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Originally published on July 2, 2019, updated September 6, 2024
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Amazon is synonymous with being the one-stop shop for everything you could want to sell and more, but the key to mastering how to build your brand and get the most out of the marketplace is understanding how the platform uses data.
Amazon is a data-driven business. It makes decisions based on data, not opinions or emotions. Amazon has an immense amount of data in areas such as customer behavior, category performance, and buying patterns that businesses would pay good money for. But as most of you know, very little is shared with sellers.
While Amazon is famously cloak and dagger with its intel, some invaluable tools are at your disposal. The Seller Central platform gives today's sellers enough data (particularly those enrolled in the Brand Registry) to help them understand what is working, what isn’t, and where there are opportunities for improvement, development, and growth.
Fear not: you don’t have to start aimlessly scrolling through pages of impenetrable tables and acronyms, wondering how they can help your brand! Think of us as your friendly neighborhood SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis team that’s done your homework for you.
Now, here are eight of the top Amazon seller central reports and pages you need to start paying attention to.
What are the most valuable Amazon seller central reports and pages? Which metrics should you focus on first? Let's find out.
First, put in some quality time with Amazon's business reports. These reports focus on traffic, seller performance, and conversion data on the granular level – sellers can download and generate this data at both the parent and child level.
In a nutshell, these reports tell Amazon sellers what has sold, how much has been sold, the amount of traffic that is going to the product pages, and whether that traffic is converting into a sale. Understanding traffic and conversion data are important because these metrics drive sales.
Now, you can see in-depth data on high-, medium-, and low-performing ASINs and plan to optimize your catalog to meet customer demand.
Related reading: Navigating Amazon Seller Central
While you're focused on driving traffic and sales, you also need to ensure that your business is running efficiently from an operational standpoint.
For sellers utilizing Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), Amazon fulfillment reports are a go-to source of statistics designed to help keep your brand in tip-top shape. Reports are separated into Inventory, Sales, Payments, Customer Concessions, and Removals.
Six reports have been discontinued: Daily Inventory History, Monthly Inventory History, Inventory Event Detail, Inventory Adjustments, Inventory Reconciliation, and Received Inventory. These reports have been consolidated and replaced with the Inventory Ledger report.
FBA sellers must also keep a close eye on their Inventory Performance Index (IPI) score. The IPI is a comprehensive metric aggregating data from your sales, inventory levels, and fees to measure how well you manage your FBA inventory. Your IPI score will determine whether you’ll be subject to storage volume limits and factors into Amazon's new FBA capacity management system as well.
Maintaining a healthy IPI can be challenging at times, although to avoid penalties, it’s critical that you do so. When looking at your IPI, the top influencing factors to monitor and manage are your:
Amazon's fulfillment reports go into great detail about many of these metrics, so they're definitely something that you want to check out.
With over two-thirds of Amazon customers starting their shopping journey in search results, it's vital that sellers understand the following:
This data can then be used to optimize your product content and ads for even better results.
Leveraging SEO data for focused advertising proves especially advantageous during peak retail occasions, including spring sales, Prime Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, and other seasonal holidays. This approach will amplify your product's exposure, bolstering your brand's prominence.
You can run reports for your Sponsored Products, Sponsored Display, and Sponsored Brands ads. From there, you can analyze everything from your search terms and your targeting to your budget and gross and invalid traffic.
Your account health, much like your own, isn't determined by just one thing. Amazon measures your account’s metaphorical temperature based on three critical metrics:
Your brand’s Account Health Rating (AHR) is color coded and displayed as a numeric score ranging from 0 to 1,000. This barometer should enable you to see how close you are to the various health thresholds – green, yellow, and red.
If your AHR is green (healthy based on a score of 200-1,000), your account is not at risk of deactivation.
If your AHR is yellow (at risk, based on a score of 100-199), your account is in danger of deactivation.
When your AHR is red (unhealthy, based on a score of 99 or lower), your account is either eligible for deactivation or has already been deactivated.
It is imperative to adhere to the metrics set by Amazon to successfully grow your business and avoid losing your account. If any issues arise, you should speak to an Account Health Specialist by following the contact details on the Account Health page.
Related reading: Amazon Seller Central Help: How to Prevent Common Problems
This clever function helps you find out if your brand store is getting visitors and if these visits are converting into sales. Want to go deeper? You can even discover where these visitors come from, whether through sponsored advertising, organically through Amazon, or other sources such as Google or social media.
If you share the brand store link externally, attach source tags to identify the exact source of your traffic.
Learn more about Stores Insights here.
By enrolling in the Amazon Brand Registry, brand owners gain access to a valuable tool for monitoring and improving their customer experience and sales metrics. With the ability to review key metrics such as price competitiveness, Prime eligibility, in-stock rate, conversion, traffic, and customer reviews, brand owners can gain valuable insights into their performance on the Amazon platform.
If any of these metrics are found to be lacking, Amazon will provide recommendations on ways to improve. This is a powerful feature that can help brands to stay competitive and achieve their goals on Amazon. So if you're a brand owner looking to optimize your presence on the platform, it's definitely worth taking the time to enroll in the Brand Registry.
Brand Analytics is another feature only accessible to brand owners enrolled in the Brand Registry. These reports examine customer behavior, such as Amazon search terms and demographics. These reports give brands greater insight into what the customer is searching for, which products get the most clicks for those keywords, and what other items customers view when looking at your products. They also provide customer data such as age, education, gender, and household income.
The Search Query Performance (SQP) dashboard is another great place for brand owners to discover how customers search for their business, focusing on the search results stage. The SQP dashboard provides visibility into the performance of the top search terms associated with your brand, including a breakdown of query volume, impressions, clicks, add-to-baskets, and buys.
Utilizing the Fix Your Products tool in Seller Central can be a game-changer for those of you looking to revive inactive or search suppressed listings as well as monitor listings that are potentially at risk for suppression.
The reasons for an ASIN becoming inactive or suppressed are diverse and include factors such as being out of stock, requiring category approvals, or having incorrect or incomplete attributes.
However, one of the most frequent culprits for Amazon listing suppression is non-compliance with image regulations. Amazon's image regulations are highly specific, making it easy for sellers to miss critical details.
To access the Fix Your Products tool, go to the Inventory tab and select Manage Inventory, then choose "search suppressed and inactive listings" from the top menu.
When your Amazon listings are search suppressed, it can be incredibly detrimental to your sales and search ranking. Shoppers won't be able to find your product detail page in Amazon's search results, which is their primary way of discovering new products. The good news is, FeedbackFive has you covered.
The industry’s leading feedback and review tool now sends you notifications (unlike Amazon) when your product listings become search suppressed or experience other listing status changes. Alerts are sent out individually or in a daily digest, based on your preferences.
With this amount of data in these Amazon Seller Central reports (and more!), you should be able to make solid business decisions on how to move the business forward. Avoid making assumptions based on opinion. The answers are in the data: where to invest and where not to invest. Sellers should not be afraid to have a go at testing new ideas.
Remember to be bold, dive deep into those metrics, and test new ideas – it's a brave new world out there! If you need any help, reach out to your friends at eCommerce Nurse.
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