Today, we are going to talk about Sales Per Month (SPM), why it’s important and what recent changes have taken place on the Amazon platform.
What is Sales Per Month (SPM)?
Sales Per Month (SPM) is one of, if not the most important metrics to look at when analysing a deal on Amazon FBA. This metric determines how many sales a product is getting on a monthly basis and is essential to figuring out if you should buy a product in the first place and how many items you should stock at any one time.
A feature many newer Amazon sellers may not realise exists is that Amazon tells us the sales per month of nearly all of their products. I cannot stress how amazing this feature is; we are getting this data directly from the horse’s mouth; it does not get better or more accurate than the data directly from Amazon.
You can see this under the review score on an item’s product page or in the search results. You can see an example of this below:
It is important to remember that this sales per month figure represents the total sales for the past month of this product across all sellers. So, if the item sells 1,000 times per month and there are 10 sellers, this means that each seller would sell 100 items per month. (This is not exactly how sales are distributed, but I’ve simplified it for this example.)
It is therefore very important not only to use the sales per month figure, but also to look at the number of competitive offers from other Amazon sellers to determine what your share of this sales per month figure you might expect.
Sales Per Month and Seasonality
An important consideration when looking at the monthly sales figure is to remember that it is not a static number. While it gives us a good indicator of a product’s sales velocity, it does not guarantee that the product will have the same sales each month in the future.
Certain products, such as perfumes, aftershaves, and sun cream, are very popular at certain times of the year and unpopular at others. Seasonality can play a significant role in how quickly some items sell throughout the year, and this can mean that sellers can be caught off guard with too much inventory on a product that is no longer selling.
We can use a tool like Keepa to view the sales velocity of a product throughout the year, using one of the many useful graphs they offer.
As you can see in the graph above, this item has a very high sales per month of 7,000 in December, but the sales per month drop off rapidly as we head into late December and January.
Recent Amazon Changes to Sales Per Month
Until recently, Amazon would only show us this metric if the sales per month were over 50. If an item was selling below 50, we had to guess at what the sales per month was; it could be 49 or it could be 1 (or even less), it was always hard to figure out exactly and required some educated guess work using the data provided by other services such as SellerAmp or Keepa.
However, as of last week, Amazon have given us an early Christmas present. They are now providing us with data for 20, 30, and 40 sales per month on products, as shown below.
This is a pretty game-changing feature for us, Amazon sellers. This will allow us to make more educated purchases on these slower-selling items. The 40+ spm is especially important, as previously we didn’t really know how far below 50 spm these items were selling.
Final Thoughts
Sales per month is the most important metric when evaluating a product, and now Amazon have made it even easier for Amazon sellers to make the correct decision when buying a product.
Always keep this figure in mind when sourcing, and make it your first consideration when deciding whether to buy a product to resell on Amazon.
If you are struggling to source profitable products, you should check out the Mastering Online Arbitrage series below:
Mastering Online Arbitrage – Part 1
Mastering Online Arbitrage – Part 2
Mastering Online Arbitrage – Part 3
Mastering Online Arbitrage – Part 4
