Amazon gives sellers traffic, conversion, sales, fee, inventory, and advertising data for free inside Seller Central, and withholds nothing on purpose except the one figure it never had: your cost. Profit per SKU, the reconciliation of dashboards to deposits, and the attribution of ad spend to products are the seller's job, and the twelve questions below are the ones that come up when a seller starts doing it.
Business Reports (Sales and Traffic, Detail Page Sales and Traffic) with sessions, units ordered, ordered product sales, and unit session percentage by ASIN. Settlement and payments data with every fee, refund, and reimbursement at the transaction level. Campaign reports in the ad console. The FBA Inventory tool with on-hand units, excess, stranded units, sell-through, and inventory age. The Inventory Performance Index. The Fee Preview report. All of it comes with the Professional selling plan, and sell.amazon.com describes each tool on its public pages. Amazon Business Reports explained reads the first one line by line.
Your cost of goods, freight, duty, and any landed cost. Amazon does not know what you paid for a unit, so no Amazon report can compute margin, contribution, or profit by SKU. Also missing: ad spend attributed at the SKU level rather than the campaign level, a single view that joins sales to fees to refunds by product, and anything from your other channels. The exports are complete on what Amazon did and silent on what it cost you to be there.
Join four things by SKU for the period: sales and units from settlements, fees and refunds from the same settlements, ad spend allocated from campaigns, and FIFO landed COGS from your purchase orders. Illustrative numbers for one SKU in a month: 500 units at $19.99 is $9,995.00 of sales; referral at 15 percent (Amazon's published Home and Kitchen rate) is $1,499.25; fulfillment at an illustrative $4.20 per unit is $2,100.00; ads $700.00; refunds 15 units, $299.85; COGS at $5.30 per unit is $2,650.00. Contribution: $9,995.00 minus $1,499.25 minus $2,100.00 minus $700.00 minus $299.85 minus $2,650.00 equals $2,745.90, or $5.49 per unit, 27.5 percent. A SKU-level profit report does this for the whole catalog each month.
Amazon reports spend by campaign and ad group, and attributed sales by advertised product. For Sponsored Products campaigns with one ASIN each, the mapping is direct. For campaigns with several ASINs, allocate spend by attributed sales share or by clicks, and write the method down so next month uses the same one. Whatever you pick, put the allocated spend on the SKU's contribution line. A product with a 30 percent margin before ads and a 20 percent TACoS earns 10 percent, and the only way to see that is to charge the ads to the product.
Because the Seller Central sales dashboard runs on order date and gross sales, and the deposit is a settlement: sales minus fees, refunds, and ad invoices, plus reimbursements, minus any reserve, for a period that closes on Amazon's cycle rather than the calendar month. A month can contain two deposits or three. The two figures are not supposed to match. Reconcile each settlement to its deposit, then compare order-date sales to settlement-period sales with the timing difference identified. If they still disagree after that, something is missing from one side.
It depends on the report, and Amazon changes the windows without much notice. Nothing on Amazon's public seller pages states the current limits, so this FAQ quotes none. The rule that survives whatever the limits are: download settlements as they close and the rest monthly, and keep your own archive. Plan on being able to retrieve nothing older than what you already saved.
Yes. Amazon's Brand Analytics page on sell.amazon.com states that access requires a Professional selling account and that you be a Brand Representative for a brand enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry. Without it you still get Business Reports, settlements, ad reports, and the inventory tools. Brand Analytics adds the search, customer loyalty, repeat purchase, market basket, and demographics dashboards, which are traffic and customer views, not profit views.
There is no benchmark worth quoting, and any article that gives you one is guessing. Unit session percentage varies by category, price point, review count, whether the session came from an ad or organic search, and whether the product is a replacement purchase or a considered one. Compare a listing to its own history, month against the same month last year, and to its sibling SKUs in your catalog. A drop in conversion with steady sessions is a page or market problem; a drop in sessions with steady conversion is a visibility problem.
By unit, by SKU, by reason, from the FBA returns detail and the refund lines in settlements. Compute return rate as units returned divided by units sold in the period, and charge the refund cost (the refunded amount less whatever referral fee Amazon returns to you, plus any returns processing fee) to the SKU's contribution. A product returned one time in twelve at a $3 margin per unit is a loss. Reason codes that cluster on damage point at packaging; codes that cluster on "not as described" point at the listing.
Parts of it, on the right data. An AI reading reconciled data with COGS attached can answer why profit fell, which products were profitable last quarter and are losing money now, and what pausing ads on a product did to margin. Crunch, the analytics AI inside ConnectBooks, does exactly that on ConnectBooks data. An AI reading pasted Seller Central exports cannot compute a margin the exports do not contain, and a general chatbot will produce one anyway, which is the danger. No AI knows your supplier raised prices before the PO is in the books, and none of them takes the action.
Settlements to deposits. It is the only check that proves the data you are about to analyze is complete, and it is where missing reimbursements, unexpected reserves, and ad invoices you forgot about show up. ConnectBooks pulls Amazon settlement data and posts it to QuickBooks or Xero at the transaction level, so the reconciliation is done before the analysis starts. Reconcile first, analyze second, decide third. Sellers who analyze first end up arguing with their bookkeeper about which number is real.
With one month and one question: which of my products earned the most, and which lost money, after every fee, ad, refund, and cost of goods? Answering it forces the reconciliation, the COGS entry, and the ad allocation, and once those exist for one month they exist for every month after. Do not start with a dashboard. Start with a ranking of contribution by SKU, and let the surprises in that ranking pick the next question.
Running an e-commerce business comes with plenty of challenges, but ConnectBooks is here to make your life easier. With real-time insights, seamless integrations, and detailed tracking of your profitability and inventory, you can stay ahead of the game. Whether you’re selling on Amazon, Shopify, Walmart, TikTok or eBay, ConnectBooks helps you manage your finances with 100% accuracy and confidence, so you can focus on growing your business.
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