The Olson Report: KEEPA KORNER

Not Every Offer Spike Is What It Looks Like

Brian Olson — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:02:45 GMT

A builder pulls up an ASIN, sees 45 offers, and closes the tab. “Too crowded.” Next one.

That’s discipline, right? Except it costs you good tests. A lot of them.

Here is what the number alone cannot tell you. Whether those 45 offers accumulated slowly across two years, or showed up in the last twelve days. At a glance the listing reads the same. How it got there is completely different.

And there’s a second layer that often catches builders sideways. Not every offer spike is what it looks like.

Share The Olson Report

Why This Trips People Up

Offer count is the easiest number on the page, so it gets treated like a threshold. Ten is fine. Fifteen is maybe. Thirty is a pass. It’s a clean shortcut, and it’s the wrong question to be asking.

The question is not how many sellers are on the listing right now. It’s how the count moved to get there.

The Real Signal Here

An offer spike happens for one of two reasons, and in a single snapshot they look nearly identical.

The first is the one everyone assumes. Demand is not keeping up with supply. More sellers showed up, prices started getting pushed around, and the room to test at your price got tighter.

The second is sneakier. Supply is moving toward availability but has not landed yet. Inventory sits behind a delayed delivery window, so offers stack up on the page while the product cannot actually flow to customers at a normal pace. That is not saturation. That is a logjam.

One of those situations may resolve as inventory lands and ships. The other may not.

How Builders Use This

Instead of reacting to the current count, look at how it moved. Compare the recent two weeks against the roughly two-and-a-half months before that. When the recent window sits around 2.5x or more above the baseline, you have a real spike on your hands, not background drift.

Then cross-reference against delivery windows. If the listing shows stretched delivery, say three to six days out when Prime listings normally ship fast, you may be looking at phantom supply and a resolvable logjam. Offers stacked up because inventory is still in transit. When that inventory lands, the count can thin out and the pressure eases.

If delivery windows are tight and the count still jumped, you are closer to genuine competition. New sellers found the ASIN, piled on, and now there’s real density to work around.

Those two situations call for different decisions. A logjam may be worth circling back to in a week or two once supply normalizes. Density may still be worth a small test at your price, if the 90-day chart shows your price has appeared in the window. You’re not guessing about either. You’re reading the movement and letting the context tell you which kind of crowd you’re looking at.

Our free Chrome extension, PATH Profit Zones, watches this pattern for you. It compares recent offer activity against the longer baseline and surfaces a spike badge when the movement crosses that threshold. It is not a buy signal. It is a “look closer” signal, and it keeps you from tossing listings on the raw number alone.

A Clearer Way to Frame It

The number on the page is a snapshot. The movement behind it is the signal. A test at your price still belongs on a lot of listings that look crowded at first glance. Crowded and spiking are not the same thing. A spike and a logjam are not the same thing either.

Let’s go test more ASINs!

YOUR KEEPA FILTER IS WORKING PERFECTLY...THAT'S THE PROBLEM

Brian Olson — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 13:03:17 GMT

You built a Product Finder filter. You tested it. It returned results. You found a few test-worthy ASINs. So you saved it, and now you run that same filter every time you source.

Here is the thing nobody mentions: that filter is doing exactly what you told it to do. It is returning exactly the type of ASIN you described. Every time. Without variation.

And that is why your deal flow feels like it dried up.

The filter did not break. It is just showing you the same slice of the same market, over and over. The ASINs rotate, but the pattern does not. You are looking through one window and wondering why the view never changes.

Share The Olson Report

Why This Trips People Up

When a filter works once, the instinct is to keep it. You found good ASINs with it, so it must be the right filter. That logic feels solid.

But Product Finder does not search for good ASINs. It searches for ASINs that match your parameters. Those are two different things. The builders I watch get stuck here tend to have the same story. They built a filter early, scored a few wins, and then spent weeks running it wondering where all the deals went. They blame the market. They blame the tool. They rarely blame the filter, because the filter worked before.

The Real Signal Here

A Product Finder filter is a hypothesis, not a formula. It says: “I believe there are test-worthy ASINs with these specific characteristics.” That hypothesis may be true today and irrelevant next month.

