Amazon U.S. February bestsellers and general Amazon-based discussion

[nemo37]

Based on what others have said Amazon has served as a fairly reliable predictor for NPD, but it has had failures explained by certain shortcomings which is why I think it is also useful to look at data from GameStop and BestBuy. These shortcomings came into particular view in November and December. These are several factors that I think impact Amazon's predictability in a given month:

1. Retail exclusive bundles and offers: this is one that I think impacts Xbox One the most, because I have seen several bundles and offers available on Best Buy and Microsoft's own store front that are not offered by Amazon. This was particularly true during the holidays when Amazon did not offer the Xbox One Madden bundle nor did they offer the ability to choose your own games. This put Xbox One in third-place on Amazon in December, while it on NPD it came in second place. Looking into February, I think Amazon is once again underestimating Xbox One, because once again there are discounted bundles that are available at other retailers but not Amazon. I think this also, to a lesser degree, holds true for PS4 because Gamestop have several limited edition bundles that are not available on Amazon. Ultimately, buyers will buy from the retailer that has the best deals, and if Amazon does not have the best deal for a particular console then its predictability for that system falls. Right now it has not effected Switch too much because Switch has two SKUs and the retail exclusive bundles (Splatoon 2 Switch bundle is the only one I can think that is not available on Amazon) do not really offer discounts. Once Nintendo starts selling retailer exclusive discount bundles (like they did with 3DS as it progressively went through its lifespan), then I believe we will see a similar effect on Switch.

2. Stock discrepancies. Again this is fairly self-explanatory. If Amazon is having stock issues while other retailers have stock, then it is likely that people that might have purchased a system would go to another retailer. In early February PS4 started having such issues on Amazon while the base model was available on other retailers. So we may be missing chunks of data from PS4 during that period for Amazon (the same occurred with Switch in early January).

I think the best course is to look at console ranking performance from multiple retailers at once (I often follow Amazon, BestBuy, and EB Games) to get a decent picture of how each console is doing with regards to ranking position compared to other systems.