A Detailed Guide to Understanding Amazon Vendor Central Reports
As a vendor, it's vital to be as efficient as possible when selling to Amazon and also to understand your customer base. The best way to do this is to fully understand the metrics, and many of those metrics are available in reports that Amazon provides in Vendor Central.
These reports help you understand how much Amazon is taking off your bottom line for coop deductions, what products are your biggest competitors, and other key information.
This guide provides a basic breakdown of which reports are most important and how to access them because .navigating Amazon Vendor Central reports can be a daunting task due to its myriad of metrics and data points. At Reason Automation, we excel at using sophisticated reporting tools to help our clients achieve their business goals. Through this article, we want to guide you on interpreting and leveraging Amazon Vendor Central's analytics effectively.
How to Access Vendor Central Reporting
To access the most useful reports from Amazon Vendor Central, log in to your dashboard and click on "Reports" from the main menu, and then click on "Analytics." Most brands should be set up as ARA (Amazon Retail Analytics) Premium, and if so you'll see the brand analytics logo pop up. If it's ARA Basic, the dashboard will say that, and that will mean there are limits on what the account has access to in terms of reports. So, for example, a Premium user can go back about a year and get more robust reports.
These reports are available to all users in Amazon Vendor Central and refresh daily, at midnight Pacific Time. They are also available for download into a .csv file for further detailed analysis.
3 Amazon Vendor Central Reports Categories
Once you're in the reporting section of Vendor Central, you'll encounter sections such as sales and traffic dashboards, consumer behavior, and product catalogue. Here, we’ll highlight three Vendor Central reports categories that are most important to focus on.
Retail Analytics Tables
In the summer of 2022, Amazon released a new Retail Analytics reporting suite, which include five reports: Sales, Traffic, Inventory, Forecasting, and Net PPM. Note: these tables are not live in Reason databases yet, but will be replacements for the equivalent tables from Sales Diagnostic.
Sales: The Sales View shows vital stats like shipped revenue, shipped COGS (cost of goods sold), and ordered revenue. Shipped COGS are key because they show the brand's overall revenue, as they are simply the number of units sold multiplied by whatever price Amazon paid for them. If a brand sold 10 items to Amazon for $5 apiece, the shipped COGS would be $50.
Traffic: This data is sometimes redundant because a lot of it can be found in the sales diagnostics. However, this is the place to go if you're looking for traffic to the different products. Like sales, you can break it up into different views.
Inventory: This is the amount of inventory that is sitting in Amazon's warehouses (or at least in their possession). If you're a manufacturer, you can see how much total inventory is flowing into Amazon. If Amazon is sourcing from multiple other places, it lets you see that as well. This report will show you metrics like what's on open purchase order, what's sellable vs. unsellable, and how old inventory is.
Forecasting: This is Amazon's forecast of what they think is going to sell. These are broken out into P70, P80, and P90 forecasts. Amazon has the highest confidence in the P90 reports, which means they are 90% sure that at least this much of a product will sell, where as a P70 report will forecast a higher amount that they are only 70% sure they will hit. Amazon usually buys at the P70 level, so vendors should pay close attention to this report.
One key thing to remember about this report: it's always done at the manufacturing and ASIN level. Amazon is forecasting the total number of products in this ASIN that they believe will sell, not how much they'll buy from you. So if the report says they'll buy 100 units, they may only buy 50 from you and 50 from someone else who is also distributing that product.
Net PPM: This stands for Net Pure Margin, which is product revenue plus product COGS plus vendor-funded coop divided by product revenue. This report shows you what products are most profitable once all costs are taken into account. This data is important because it's what Amazon uses to negotiate with vendors.
Consumer Behavior
Sales and traffic data is key, but you also need to understand consumer behavior so you can make business decisions that will impact sales in the future.
Amazon Search Terms: This will show top search terms for a specific ASIN, which can help you design your product pages to better attract customers. It provides a way for a brand to get a sense of search rankings and what's converting.
Repeat Purchases: This report will indicate items that are purchased over and over again. This is a very informative report for consumables so you can see how often customers are coming back to you. Unfortunately, it doesn't tell you the time frame (i.e., they come back every three months for the same product) -- just what percentage of customers come back to complete another purchase later.
Market Basket Analysis: If a consumer purchases this product, what else will they buy with it and what percentage of the time? This report answers that question and shows you which products in your inventory are complimentary.
Item Comparison: Vendors often want to know what other ASINs customers are looking at when they check out their ASIN. If, for example, one item is compared to another item 25% of the time, this report will show that.
Alternate Purchase: This is the opposite of item comparison. It shows how often customers are choosing an alternate product over yours, which is helpful for understanding which products are your competitors.
Demographics: This report helps vendors understand the basic demographic breakdown of their customer base -- data such as gender, education, marital status, and other info important to the marketing and product development team.
Payments
These reports are located next to the Reports drop-down on the top menu bar. These are vital accounting reports that will help keep your business's finances in line.
Remittance Payments: This report shows the payment number, amount, status, and date of any payments Amazon is making to you.
Coop deductions: When Amazon makes any coop deductions, this report will show you the funding type, agreement ID, invoice date, and other details so you can get a full grasp of how much these deductions are taking off your bottom line.
Purchase Orders: When Amazon submits a purchase order to you, you have to confirm it. This report gathers all of that data so you can see a full picture of Amazon purchase orders to your company.
Shipments: This report tracks the status of any shipments.
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