Figuring out how much you’re making, how much you need to make, and how much you could be making is integral to running an Amazon business. Fortunately, some of the information you need is already built into the platform via Amazon’s business reports. That said, these reports on their own don’t offer much insight or enhanced Amazon sales analytics. For this reason, it’s important to consider what kind of additional data you need to evaluate profitability.
So, what does Amazon sales data show you? Can you determine the landed cost of your products on Amazon? Finally, what programs can you use to provide better, more comprehensive Amazon product sales analytics?
In today’s guide, we will answer all of these questions and more, but first, let’s see what kind of data you can already access from your Amazon Seller account:
When you open Amazon Seller Central, you get immediate access to basic analytics, including which products you’ve sold through Amazon recently. However, for a more in-depth Amazon sales data analysis, you can simply navigate to Amazon’s business reports (in the Reports section). Here, what you’ll see depends upon the kind of business you do through Amazon. For example, if you are an FBA seller, you may have access to a few extra reports and analyses.
In any case, all Amazon sellers will have access to basic sales data and tax reports on Amazon Seller Central. More specifically, you can evaluate your sales data through three types of reports:
● Sales Dashboard
● Sales & Traffic
● Detail Page Sales & Traffic
Your Sales Dashboard just provides a barebones overview of your sales data. It is one of the easiest ways to quickly analyze your data over a set period of time. Sales & Traffic reports allow you to do a bit more customization to choose exactly what kind of data you want to view. And finally, Detail Page Sales & Traffic reports offer a view for each product, with additional scales to customize your experience.
If you just use Amazon as a side gig or you’re not that interested in analyzing your expenses and profits, Amazon Seller reports may be sufficient. However, for the vast majority of Amazon Sellers, you need way more information to accurately calculate the number of units ordered, sales, page views, conversion rates, landed cost, and more.
So, here’s a breakdown of some items that you need as an Amazon Seller and cannot access through Amazon Seller Central:
One of the biggest issues with Amazon Seller Central is not that it doesn’t provide the right data and metrics, but simply that the numbers are not always reliable. For instance, your Amazon Sales Dashboard may give you information on orders that have been placed, but not those that have been shipped. You’ll also find that the data does not even consider pending orders when providing a snapshot of your sales data.
It gets even worse if you want to calculate your overhead costs and profits. The Sales Dashboard gives you virtually no information related to returns, shipping costs, or Amazon fees. This makes it impossible to accurately calculate how much you’re spending on each product, or how much you’re making.
There are a few ways around some of these issues, but they’re not all that convenient. If you want to see your total sales on Amazon, you have to specifically request a report for all of your orders. And since you have to download this report as a PDF, it makes it much harder to integrate into the rest of your Amazon sales analytics.
In general, Amazon does a good job of providing a platform that is easy to use for buying and selling products. However, when you need to review different reports to determine the success of your business, Amazon falls short. You can’t always find related data in the same place, and the sheer volume of information can be a little overwhelming. Even if you just want to determine how much one individual product sold over the last 30 days in comparison to another product over the same period, you may have to combine data from multiple reports just to figure it out.
Many Amazon Sellers overlook the importance of good UI when analyzing data. The fact is that you cannot really get a good picture of the health of your business if the data is jumbled, disorganized, or hard to find. This is why so many Amazon Sellers do not rely on Amazon Seller Central alone. It simply does not offer a good experience when it comes time to dig into your COGS, KPIs, and other important metrics.
A surprisingly high percentage of Amazon Sellers are either just breaking even or operating at a loss with their businesses. Naturally, you’ll want to know if your business falls in either of these categories and if so, what you can do to fix it. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t make it easy to figure out your landed cost (the total expenses required to ship a product) or your profit margins.
Amazon Seller Fees are part of the reason that calculating either metric can become so difficult if you’re just relying on Amazon’s business reports. Since each Amazon Seller is subject to different fees, and Amazon doesn’t always make it clear how much you’re paying in fees, actually determining your expenses and profits can be a nightmare without some kind of automated tool to do the heavy lifting.
You’d think that all sales made through Amazon would be automatically tracked through Amazon Seller Central, but this is not the case. Sure, Amazon provides a lot of the basic data, but as you may have already discovered, it’s often not nearly enough. To make things worse, Amazon doesn’t offer a simple way to automate data input and retrieval, even with popular accounting software like QuickBooks or Xero.
This means that, if you rely on Amazon and one of your favorite accounting services without a third-party integration tool, you’ll have to comb through all of the data and reenter pieces that are missing. But even when you use information from Amazon and input it manually into QuickBooks or Xero yourself, there’s always a risk of errors.
When you want to really understand your Amazon sales data, you need to make sure that your data is accurate, easy to find, relevant to your needs, and automatically integrated into the accounting software of your choice. Fortunately, you can get all of this and more with ConnectBooks.
With ConnectBooks, you can automate the bookkeeping process, ensuring that all of your data is 100% accurate and fully integrated into your accounting software. Moreover, ConnectBooks makes it easy to track your Amazon inventory, access in-depth reports that go far beyond what Amazon Seller Central offers, and review all of your expenses and profit data in one place. It is especially useful when evaluating the overall performance and productivity of your business, thanks to detailed profit & analytics reports, as well as stock alerts & reorder forecasts. In short, ConnectBooks ensures that you have all of the sales data your Amazon business needs to thrive.
Do you want to learn more about managing your Amazon Seller analytics? If so, reach out to the experts at ConnectBooks today!
