Real Keepa Examples: Good Buys, Bad Buys and Wildcards

by Brandon | Last Updated: September 16, 2021

Overview

My goal here is to show you what I consider good buys, bad buys and “probably” good buys via Keepa example charts so you can get an idea of how to read the charts and what to look for to make a good data backed decision.

Hopefully by now you are already familiar with Keepa.

If not, have no fear, I wrote a guide on how to read Keepa charts that you can read through and then come back to this page.

We’ll start with the worst buys so far. Think of this as the what not to do section.

Bad Buys

I should probably preface this section by saying these could still turn around. I just don’t know how long it will take. It’s very possible Q4 bails me out on even these “bad buys.”

NERF Roblox MM2 Dart Blaster

AMAZON LINK

Let’s rewind a little bit and I’ll show you the Keepa example chart from when I actually bought the item on August 2nd, 2021: (Click any of the images on this page to make them bigger.)

I was browsing around one night on my phone and came across this item.

It was available at Target and my all in cost was $24.88 each and I just bought them after seeing what the current price was on Amazon, $69.99

I didn’t even check the Keepa chart. I may possibly have been a little intoxicated lol.

For those wondering, Keepa does have an app, though it’s not as good as the desktop version. I do have it on my phone. I could have checked it but I didn’t.

At this point this item was only about 33 days old. This was the only red flag I would have needed had I paid attention.

So I did check the Keepa chart the next day and I was like oooof. The number of sellers was skyrocketing, the price was already in decline.

My items had already shipped…thanks Target, the ONE time I would have preferred you take your sweet time.

I’m like OK…I’ll just get them and ship them into FBA real quick and still catch a good price point. It had a really awesome rank so these were ripping.

Yeah, I could have returned them but I really try not to return stuff unless it is damaged. It forces better buying habits and not to mention it’s a pain in the butt.

Long story short, my items make it to the fulfillment center where they…promptly sit for a couple weeks.

And then, every seller’s worst fear realized: Amazon came into stock with a huge quantity.

Here’s the current Keepa example chart:

As you can see, as of this writing it is still only 82 days old. I drew an arrow to where my inventory got checked in about August 17th and you can see a few days before that is when Amazon started coming in with heavy stock. I remember looking at it and seeing the dreaded 1000+ stock number (now reduced to max order limit 3.)

There are now a whopping 146 sellers, and don’t worry, Amazon still has plenty of stock. 😉

At this point my only options are to hold and hope Amazon sells out around Christmas and I can move them. It could happen.

Either way, not a proud buy, for sure. Luckily it was only 20 units.

Let’s take a look at another bad buy, shall we?

Daniel Tiger’s Baby Margaret

AMAZON LINK

I ordered these a total of 9 times between April 7th, 2021 and April 22nd, 2021. This is what the Keepa example chart looked like when I bought the item:

At the time, this chart was looking great.

Amazon really hadn’t been in stock since November and the first arrow I put at about March 15th was only the tiniest little blip of them coming in stock.

The rank looked amazing – 1,137 would probably sell as soon as they hit the warehouse. But this isn’t the full story, more on this in a minute.

A buy box of $24.10 didn’t leave a ton of profit, but if it was fast moving it would have been fine. Historically this item showed prices around $39.99 which would be a lot better, obviously.

The number of sellers was rising but 26 at the time didn’t scare me off. The rank at the time could support that, so I thought.

The rank is where things went south for me in my analysis.

Baby Margaret is part of a listing that has variations. I talked about this more in the Keepa Product Finder guide but a listing with variations can combine rank and reviews into one number under the parent listing.

The variations look like this:

If you have the Revseller extension (it’s so useful, if you don’t have it yet what are you waiting for?) you can click the Variation Viewer button and we get some interesting findings.

Like This:

This is considering reviews that have been made in the last 8 months or so, but we can see the review breakdown skews heavily in favor of Daniel Tiger and Tigey. With a combined 85% of the reviews we can assume these two variations drive the majority of the sales on this listing.

