon sales rank will jump in response to a sale. I finally decided to find out for myself, and also to compare that with how soon Amazon reports a change in the stock number. Sales Rank Express has made that easy!
I tested by purchasing several low-cost Dover books on Amazon.com—two in stock at Amazon, two not in stock at Amazon but ready for drop shipping from Ingram, one sold by Amazon but not in stock either there or at either Ingram or Baker & Taylor, and one sold only on Amazon’s Marketplace. (If you’re not familiar with the various permutations of the Amazon stock number displayed by Sales Rank Express—and how to recognize them—please see the S.R.E. FAQ.) I then checked Sales Rank Express after each of Amazon’s regular hourly updates of both sales ranks and stock numbers.
I’ve already worked the most important results into the S.R.E. FAQ, but here they are in a nutshell: In each case, the jump in sales rank came about two to three hours after the sale. The stock number change for Amazon’s own stock came more quickly—in about one to two hours.
For the books stocked only at Ingram, the stock number change was quicker still, coming within the first hour—and actually, since I purchased one book shortly before an hourly update, I can say it came in this case within minutes. On Ingram’s ipage, the same stock changes took two to three hours after the sale to show up in a “Real Time Stock Check.” Sales rank and stock number timing remained the same when I ordered one of these books outside Ingram business hours—around 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time for a book in Ingram’s Pennsylvania warehouse.
As Morris Rosenthal gently pointed out to me, these results apply to the time of testing and may not be valid generally or for long. Still, I hope this gives ballpark help to those of you who hover over your computers trying to follow your book sales minutely from numbers dancing on a screen.
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Welcome to the New S.R.E. Blog!May 9, 2007
I decided to offer this blog in place of the “What’s New?” page. Seems a bit cooler, yes? And it lets me discuss things in more depth.
This is my week for adding support features to the site. Besides this blog, we just launched SRE-Talk, a discussion list for Sales Rank Express and related issues on Amazon. I’ll be active on the list, of course, and my wife, Anne L. Watson, will moderate. I’m happy to say that initial invitations are already bringing in some heavyweight list members, the very first being Morris Rosenthal—author of Print-on-Demand Book Publishing, founder of pod_publishers, prominent blogger, and influential Amazon sales rank analyst—who hasn’t been on a publishing list himself for maybe a couple of years. We hope you’ll join us too!
Also, please check out the revised and reorganized S.R.E. FAQ, especially the new separate sections on Amazon sales ranks and stock numbers.
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