The idea of this thread is to use the online best selling list of main US retailers to try and build a formula allowing us to predict the outcome of incoming NPD.

After a few month, here is what we do :

- The retailers tracked are :  - Amazon, - Best Buy, - Gamestop

- The basic idea is to allocate points to hardware depending on their ranking on the 3 retailers online best selling list : Rank 1 = 210 points, Rank 2 = 205 points, ... , Rank 21 = 110 points, Rank 22 = 108 points, ... , Rank 51 = 50 points, Rank 52 = 49 points, ... , Rank 100 = 1 point. The amount of points for each rank has been determined empirically over a few month.

- Retailers are weighted in the formula as follow : Overall points = Gamestop x 1 + Best Buy x 0.2 + Amazon x 0.8. Again, this was determined empirically.

- Concerning Gamestop, we look at Top 200 instead of Top 100 because the amount of figurines and T-shirt can make it difficult to find hardwares in the top 100. However, if an item is ranked 124, we consider it to be ranked 62. If it is ranked 10, we consider it to be ranked 5 etc... Then the point system applies normally.

We check those best selling lists everyday and then we do an average for the month ("NPD month").

We then use those averages to try and predict the next NPD result (Ranking and ratios only).

Here are results from previous months :

April 2018

Tool result : 1) PS4 : 716.6 points/day (1.0) ; 2) NS : 359.3 points/day (0.50) ; 3) XBO : 242.8 points/day (0.34)
NPD Results : 1) PS4 : 326k (1.0) ; 2) NS : 171k (0.52) ; 3) XBO : 134k (0.41)

May 2018

Tool result : 1) PS4 : 512.7 points/day (1.00) ; 2) NS : 388.1 points/day (0.76) ; 3) XBO : 217.0 points/day (0.42)
NPD Results : PS4 : 223k (1.0) ; NS : 167k (0.75) ; XBO : 145k (0.65)

June 2018

Tool result : 1) PS4 : 438.7 points/day (1.00) ; 2) NS : 397.5 points/day (0.91) ; 3) XBO : 247.9 points/day (0.57)
NPD results : PS4 : 375k (1.0) ; NS : 325k (0.87) ; XBO : 240k (0.64) (No leak this month, those are estimates from NPD vague statements...)

July 2018

Tool result : 1) NS : 413.2 points/day (1.00) ; 2) XBO : 160.4 points/day (0.39) ; 3) PS4 : 138.9 points/day (0.34)
NPD results : 1) NS : 263k (1.00) ; 2) PS4 : 187k (0.71) ; 3) XBO : 152k (0.57)

August 2018

Tool result : 1) PS4 : 315.6 points/day (1.00) ; 2) NS : 311.3 points/day (0.99) ; 3) XBO : 280.3 points/day (0.89)
NPD results : 1) NS : 215k (1.00) ; 2) PS4 : 209k (0.97) ; 3) XBO : 172k (0.80)

September 2018

Tool result : 1) PS4 : 503.2 points/day (1.00) ; 2) NS : 351.7 points/day (0.70) ; 3) XBO : 226.8 points/day (0.45)
NPD results : 1) PS4 : 425k (1.00) ; 2) NS : 260k (0.62) ; 3) XBO : 175k (0.41)

Links to lists :

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?cp=1&searchType=search&nrp=15&seeAll=&browsedCategory=abcat0700000&qp=newreleases_facet%3DReleases~New%20Releases&ks=960&sp=-bestsellingsort%20skuidsaas&sc=Global&list=y&usc=All%20Categories&type=page&id=pcat17071&iht=n&st=categoryid%24abcat0700000&lid=Products%3A%20All%20New%20Releases

https://www.gamestop.com/browse?nav=28-xu0,134f

https://www.amazon.com/best-sellers-video-games/zgbs/videogames#1

Good idea, im looking forward to seeing how this develops.

I LOVE this idea, will be fun to see if its got a higher prediction accuracy than just amazon alone (Id assume so).

That is such a great idea.

Switch out of stock at Gamestop?

Nope, first sku is a Odyssey bundle which is ranked 102. This is odd indeed.

Will be pretty hard to always update all of those by yourself. If you need any help I'm willing to help out.

Well, I guess you'll have to keep this running for a few months to see how well it works!

Thanks a lot for the offer.

As I mentionned in the Amazon thread, I will be away from home/computer for a few days due to work and won't be able to do any update...

That said, Amazon aside, I don't know much about refresh rate for those best selling list (I think best buy is daily but have no idea for the others...) so I don't know how often we will need to update. When I am back on Saturday, I think I can handle this on my own but if you feel like tackling one or two of those in a daily (maybe) fashion, that would be amazing.

Probably a useless idea since there's no good or authoritative indicator in terms of console hardware sales trends, Amazon is the only remotely good point of data but that's starting to change as time goes since Nintendo products are getting over represented so the data becomes less valuable ...

Having access to specific data from the biggest retailers such as GameStop or Walmart in a related industry could help a lot with predictions but even then it might only be good enough to represent a single market ...