Poor Baby Margaret is nearly an afterthought with only 4% of the reviews.

A quick manual scan does confirm most of the reviews favor Daniel Tiger or Tigey but I did see quite a few for Baby Margaret after all.

In my infinite wisdom I bought every restock Amazon offered. They’d sell out, come back a day later, I’d buy more.

My thinking was that if I controlled most of the stock, people couldn’t tank the price. And since they barely had any stock since November they probably don’t have much now, right? Right??

Na, they must have had a container floating out in the Pacific for months and just got that ship to port haha.

Here’s a current look at where we stand with Baby Margaret.

We can see that the number of sellers climbed all the way up to above 70 and have since settled back down to 60.

The rank still looks really good, comingled as it may be.

Amazon has been in stock straight since April.

If you’re wondering what some of the funky lines represent, they are:

Vertical gold lines – every time Keepa alerted me about this item.

Blue dashed line in top box – where I setup to be notified when the new price reaches $25.

Gold dashed line below the blue dashed line – the price I set to be notified when Amazon is in stock under a certain price.

Blue dashed line in seller offer box – I setup and alert to let me know when the number of sellers reaches 30 or less.

At this point, I’m just going to have to wait until Amazon sells out and the number of sellers drop and price can rise again.

I’ve also considered maybe just donating them to a children’s hospital or something like that.

I went way too deep on this item without proving my theory first. Leave a comment below with a guess of how many Baby Margaret dolls I purchased. I’d love to hear what you think.

Wildcards – Probably Good Buys

Here are a couple of buys I made recently that I think will still pan out, they’re just not nearly as profitable at the moment. When I do my 2021 Year In Review sometime in January I’ll have a clearer picture on these two items.

Carrera First Disney/Pixar Cars 3

AMAZON LINK

When I came across this one, I was dumbfounded. I had been tracking this listing sometime since mid April and Amazon hardly ever came in stock, when they did it was only like 1 unit.

Then on August 10th I got an alert from Keepa that it came back in stock. I was on my phone at the time so I checked it out and I went to go check the other sellers to see how many people were on the listing.

There were no other sellers. Uh what?

Never before had I seen this. I was sure Amazon was glitching out.

I think there were 80 something available at $33, and I was able to snag like 65.

Man, I was so happy, I thought I was going to be able to quick flip these.

Let’s rewind history a little bit and look at the Keepa example chart as I saw it on August 10th, 2021:

This chart looks fantastic.

Let me break down what’s going on.

We can see Amazon has had a really hard time with stock since March.

You can also see that the price has hit $85+ on 3 different occasions.

The high price always corresponds with the number of sellers dropping. When the amount of sellers rises, the price drops, as you would expect.

Rank is not the greatest at 35k but I attributed some of that to there not being any sellers for a little bit of time.

I know there are variations for this listing, which was the undoing of one of the bad buys discussed up above, but let’s take a look at the Revseller variation viewer and see the breakdown of reviews.

We can see that the listing we’re on is 2nd on the list with 29% of the reviews, so we can figure this is quite a popular item and we can proceed.

So, I don’t regret buying this item at all.

In fact, it came into stock about a week after this and I bought more at $34.99.

And, while I thought I was able to gobble up most of the stock, Amazon did come into supply with more and I was not able to purchase the rest. I’m already over 100 deep on this item lol.

We’re not too far removed from when I bought it, so the updated chart is not going to look that much different, but here it is:

We can see there are now 21 offers on the listing and the buy box price has dropped all the way down to $52.89 and is actually being won by a Fulfilled By Merchant seller, which is probably only because they’re priced about $15 lower than the next FBA person.

There is pretty much zero profit in this item at that price, and in fact, the current buy box winner could even be losing money.

If we assume they got some at $33 which has been the lowest cost in recent times, then they’re getting a whopping 5% ROI. I’d rather just throw my money at the S&P 500 and call it a day for that.

As a general rule you shouldn’t assume some else’s buy cost, but I feel pretty confident they’re not making much money.

