What is eScore? It's a true game changer! eScore is our own proprietary metric to easily track a book's sales history to help you gauge a book's historical demand.
Simply put,eScore measures the number of days out of the past 180 days that a book has sold at least one copy. Why do we measure days instead of units? Amazon doesn't share how many copies sell each day, otherwise we would measure that. For example, a book ranked 1k is selling more copies than a book ranked 50k, but we don't know exactly how many copies. So we report that it sold at least one copy that day, and add one to its eScore. If a book's sales rank is under 100k each day or if the rank drops by more than 10% since yesterday, we consider that a day with at least one sale.
We use a six-month timeframe to try to include at least one textbook season (January and August) in each book's metrics. That way you're less likely to pass over books with seasonal demand when you're scouting.
The max eScore is 180, but we lump everything over 150 into a "151+" category. The rationale behind this is that if a book is selling nearly every day, the sales rank will often be under 100k and we can't say with certainty that a book has sold every single day. Instead, we show the eScore as 151+ so you know that the book has extremely high sales volume.
eScore is extremely helpful in analyzing books that don't sell very often. If a book has an eScore of 3, it means it has sold 3 times in the past 6 months. The sales rank is extremely volatile, and if you happened to scan the book when the rank was 3MM you may pass on the book altogether. Conversely, if you scanned the same book the day after it sold a copy, the rank could be 200k and you may decide to buy it when you would have passed on it a few days earlier. In this way, eScore smoothes out the volatility that exists in sales rank and helps you make better purchasing decisions. It's the primary way ScoutIQ helps you scout smarter, not harder!
Here are some examples:
Current Sales Rank: 1.7MM
eScore: 6 (6 sales in the past 6 months - low demand)
Current Sales Rank: 30k
eScore: 151+ (likely selling every day - high demand)
eScore forms the backbone of ScoutIQ's Smart Triggers, and eScore is in our downloadable database so you can access better data even when you don't have a cell signal.
Some books don't have an eScore, and that means it's not yet in our database or we haven't been able to track its sales history for at least six months yet. In these rare cases, your triggers will pick up the book's sales rank and help you make an intelligent sourcing decision. Since our database is crowdsourced, we're always adding new ISBNs and tracking their eScores to help you buy better books.
To learn more about the preset eScore ranges that we use in our triggers, check out this article.