What Even Are Reporting Metrics for Amazon Sellers?

...And How Can They Help Sellers Increase Sales?

Most ecommerce stores have a plethora of reporting tools and software available to them. But because of the unique relationship between seller, Amazon, and customers, these tools have not traditionally been available specifically for Amazon sellers - leaving sellers mostly in the dark, or trying to make the best of confusing performance metrics.

This leaves a huge gap for Amazon sellers who understand the need to be able to analyze and interpret their sales data to its fullest extent. We'll talk through some of the analytics tools and reports available to you as an Amazon seller, and the kinds of metrics that you should ideally be thinking about if you want to survive and thrive in the Amazon game.

A brief history of Amazon seller analytics

Amazon Seller Analytics has come a long way since it was first introduced in 2014. Since then, Amazon has expanded their analytics capabilities so much that a new feature has been born: Amazon Brand Analytics.

If you own a brand, you will be able to access Amazon Brand Analytics (ABA). Brand Analytics is a feature that allows sellers to download marketing reports that help business owners make critical decisions about their strategies. A couple of example reports you can find in ABA include Item Comparison, and the Search Terms report.

• Item Comparison: Allows sellers to view sales, units sold, and revenue data for a single item across different categories, enabling them to see how their product is performing against others. The report also shows the average prices of competing items, their average ranks, and whether they are fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) or merchant-fulfilled. It also gives an indication of the number of negative reviews each product has received.
• Search Term: Provides data on how individual listings perform in search results based on users' search terms. The report tells sellers which keywords drove traffic to their products and shows conversion rates for each term so that sellers can optimize their listings to generate more sales.

🤓Read more about all of the metrics, and terminology you need to know about selling on Amazon

How to improve your Amazon seller metrics

Unfortunately, although there are a lot of reporting tools available to Amazon sellers, we've heard time & time again -from both sellers just starting out to more established brands - that this data can be particularly unwieldy, and fairly hard to actually gain insight from. We believe that to take a specific course of action, you first need to understand what's going on! By now, if you're an Amazon seller, you know that the metrics are always changing. It's a platform that is constantly evolving and improving.

What isn't always clear is how to improve your Amazon seller metrics. The key is finding the right toolset that allows you to pinpoint with accuracy what your customers are doing, and how, and when, and, critically, why. Here are some tips on using tools to improve your Amazon seller metrics:

• Understand your product life cycle. If you can easily spot patterns of behavior for customers repurchasing at a specific cadence, then you know what your advertising cycle needs to be for a specific product. Do you have enough inventory to last until the next purchase? If not, are there ways to increase inventory or should you let this one go?
• Know where opportunities for growth exist. It's important to understand how much money you're leaving on the table. For example, if a customer purchases from you every three months but your advertising cycle ends every month, then chances are you're losing out on two months of revenue on that user. If this happens across all your users, that could be huge money lost.

Utilize Amazon FBA reporting tools

You're probably already using a third-party tool, such as Jungle Scout or Helium 10 to conduct your product research, so it makes sense that you should also consider adding analytics software to your suite of tools as well. Not only can these seller tools help you make better strategic decisions about marketing your products, but they can also help you understand where promotions are effective or not - taking the hard work out of sales analytics and your Amazon advertising strategy.

These days there are lots of options for Amazon FBA sellers looking for analytics solutions, so it's up to you to pick the one that fits your needs the best. Whether you are looking for a more streamlined user interface, or just something more robust than what Amazon provides natively, there are lots of tools to choose from, such as Nozzle analytics for Amazon sellers.

🤓Read more about Amazon analytics tools that are available for Amazon brand owners

🤓Read more about free amazon analytics tools 

Catch issues early before they become problems with proactive reporting and analytics

I have always been an advocate of preparing for the worst but hoping for the best. In an ideal world, you would never do anything that could be detrimental to your business, but realistically when you're running an Amazon business, there is so much to consider all the time, such as shipping, market competition etc. that it becomes difficult to catch problems when they arise.

However, if you can create a habit of checking your Amazon analytics reporting on a regular basis, then it becomes much easier to spot where and when things are potentially going wrong -whether that's a decline in sales volume, or a huge spike in your customer acquisitions cost - nailing the basics of monitoring your analytics will give you laser-focus on what is working, and ultimately help boost your profits, without too much extra hard work.

Most analytics tools out there allow you some degree of control over which time period you can analyze. For example, Nozzle's cohort analysis allows you to look at data from up to two years ago up until today - and in fact, fairly soon, you will be able to get real-time performance updates each day, so that you can see trends over both long and short terms, as well as giving you valuable insights into your sales cadence per ASIN across your product portfolio. 

Takeaway

If you're an Amazon seller, you should be taking advantage of all the data analytics tools available to you and looking for ways to improve your Amazon sales performance, gain market share, and increase both new and returning customers.

🤓 Read more about how harnessing Customer Lifetime Value on Amazon helps you beat the competition and increase Amazon profit.