I don’t know how many other sellers are hiding out with inventory stashed ready to send in for Q4 but I feel pretty good about this buy and am expecting it to touch around $100 for Q4.

On to the next…

Disney’s Zombies 2 Willa Lykensen Werewolf Doll

AMAZON LINK

I found this listing using the Keepa Product Finder and it really wasn’t too long ago, so the “before and after” charts aren’t going to look too much different.

This was only three weeks ago as of this writing, but here is the Keepa example chart of what it looked like on that day:

There’s a lot to like about this chart.

Amazon had not been in stock since October of 2020. Nearly one whole year of being out of stock.

In that time, even the 3rd party sellers got decimated as there is a long stretch from late December 2020 to June of 2021 with hardly any sellers on the listing.

(I have no idea what’s up with Mr. $319.99 there, I doubt they sold for that price but if they did then my hat’s off to you good sir.)

I digress…so offer count only jumps to 19 and buy box is at $44.19 with lots of price support for above $50.

Rank of 15k is still very good. We know this is the true rank since there are no variations on this listing.

This thing is looking pretty good. Now, of course the big question – how much stock will Amazon have?

As of this writing they have 437 left. I think they probably got a small shipment and that will be it.

Learning from some of my past mistakes I decided to only go with 35 of these for now.

Let’s take a look at the current chart as of September 15th to see what has changed:

We can see the offer count has ballooned up to 51.

The rank has actually gotten better at now just under 9k, which is to be expected with Amazon coming into stock with a hefty supply.

We also see that 3rd party FBA sellers have dropped their price all the way down to $24.58 in an attempt to ditch their inventory.

My guess is that maybe this item was available from Walmart somewhere around May/June and that explains the seller increase.

At this point, I’d like to see the number of sellers level off soon. I think a lot of the 3rd party sellers are going to sell quick for little margin once Amazon’s stock dries up.

I still feel optimistic about this listing heading into Q4, and I think a return above $50 is very likely.

Good Buys

Now, let’s take a look at what I consider some pretty decent purchases.

Barbie Babysitting Playset with Skipper Doll

AMAZON LINK

I made my first purchase on this item back on May 25th, 2021 and it looked pretty good at the time:

A few things to go over.

We can see strong price support around the $50 area.

Since December of 2020 there has hardly been over 20 sellers on this listing. In December 2020 we can see where the number of sellers fell off a cliff, likely due to massive sell through.

Amazon had real trouble staying in stock from March to the end of May, and probably trouble before that even since they gave up the Buy Box on a couple occasions for prolonged periods (the time where the pink line rises above the Amazon price, even when they were in stock.)

Amazon itself sold this for nearly $50 in January and it still had a great rank.

At the time I made the purchase Amazon was the only one in stock.

The listing has great age at 1349 days, so it has proven history.

The rank, even at its highest point is mirroring that of pre-Q4 of 2020 so that’s an ok sign to me also.

Now, the listing does have two other variations available? Are we worried about those? Well, Revseller can help us out:

We can see the Pram Playset gets the majority of the reviews, so we are good in that respect.

So now let’s fast forward to the current time and look at how the graph is shaping up.

Amazon was in stock for the last week of May and the whole month of June so I’m not sure how much supply is out in the wild.

The number of sellers never rose dramatically, topping out at 22 on June 27th.

From there we see the price moving on an upward trajectory while the rank has improved even more since our purchase.

Amazon did just come into stock in the last few days, but with a far out ship date they were still giving up the Buy Box at $49 to 3rd party sellers.

And yes, I did buy more at that time. =)

For right now, it doesn’t seem like this latest restock had very much quantity since they’ve already sold out as of September 16th.

This is looking to be a heater for Q4.

Potential downsides that are still unknown? A lot of sellers have inventory in storage that they will flood for Q4 thus driving the price down and/or Amazon comes back with a hefty restock for December/January.

Time will tell the whole story, but right now I am quite happy with this buy.

And let’s take a look at the final item on this list.

