What ‘X+ bought in past month’ means on Amazon (and how to track it)

Open almost any busy listing on amazon.com and, just under the star rating, you will see a line such as “1K+ bought in past month”. It is one of the few demand signals Amazon shows to everyone, and one of the least understood. This guide explains what the badge is, what the number actually means, where it falls short, and how to record it every day so you can see the trend rather than a single snapshot.

What the badge is and where it shows

Amazon calls it social proof: a short line stating that at least a certain number of units of that listing were bought in the past month. On the product page it sits directly under the review count, above the price block. The same figure appears on search-result cards and on some category pages, so shoppers see it before they ever open the listing.

It started appearing on amazon.com in 2023 and now shows across most of Amazon’s storefronts in local wording — “achetés au cours du mois dernier” on amazon.fr, “Mal im letzten Monat gekauft” on amazon.de, “gekocht in de afgelopen maand” on amazon.nl. Not every marketplace has it: in our own page captures through mid-2026 we have not seen the badge on amazon.pl at all.

Amazon has never published how the number is calculated. What is known comes from watching listings closely, which is what the rest of this guide is based on.

The thresholds Amazon uses

The badge never shows an exact figure. Amazon rounds the number down to a threshold and adds a plus sign, so “1K+” means at least 1,000 units and, since the next step up is “2K+”, presumably fewer than 2,000. The steps we see most often on amazon.com are:

• 50+ — the lowest badge we have observed; below it the line simply disappears.
• 100+, 200+, 300+ … 900+ — steps of one hundred.
• 1K+, 2K+, 3K+ … 9K+ — steps of one thousand.
• 10K+, 20K+, 30K+ … — steps of ten thousand, with 100K+ the highest we have seen.

Two caveats. First, Amazon does not document these steps, and they may differ by marketplace or change without notice — amazon.de, for example, writes the number out in full (“7000+ Mal im letzten Monat gekauft”) rather than using the K shorthand. Second, “past month” is not defined either: it may be a rolling 30 days, a calendar month or something else, and Amazon has not said whether returns are subtracted or whether the count covers every variation of a parent listing or only the one you are looking at.

Why the number matters to sellers

• Demand you can see in units. Best Sellers Rank is relative and jumps with every burst of sales; reviews lag by weeks. The badge is the only public figure that speaks in units. A listing at 500+ is selling; a listing at 5K+ is a serious competitor, whatever its rank says today.
• Competitor benchmarking. Compare the badge across every listing on the first page of your keyword and you have a rough share-of-demand picture — who is winning, who is fading — without buying a research suite.
• Seasonality and launches. Because the window is a month, the badge moves slowly. A step up from 200+ to 500+ after a promotion, or a step down in January, is a clear signal once you have a record of the previous months to compare against.
• Your own listing. When your badge drops a step, that is worth noticing even if your sales report looks flat — it is Amazon’s public read of your listing, and the one your competitors see.

What it does not tell you

• It is a floor, not a count. 1K+ covers anything from 1,000 to (presumably) 1,999 units. Two listings with the same badge can differ by a factor of two.
• It is not revenue. Units at $9 and units at $90 earn the same badge.
• It can disappear. Drop below the lowest threshold and the line vanishes, with no “fewer than 50” message to replace it. It also drops out of some page layouts and experiments, so a missing badge on one visit is not proof of zero sales.
• It varies by marketplace. Thresholds, wording and even whether the badge exists differ between storefronts, so an amazon.co.uk figure is not directly comparable with an amazon.com one — and a listing sold in several marketplaces shows a separate badge on each.
• It has no history. Amazon shows today’s value only. Yesterday’s is gone unless someone recorded it — which is the point of the next section.

How to track it over time with AMZ Selling Tools

AMZ Selling Tools reads the live product page — the same page a shopper sees — once a day for every ASIN you track, in any of 12 Amazon marketplaces and from 22 shopper locations within them. The bought-in-past-month badge is one of the 90+ fields recorded on every check, so the trend builds itself — the bought in past month tracker page covers the field in detail:

1. Add the ASINs. Paste a list or upload a file, pick the marketplaces and locations, and the daily checks start on their own.
2. Read the Bought (Month) column. The tracker stores the number the badge shows, without the plus sign — 50, 500, 1K, 10K — and leaves the cell empty when the badge is absent, so a disappearance is recorded rather than hidden. Every check is kept, and the changes view marks the day the value moved.
3. Set an alert. Product alerts can watch this field: choose “changed” to be emailed whenever the badge steps up or down, or “becomes” to hear when a competitor reaches a specific step such as 1K.
4. Take the data with you. Download to CSV, connect Google Sheets so the history refreshes itself, or pull the bought_in_past_month column through the read-only API included on every plan.

Price-history tools such as Keepa are built around price and sales-rank charts rather than this badge; if you are weighing the two, the comparison with Keepa sets out the differences. Tracking costs a flat $0.10 per ASIN per month — 30 daily checks per ASIN — and every new account starts with a free 30-day trial of up to 10 products, 10 checks a day, with no card required. See everything else the tracker records from the same page.