Metric Junkie Blog » Sales Rank http://www.metricjunkie.com/blog We Track Ranks So You Don't Have To™ Sun, 08 Jan 2012 18:54:39 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Are You Obsessed With Your Amazon Sales Rank? http://www.metricjunkie.com/blog/are-you-obsessed-with-your-amazon-sales-rank/ http://www.metricjunkie.com/blog/are-you-obsessed-with-your-amazon-sales-rank/#comments Wed, 29 Dec 2010 04:36:41 +0000 Mark http://www.metricjunkie.com/blog/?p=101
I came across this really interesting video created by married Authors John Yunker and Midge Raymond that shows how they deal with their Amazon Sales Rank obsession.

It’s actually a really cute promotional tool for the pair’s most recent books (The Tourist Trail and Forgetting English respectively) that will hopefully get your creative juices flowing as you look for new and interesting ways to promote your own books and music in 2011.

The youtube video has already received 4,642 views in the short 30 days since it was released (11/28/2010).

How will you be promoting your book in 2011? Share your ideas.

]]> http://www.metricjunkie.com/blog/are-you-obsessed-with-your-amazon-sales-rank/feed/ 1 Problem Resolved http://www.metricjunkie.com/blog/problem-resolved/ http://www.metricjunkie.com/blog/problem-resolved/#comments Fri, 09 Oct 2009 03:20:56 +0000 Mark http://www.metricjunkie.com/blog/?p=46
The other day we reported a problem that resulted in intermittent reporting of sales ranks for some users during a 48 hour period. Today I am happy to announce that the source of the problem has been identified and a solution has been implemented. Unfortunately any sales ranks that were missed during October 5th – October 7th, 2009 are not available and are forever lost to the Amazon Gods. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you. It is our goal to collect each and every rank Amazon provides for the items you track. But as they say, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

Since we rely on Amazon to respond to API requests we make, we are entirely dependent on their “delivering the goods” when we ask nicely. Unfortunately the consistent responsiveness we have enjoyed from Amazon’s AWS API has a bit of a hearing problem lately which resulted in our missing some sales ranks as a result. It also exposed an issue with our metric collection script which didn’t gracefully handle such a condition. Since it is beyond our scope to force Amazon to respond to each and every request we make, we took this opportunity to make our script a little more robust when it comes to dealing with an aging and sometimes deaf Amazon, by adding some redundancies and not bailing in protest when Amazon ignores it. We also added some notification functionality to alert us, both preventively and reactively as actionable situations occur.  In the end, the applied solution is more of a work-a-round to address issues that Amazon is having responding to requests.

For the record, it appears as though Amazon moved control of these APIs to another group within the organization and they have not been effective communicators of changes they are making to the system. Case in point, Kindle books, they are no longer provided by the API as of August 14th, 2009. Amazon made no mention of this change and finally responded to the frenzied developer community September 29th, 2009 by flatly saying they would no longer be providing them (no explanation given).

Anywho, you don’t need to know how the sausage is made. You just want it to taste good.

We appreciate your continued support and look forward to delivering your sales ranks in new and delicious ways!

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