Transformers Optimus Prime Action Figure

AMAZON LINK

If you’ve read some of my other guides, especially my how to read Keepa charts guide (link here) then you will recognize this as my example chart.

I’ve studied this listing very closely since April and I’m growing to like it more and more, even with some more recent hiccups that we’ll discuss.

Here’s the Keepa example chart as it looked on May 25th, 2021 when I made my second purchase, the first being April 7th, 2021:

Right off the bat we can see that Amazon has had a really hard time staying in stock since the beginning of November 2020.

All those little lines down to the $20 mark are when Amazon would come into stock but they are just blips…they probably sold out within minutes or maybe hours of what little stock they had.

The Buy Box did get down to around $33 the first part of May but you can tell the way sellers go from about 60 to 30 that either the sellers didn’t have much inventory or this listing was selling so many units that the sell through was very fast.

In a matter of a month it went from 57 sellers to 28 and the price started to rebound.

I was able to catch a pretty big stock on May 25th and I’m sure a lot of others did as well.

For those that don’t know, I do a lot of buy and holds – meaning, I buy an item at a low price, prep it, package it up and throw it in storage. I set Keepa alerts to notify me when either a price has been reached where I want to re-evaluate to send in or maybe the number of sellers has fallen below a certain point.

When I’m ready to send the shipment in all I have to do is go retrieve the items from storage, slap a UPS label and FBA label on the box and schedule a UPS pickup. Detailed write up on this process coming soon.

I do some quick flips too but if you can sit on some capital the buy and hold method is far more profitable. Using prior Keepa data you can make future guesses about where the price will go at certain points.

Like in the above picture we have strong evidence that $70 is very reachable. $55 to $60 was quite common last Christmas.

$60 on this item nets you $25 in profit, or a 126% ROI on your money. Now compare that to if you tried to quick flip this item only to see the buy box sink down to $33 (leaving you a meager profit of $2.25 or 11% ROI.)

Buy and hold for the win!

Anyway, let’s fast forward to the present day and look at the chart. We’ve had some interesting developments.

The rank is looking as good as ever but you will notice that the amount of sellers has swelled all the way up to 77. This is actually the highest amount of sellers this listing has ever seen in all 1086 days its been active.

The buy box did just scratch $60 for a moment in time before the influx of sellers drove it down to $41.99.

Also, the first week of September did see a pretty sizeable restock from Amazon. I don’t know how many exactly, I was getting the 1000+ message for a while and then poof they were just gone.

Did someone buy a massive quantity?

I did buy more, and I have a feeling that by the end of January I’m going to be wishing I was the one that cleaned them out of their stock.

Now, I know it is entirely possible that a lot of people caught the last restock and maybe we even hit 150 sellers.

But the rank on this is insane, right around 2k, consistently.

Let’s do a little quick Jungle Scout math. They claim a 2k rank = 2160 sales a month. Roughly 70 a day…right now. That doesn’t even account for Q4 volume.

Since Keepa gives us stock numbers for every seller, let’s just take a look at the total inventory for this item.

Yes, like a mad man I went though and added all the stock up. FBM and FBA, even though FBM is not really our competition…

891 total, about a 13 day supply.

Now I know that the listing won’t dry up in 13 days, there are a lot of people just sending in their inventory and probably more and more items will be checked in over the next month or two.

This is just to illustrate that despite the number of sellers, the rank can support it easily.

If Amazon doesn’t come in with a surprise restock, I fully expect Optimus Prime to touch $100.

Wrapping It All Up

So there we have it. By now you should be able to read Keepa charts, identify products to sell with Keepa product finder and now be able to put it all together using these examples to make some better buying decisions.

Ultimately, you will make some mistakes. It’s part of the process.

Just remember, you never take a loss, you only receive a lesson.

Hopefully these real examples will give you some good guidance along the way.

Can you do me a favor? Hit me up on Twitter if this helped you or if there is anything else you’re struggling with?

I’m trying to help as many people as possible.

To your success! -Brandon