The builders who maintain consistent deal flow treat filters the way they treat ASINs: they test them. They rotate. They change one variable at a time and see what surfaces. They keep the ones that produce and retire the ones that do not.

One filter set cannot reveal all patterns. A filter tuned for low offer count and moderate MonthlySold in a specific price band will never show you the supply-constrained ASIN sitting in a different range with a delivery window gap. That ASIN may be just as test-worthy, but your filter cannot see it because you never asked it to look.

How to Read This in Practice

Start with the filter you already have. Duplicate it and change one variable. Widen the price band. Shift the MonthlySold range. Swap the category. Leave everything else the same.

Run both side by side. The original gives you what you already know. The variation shows you what you have been missing. If it returns nothing interesting, change a different variable and try again.

Over time, you build a rotation of three to five filters, each tuned to a different hypothesis about where test-worthy ASINs may be hiding. Some hypotheses will be wrong. The point is to keep your pipeline exposed to different parts of the market instead of staring at the same corner.

A Clean Way to Think About It

The unicorn filter is the one you keep because it worked once. The modern approach is to keep several, test them like ASINs, and retire the ones that stop producing. Your filter set should evolve as fast as the market does.

Let’s go test more ASINs!

Keepa Korner: What Keepa CAN Show You (When You Stop Staring at Charts)

The Official Olsons — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 13:02:43 GMT

If you have been reading the Your Secret Edge series (and if you have not, go read Part 1 first), you know we just spent a full article explaining what Keepa cannot show you on a product listing. One region. Unknown location. No toggle. That is a real limitation and I stand by everything we wrote about it.

But here is the thing. Keepa heard that and did …

The Product Finder Filter You're Probably Ignoring

The Official Olsons — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 13:03:07 GMT

There’s a filter sitting in Product Finder that I’d bet most of you have scrolled right past. Buy Box: Top Seller ID. Four time-period fields. No obvious use case screaming at you. So let’s fix that.

Here’s what it does. You plug in a specific seller ID, and Product Finder returns every product where that seller has the highest Buy Box win percentage ove…

Keepa Evolved. Your Training Didn't.

The Official Olsons — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:00:23 GMT

Keepa gave us new data. Direct sales counts. Storefront bulk analysis. Return rate filtering. Offer history tracking. Custom column presets that save your workflow.

The teaching community kept pointing at the same old chart signals like nothing changed.

Here’s what I keep seeing: builders running the same screens from three years ago, filtering the same w…

The Delivery Window Signal Hiding in Plain Sight

The Official Olsons — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 13:03:01 GMT

There’s a data point on every ASIN that almost nobody talks about. It doesn’t live in the price graph. It doesn’t show up in rank history. But if you know where to look in Keepa’s Offers data, it can tell you something genuinely useful about the competition you’re actually stepping into.

I’m talking about third-party seller delivery windows - the estimat…

What the Buy Box History Is Actually Telling You

The Official Olsons — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 14:00:31 GMT

There’s a specific moment in Keepa that trips a lot of builders up. You pull the buy box section on a chart, you see Amazon sitting there in orange, and you close the tab. Listing disqualified. Too competitive. Move on.

I understand the instinct. But that read is missing something - and the something it’s missing tends to matter more than the orange bar …

The Intelligence Layer Hiding Above Product Finder

The Official Olsons — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 14:03:05 GMT

You know how to use Product Finder. You’ve built your filters, run your searches, found ASINs worth testing. That part of the workflow feels dialed in. But here’s something worth sitting with: a lot of builders are doing all of that work inside categories they’ve never actually evaluated. They’re filtering products in a category without ever asking whet…

Keepa Just Changed the Rules. Here’s What Builders Need to Know.

The Official Olsons — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 14:02:54 GMT

Keepa dropped a major update on February 3rd. Pricing, quotas, free tier access, all of it shifted. I'm working on a full deep dive, but here's the short version so you can adjust your workflow now and not get caught off guard.

The Price Went Up

Monthly subscription jumped from €19 to €29. That’s roughly $32 USD. A 52.6% increase, no grandfathering, no ad…

Bulk Storefront Stalking Just Got Stupid Easy

The Official Olsons — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 14:02:14 GMT

If you’ve ever tried to pull inventory data from multiple storefronts at once in Keepa Product Finder, you know the friction. Copy a list of seller IDs, then take them to Excel or a third-party tool to format them as a comma-separated list before Keepa would accept the input. Not difficult, but an extra step that slowed down the workflow.

