A Guide to Understanding Shipped COGS in Amazon Vendor Central Sales Reports
If you’re an Amazon vendor, you need to understand basic sales data like shipped COGS, shipped revenue, ordered revenue, and other important metrics. This data is key to making important decisions about marketing and product development.
You can find this data in Vendor Central, as it is one of five key reports that is included within the Amazon Retail Analytics tables: Sales, Traffic, Inventory, Forecasting, and Net PPM. This guide will help you find this report and understand what the data is telling you.
This reporting section offers crucial insights that can guide a company's strategic choices. The reporting is divided into Sales, Consumer Behavior, and Operations, each providing distinct yet interconnected insights into the vendor's Amazon business. Vendors should prioritize understanding the sales reports and then integrate findings from the other sections to formulate a comprehensive business improvement plan.
How to Find the retail analytics Sales Report in Vendor Central
After logging in to the Amazon Vendor Central dashboard, click on the "Reports" menu item in the bar at the top. Select Retail Analytics and click on "Sales," where you will find the daily sales report in Amazon Vendor Central .
The sales report is updated daily, at midnight Pacific Time, and has a backfill of three years. This report is available to all Amazon Vendor Central users and can be exported to a .csv file for further analysis. In order to view this report correctly, you must filter it by "Distributor View: (Manufacturing vs. Sourcing)" and "Period: Daily."
Shipped Revenue vs Shipped COGS vs Ordered Revenue
The Retail Analytics Sales report has the following six key metrics:
shipped_cogs
ordered_revenue
shipped_revenue
ordered_units
shipped_units
customer_returns
Shipped COGS
Shipped COGS (cost of goods sold) is shipped units multiplied by the average wholesale price of units, which gives you a total revenue figure. Shipped COGS tends to be the number most brands care about the most because it references Amazon's cost of goods sold, not the vendor's, which makes this a better reflection of the true revenue generated by the product.
Ordered Revenue vs Shipped Revenue
Ordered Revenue is the number of units ordered multiplied by the average retail price of each unit. It’s how much revenue you can expect based on orders that have been actually placed, but these units have not necessarily shipped.
Shipped Revenue is also important, but is not as important to vendors as shipped COGS because it is a measure of revenue going to Amazon -- not the vendor. Shipped COGS specifically refers to the revenue that goes to the vendor.
Ordered Units vs Shipped Units
The Ordered Units and Shipped Units metrics have to do with actual units rather than revenue. It tells you how many units were ordered for an ASIN during the determined time period, and how many were shipped during that time period. This is the ASIN-level data that can give you different insights compared to just looking at revenue.
Customer Returns
The final key metric is Customer Returns. This data shows you how many products were returned by customers, broken down by their ASIN, during the determined time period. By examining this data, you can diagnose recurring problems with certain products that are returned more than others.
Warning: The Data Is Difficult to Analyze
Amazon’s dashboard only allows you to filter daily data by day. They also offer the following snapshots: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, wtd (week to date), mtd (month to date), qtd (quarter to date), and ytd (year to date). However, you will struggle to get the data you need strictly through Vendor Central. That's because you have to manually download Amazon’s vendor central reports, and there's no way to do customized time range reporting -- you just have snapshots for a week or a month, for example.
Fortunately, there are tools out there to help you download the data and crunch the numbers. To simplify things, we've created a whitepaper that breaks down each of these methods, the pros and cons of using them, how much they cost, and how to know which is right for you so you can get access to the data you need. It’s available for free download below.
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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.
