Tracking Amazon Sales with Junglescan
 

The Junglescan site (www.junglescan.com) was originally called Amazonscan.com until the folks at Amazon felt compelled to make them change the name.

Essentially, Junglescan is a Hoover (a Hoover is a Vacuum) that scrapes the Amazon sales ranks from the book detail pages and stores them in a MySQL database.  Junglescan tracks the raw data (Figure 1), and you can view the data using their friendly GUI.
 

Figure 1 – Junglescan raw data

The best part is that it is very easy (and free) to track Amazon sales ranks with Junglescan.  Here are the steps:

1 – Go to www.junglescan.com

2 – Create a User ID

3 – Enter a list of books to track

The main screen (Figure 2) allows you to enter a user ID and Password.

Figure 2 – Junglescan home page

Once you have defined a user ID and password, you can enter as many books as you like.  When you go to the Junglescan portfolio page (http://www.junglescan.com/portfolio/) you will see your list of books (Figure 3).
 

Figure 3 – Junglescan portfolio book list

To see the historical Amazon sales rank, just click on the “Rank” number in the right-hand column.  You will then see a historical plot of the Amazon sales rank (Figure 4):
 

Figure 4 – Junglescan page rank historical tracking for 30 days

In this example, we see that the Oracle9i RAC book sales from the time the books first hit the warehouse.  As backorders were shipped, the Amazon sales rank briefly went below 5,000, indicating a backorder of about 20 copies. 

Note the menu at the bottom of the chart that allows you to view the sales over different periods.  If we plot sales over 90 days, we see a steady increase in sales for this book (Figure 5):
 

Figure 5 – Junglescan page rank historical tracking for 90 days

Eventually, all books hit a steady-state for the first six-month with a sales rank from 10,000 to 50,000 (for Computer-related books).  As the book becomes obsolete, the sales rank will increase above 200,000 indicating no further sales.