The six reports
| Report | Where | Answers |
|---|---|---|
| Sales and Traffic by Date | Reports, Business Reports | Is the business up or down this week? |
| Detail Page Sales and Traffic by Child Item | Reports, Business Reports | Which products moved, on traffic or on conversion? |
| Search term report | Campaign Manager, Measurement and Reporting | Which searches spent money, and which sold? |
| Search Query Performance | Brands, Brand Analytics | What share of each search do you win? |
| Payments and date range reports | Payments, Reports Repository | What did Amazon actually pay, after every fee? |
| FBA Inventory | Inventory, FBA Inventory | What runs out, and what is costing storage? |
Read them in this order
- How am I doing? Sales and Traffic by Date: sales, units, sessions against last week and the same week last year.
- What is driving it? By Child Item: split each product's change into sessions and unit session percentage. Traffic problems and conversion problems have different fixes.
- Where did ad money go? The search term report: spend with no orders, new terms that sell. The weekly PPC audit.
- Where can I win more? Search Query Performance: searches where you convert well and are rarely seen.
- Am I making money? Payments, by product, against your costs. Profit margin.
- What do I need to send? FBA Inventory: days of cover against the time a shipment takes to arrive.
Why it takes five hours
Each report lives on a different page, downloads in a different format, and covers a different window. Ad sales use a 7 or 14 day attribution window; Business Reports count orders on the day they were placed; payments land days or weeks later. Joining them by product, every week, is most of the work, and it is the part a spreadsheet breaks on.
This is the job the product does: it reads these reports through Amazon's APIs every week, joins them by product, and hands you the plan.
Questions
- Where are Business Reports in Seller Central?
- In the Reports menu, then Business Reports. Sales and Traffic by Date and Detail Page Sales and Traffic by Child Item are the two most used.
- How often should I check Amazon reports?
- Weekly for decisions. Daily figures swing too much, and ad sales keep arriving for a week after the click.
- Can I download Seller Central reports automatically?
- Amazon's Selling Partner API and Advertising API can deliver most of them. Tools built on those APIs pull them for you on a schedule.
Keep going
GuidesUnit session percentageWhat unit session percentage measures, where to find it, what moves it.GuidesSearch Query PerformanceHow to read your share of impressions, clicks, cart adds and purchases.GuidesThe weekly Amazon PPC auditSix checks that find wasted spend and missed sales, in the order they pay.GuidesYour Amazon profit marginThe three margins per product, and the costs sellers leave out.