How to Master Amazon Seller Central Reporting Tools
As an Amazon seller, you need access to all kinds of data, whether that be Amazon FBA analytics, glance view details, or advertising metrics. But Amazon analytics for sellers can be challenging when you do it through the Amazon Seller Central dashboard. That’s why you need Amazon Seller Central reporting tools that can make your life easier.
In this guide, we will show you how to first determine what your analytics and data needs are, and then help you choose the right method to extract and manage your data.
Read more: How to Use Amazon Seller Central Reports: A Guide
Determine Your Amazon Seller Analytics Needs
Begin your planning by determining who will use the data. What Amazon data sources can you leverage? A sales team may want weekly reporting, but your accounting team may need invoice and transaction-level data updated daily. Every solution offers different datasets, with varying levels of accuracy and granularity.
Acquiring data is just the first step: leveraging it takes software, people, and other resources.
Map Available Resources
Before you choose an Amazon data solution, map out the resources available to work with the data once you have it. Every Amazon data provider offers a different mix of features, services, and support that your organization may need.
Position Yourself for Long-Term Growth
Turning data into a strategic asset takes time. The long-term growth of your analytics program (and the insights it produces) depends on leadership enthusiasm, and a culture of best practices for managing data.
Determine Desired Outcomes
Since there is no best solution, choosing the right one is a function of your organization's desired outcomes. What are the top challenges facing your Amazon business, and how does data help or hinder you from meeting them?
Simpler strategies and requirements often have simpler, less-expensive solutions. Plan accordingly for your company's growing needs and expectations for Amazon strategy.
Note: Our free whitepaper, “Turning Amazon Data Into a Strategic Asset,” goes into much greater detail on these steps. Fill out the form at the bottom of this article to download it.
Read more: How to Pull and Export Amazon Seller Central Data
Limitations of Amazon Seller Central Analytics and Reporting
Amazon makes many reports and data exports available for manual download from Vendor Central, Seller Central, and the Advertising Console. Many users start with manual downloads because they are immediately available, and convenient for ad-hoc analysis.
But time spent downloading and preparing Excel files every week starts to add up as you introduce new reports. Amazon updates reports inconsistently, making scheduling difficult. If you manage multiple marketplaces or accounts, even 20 minutes of weekly download management per account can take up most of an entire Monday.
The process became so burdensome that Maars Drinkware was able to save $60,000 per year of analyst time on data preparation. They were able to do that by cutting 35 hours per week that was spent on manual reporting, and improving in-stock rates by 20%.
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How to Better Conduct Amazon Sales Data Analysis
If you are looking for a better way to do Amazon sales analytics, you will likely need some type of Amazon analytics tools. There are seven options to choose from.
Note: For greater detail on each of these options, including pricing, pros and cons, and what type of business will benefit from each method, fill out the form at the bottom of this article to download our free whitepaper, “Turning Amazon Data Into a Strategic Asset.”
1. API Connectors
API connectors leverage your Amazon Marketplace Web Services (MWS), Selling Partner (SP), or Advertising API credentials to programmatically access and export your data. They often come with plug-ins to import data directly into spreadsheet programs like Google Sheets. They offer a no-code way of interacting with APIs. This makes them popular with smaller businesses, who value their relative accessibility.
API connectors typically offer connections to 300-500 or more platforms, of which Amazon is just one. This makes them versatile, but limits their focus on Amazon data as just one of 300-500 sources under management. As a result, connectors often take weeks or months to update when Amazon makes changes. Connectors often do not have the ability to clean or process data, and the ones that do are expensive.
Inexpensive API connectors are notoriously unreliable: they often have unpublished data limits, lack automation, and even longer to respond to changes from Amazon.
2. Scripting or Scraping
"Scripting" refers to a simple software program that automates a manual process such as downloading a report. Excel macros are many business users' first encounter with scripting.
"Scraping" refers to a web service that works like a search engine, crawling websites, collecting the data you ask for. Many companies will scrape public website data, like Amazon detail pages, for a monthly fee.
Companies can set up scripting and scraping inexpensively, but they break easily because they rely on specific UI and code elements to detect the right data. Therefore, changes to page code or layout can render a script or scraper nonfunctional. Common website optimization practices, such as A/B testing and personalization, make it even more difficult to reliably extract data this way.