That step is go…

Filter Out the Fit Fails Before You Buy

The Official Olsons — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 14:02:43 GMT

The Return Risk Filter Stack

In KPF, down in the Refine Your Search Even More section, you have two filters that work together here:

Return Rate - This is a binary filter. Low or High. Amazon categorizes products based on their return patterns relative to the category. Setting this to “Low” eliminates the frequently returned items before they hit your res…

Spikes Are Evidence, Not Anomalies

The Official Olsons — Wed, 28 Jan 2026 14:02:09 GMT

Keepa shows you a lot. Price movements, offer count shifts, historical volatility. It can feel like having the answers in front of you.

But here is the part that trips up even experienced builders: Keepa can show you what happened. It cannot prove what could happen.

That distinction changes everything about how you read a chart.

Why This Trips People Up

Whe…

Simulator Scenarios You’ll Recognize from Keepa

The Official Olsons — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 14:02:21 GMT

You’ve been reading Keepa graphs. Maybe you don’t think of yourself as “good at it” yet, but if you’ve stared at that pink Buy Box line long enough, you’ve started seeing patterns. Certain plot twists keep showing up.

That’s why I built Arbitrage Studio the way I did. The scenarios in the simulator aren’t invented. They’re modeled on the dynamics you’re …

The Data Tab’s Hidden Shortcut You’ve Been Scrolling Past

The Official Olsons — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 14:01:38 GMT

Ever opened the Data Tab on a Keepa chart, scrolled through the Product Details section, and thought, “What am I even looking at here?”

You’re not alone. This panel is packed with information, and a lot of it looks like reference data you’d never need. UPC codes. Manufacturer info. Package dimensions. Category paths. It can feel like background noise.

But there’s something hiding in plain sight that changes how you source. And you’ve probably scrolled past it a hundred times.

The Hidden Clarity Inside a Chaotic 90-Day Window

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 14:02:43 GMT

A messy 30-day window can feel like the chart is arguing with itself. Prices whip between bands, offers jump, Amazon shows up and disappears, and nothing looks predictable. The instinct is to wait for things to “settle.” But that instinct is exactly what hides the opportunity.

When Monthly Sold Isn’t There

The Official Olsons — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 14:02:10 GMT

You’ve been trained to start with Monthly Sold. Good. That’s still the right move. But what happens when it’s missing?

New sellers are taught to walk away - and that’s appropriate for where they are. But intermediate builders can take on more risk, which means they need more tools. A recent algorithm change made one overlooked signal surprisingly useful …

The Buy Box You See Isn't the Only One

The Official Olsons — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 14:01:33 GMT

Old school sellers ask a simple question: who has the Buy Box and what is the price? But that framing can lead to a mistake that costs resellers more than almost any other assumption in their business.

What you’re looking at right now is a single data point. And it may have almost nothing to do with where you can actually sell.

There’s an opportunity hidi…

The Backorder Goldmine

The Official Olsons — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 14:36:13 GMT

Most sellers skip backordered listings because they assume nothing is happening there. That blind spot creates wide open lanes for anyone who can read the signals correctly. Backorders are not dead ends. They are flags that demand is strong, supply is inconsistent, and customers are willing to wait longer than you think.

Today we are looking at the two v…

When "Sold" Doesn't Mean Sold

The Official Olsons — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 14:02:30 GMT

You’re scanning through Keepa charts and spot an ASIN with impressive movement. The Stock History tab shows 117 units sold in 30 days for one seller, 204 for another. Velocity looks strong (as well as capital protection and potential profit). You’re ready to pull the trigger.

But here’s the thing: those numbers might not represent actual customer purchas…

Stop Counting Offers. Start Reading Them

The Official Olsons — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 14:02:47 GMT

Offer count is one of those signals that looks straightforward until you try to make rules around it. Some builders treat it as a gate - too many offers, move on. Others ignore it entirely. Neither approach gives you the full picture.

Here’s what’s interesting: at the time of this writing, there are over 20,000 ASINs with more than 100 offers on them. Ar…