From Stripetail: Below is an article of one of our users with the example of why you should not ignore products with low sales velocity (aka high BSR).

FROM 7 DIGIT SELLER:

I strongly disagree with those statements. Just running vendor/distributors reports in bulk and picking all profitable products with high BSR may not always work… so you must look outside the box (sounds cliché 😊).

Here is an example based on ‘true story’ (sounds like a movie 😊) where we took ASIN from 236,000 BSR in 2019 to 7,000 BSR within 1 year, from 10 sales per month to 700-800 sales per months (side note – we took many ASINs – but for this use case we are focusing on one).

The product BSR after the initial investigation scan was very high. However, calculated margins seemed to be OK based on our distributors cost. Also, when looking at the listing we noticed that there were only FBM sellers (most likely dropshippers). Normally, you would ignore this listing and move on. However, since there was some ‘room’ in margins, we did some extra steps. We reviewed this brand and realized it was a good brand in the industry. Similar products of other brands had better BSR. Looking at reviews on the web (outside of amazon – i.e. ebay, google search), it was obviously an OK product.

However, since not all products have price elasticity (i.e. when you lower the price, sales volume goes up) we bought 30-40 products to test out and played with prices over 2 weeks period. Indeed, we lowered price by 30% and the volume started to pick up. We bought more and dropped the price into the floor to zero margin for a few weeks (in actuality we were losing at bit during that time) to get a momentum going and to pick up sales velocity.

Voilà, slowly but surely this ASIN picked up sales velocity and we started purchasing 1000s of units at a time, and we were able to negotiate additional discounts (to somewhat protect our position on this listing) and we have a solid ASIN making 20%-30% margin. Eventually we picked up and ‘improved’ many listings with similar approach.

Would this work in every case? No… but this is something you, as a seller don’t want to overlook. It is a rewarding experience. Now, as a separate process, we look at everything that has high BSR and positive margins , and blank/error BSRs (i.e. system glitches where main category is blank or incorrect)