What is the Success Score in Xray?

One of the data points included in Xray is the Success Score, which appears in the top right of the window after you’ve run the tool on an Amazon search results page (the score also appears when you run Xray on Best Seller pages). This article explains what the Multi-factor and Two-factor scores mean, and how to switch between the two types.

The original success score, the Multi-factor score, was developed several years ago based on the criteria early top sellers on Amazon used to evaluate potential products to sell. It takes into consideration multiple data points on a product and produces a score based on that criteria.

It’s important to understand that the Success Score does not rate a type of product worthy of sourcing and selling. Like the other data provided by Xray, the score gives sellers information that they can use in their own analysis of a product or market, relative to their own business strategies. What might be a meaningful score to one seller may not be meaningful to another seller with different goals. It’s important to read the explanation for a score before determining whether the score is relevant or not to your research.

In fact, as the online retail industry has evolved, Helium 10 realized that individual sellers, who have different business goals, increasingly needed the ability to set the conditions of their own success score criteria, and that’s why the two-factor success score was added to Xray. The Two-factor success score is now the default score, because that is the score most relevant and useful to the individual seller. To learn more about the scores, let’s start the tutorial.

1. While logged into your Helium 10 account, search for a product on Amazon using a search term or keyword. Click on the Helium 10 Chrome Extension icon in the top toolbar to activate the drop-down menu, then click on the Settings icon in the menu’s bottom right corner.

2. The default setting in the extension is the Two-factor Success Score. Change it temporarily to Multi-factor, so you can see the Multi-factor score. Click the blue Save button, and let’s check how that score appears and what it means when Xray is run.

3. Now, open Xray and let the page’s data load. The Success Score appears in the top right corner, adjacent to the other top level data. 

The Multi-factor score is based on the top ten ranking products that appear in the Amazon search. The score is calculated on a range of criteria relevant to product opportunity, including the maturity of the market, the average product price, average sales revenue, and other factors, providing a snapshot analysis of whether or not launching a new product competitively will be more or less challenging. 

This score does not determine a new seller's potential success in the market, but rather weighs the levels of opportunity that might exist at this time, and assigns it a score based on experienced seller feedback. 

4. Switching from the Multi-factor success score to the Two-factor success score requires you to go back into the Chrome Extension settings and change your preference. (Repeat step two.) Inside Settings, click on Two-factor success score, and then enter the values you’d like identified and calculated in the score in Xray. 

The default settings instruct Xray to identify top ranking products with at least USD 5,000 per month, and less than 75 reviews. Because your own search criteria may be different--for example, you may be searching in a smaller market or in a brand new market with few sales yet--you will want to enter the actual minimum monthly revenue and the maximum number of reviews for the products that you want Xray to use in its calculations. Click the Save button. These new values will stay in place now until you change them again.

5. Think of the Two-factor success score as a set of filters similar to the ones in the Filter menu or that you would set in Magnet or Cerebro, but that is applied automatically whenever you run Xray. It identifies and evaluates the top ten organically ranked  products returned in an Amazon search. Unlike the Multi-factor success score, these two filters limit the analysis to monthly sales revenue and the number of customer reviews, both indicators of how successful a product is based on financial return and customer satisfaction. The analysis is displayed as two numbers to reflect the success of the two factors.

6. The Two-factor success score displays its scores in circles that are either green (a high) or red (low). Rather than an analysis of product averages, the numbers specifically identify how many of the top ten ranked products for this keyword meet the criteria set for the Two-factor score. In this tutorial’s example, nine of the top 10 organically ranked products meet the monthly revenue criteria of USD 5,000.00.

The results suggest the market may be well established with 90% of the top 10 ranking products meeting or exceeding the monthly revenue criteria entered in the Two-factor score settings.

Note, also, that only one of the top ranking products has less than 75 reviews. That means, as with the revenue score, that 90% of the top ranking products have a significant number of reviews, again suggesting that the market is mature.

As with all the data displayed in Xray, the Success Score is a filter that lets you quickly calculate whether the top products ranking for a keyword may or may not match your general requirements to source and sell a similar product.

The Success Score options are not the only filters available in Xray. To learn more about the advanced filters, check out “How Do I Use the Filters and Advanced Features in Xray?”