3. Virtual Assistants or Offshoring
Virtual assistants (VAs) are independent contractors who specialize in specific business tasks, such as downloading and preparing reports. They are often located in countries with low labor costs, making them a popular choice for small Amazon businesses.
Hundreds of companies specialize in finding and onboarding Amazon virtual assistants, making them an attractive stop-gap or interim step toward automation. Their low cost makes it easy to test out a VA-based solution.
What many companies fail to acknowledge is VAs are still people. They make mistakes that software and automation do not. Like other employees, they need thoughtful management and leadership to succeed. And very few people, including VAs, enjoy repetitive manual work.
4. ETL Platforms
ETL platforms go beyond extracting data, to helping you manage and store it. They are data extraction specialists that typically access hundreds of different data sources, making them popular with multi-channel marketers and sales teams.
ETL platforms are considered the minimum-acceptable data automation solution by most major corporations and BI teams, due to their focus on extracting data quickly and safely. Many providers also make it easy to connect cloud storage or your own data warehouse.
Most major platforms connect to Amazon's MWS, SP, and Advertising APIs. They are limited by breadth of focus: when Amazon releases an update, an ETL platform has to prioritize it against any updates from their hundreds of other sources like Facebook and Google advertising.
5. Analytics Platforms
Analytics platforms are full-service solutions that collect, store, and visualize Amazon data from multiple sources in purpose-built dashboards and reporting suites. They are popular with companies who do not have dedicated BI teams, but want automated Amazon reporting.
Many leading platforms extend beyond reporting and analytics, to enabling or automating common business functions like PPC bid management. Some offer alerting services, included or as a paid add-on, that will notify you when a metric passes a certain threshold.
For many brands, analytics platforms are an ideal solution. If you find a platform that is a strong match for your organization's data needs, visualization needs, and budget, it should be a strong contender for your business.
6. Amazon Agencies
Full-service Amazon agencies help manage everything from your negotiations, to your advertising campaign strategy, to your supply chain strategy. They serve as consultants, staff augmentation, and Amazon-related capability outsourcing for brands that can afford the contracts.
Many modern agencies have built proprietary analytics tools and reporting interfaces for their clients that combine your extracted Amazon data with other third-party sources: market share, product opportunity analysis, forecasting, and more.
7. Reason Automation: Full-Service Amazon Data Management
Reason collects, prepares, and stores detailed Amazon business data in a SQL database for you. Reason automatically keeps the data updated, cleaned, and organized daily.
There is no reporting dashboard. Instead, Reason customers can connect the database to everything from Excel to Google Data Studio, and work with the data directly in their tool of choice. Reason automatically keeps the data updated, cleaned, and organized daily. This helps companies automate reports & business processes they’re already familiar with, instead of buying and learning a new solution.
Founded by ex-Amazon business managers who understand marketplace dynamics and the quirks of Amazon data, Reason's differentiator is data quality. Instead of daily updates, Reason automatically performs a 14-day historical lookback every day, capturing any updated or changed values from Amazon. This keeps your data more accurate than even daily download automation can.
Example Report Created Using Data Gathered by Reason and Displayed in Power BI
Below is an example of a report that was created using data gathered by Reason Automation that was then fed into the data visualization platform Power BI. You can also plug data we collect into other data visualization platforms like Tableau and Google Data Studio.
The primary benefit of having Reason Automation gather your data is a significant time savings for your staff, who are probably spending many hours per week manually downloading data. And if you aren't manually downloading data because you can't afford that kind of time to begin with, you are missing out on valuable data that can help your business grow. Either way, you can immediately start improving your bottom line by taking advantage of the service we offer.
READ MORE:
Turn Amazon Data into a strategic Asset
The breadth of Amazon sales, marketing, and supply chain data lets brands find patterns and insights to optimize their Amazon business and other e-commerce channels. But only if you have a plan for extracting the data from Amazon systems, storing it, and preparing it for analysis.
This guide will help you take ownership of your Amazon data—by preparing your business for a data-driven future, and analyzing the most common methods for extraction, automation, storage, and management.
