Seller Central: The Reports Worth Reading
There are dozens of screens and about six that change a decision. Here is which ones, how often, and what each is actually telling you.
Loading Article banner
Seller Central has more screens than any one person needs. Most of them exist for a case you do not have, and the front page is a summary designed to reassure rather than to be acted on.
The working set is small. These are the ones that change what somebody does next, and roughly how often each is worth opening.
Every day, briefly
Account health. Not for the score, for whether anything new has appeared. A policy notice caught the day it lands is a reply; caught three weeks later it is an appeal. This is the whole argument for the daily look, and it is covered properly in what account health is measuring.
Anything unfulfillable or stranded. Stock that exists and cannot be sold, usually for a listing reason rather than a physical one. It sits there silently and it is almost always a five minute fix.
Every week
The business report, by ASIN. Sessions, page views, unit session percentage and buy box percentage per product. This is the single most useful screen in the account, because it separates the three ways a product can fail: nobody arrived, they arrived and did not buy, or they would have bought and you did not have the button.
The search terms report. What people typed to find you, and what you paid for it. Read alongside the guide to reading it, because the columns invite a conclusion that is often the opposite of what they say.
Inventory age. What is approaching the long term storage bands, which is money leaking rather than a metric.
Every month
The payments report. The one place the fees are itemised rather than netted. A category that looks profitable in a spreadsheet and thin here is a spreadsheet with the wrong fee assumptions in it, which is why the fee breakdown is worth a read once a year.
Returns. Not the rate, the reasons. A rising return rate on one product with the same reason attached is a listing problem or a product problem, and both are fixable once you know which.
Brand analytics, if you are enrolled. Search term share and repeat purchase behaviour: the only view of the wider market Amazon gives a seller.
What the front page is for
Orders today against orders yesterday, which is a number that moves for reasons nobody controls. It is fine as a heartbeat and it is not a report.
The trap is treating a bad morning as a signal and changing a price or a bid because of it. Daily variance on most catalogues is wide enough to swallow any change you would make in response.
What is missing, and where to get it
Seller Central will not tell you what your listing looks like against the competition, what a shopper saw before they chose somebody else, or whether your photography is the reason. Those are answered by looking at the page rather than the report.
It also has no view of anything off Amazon. If you sell elsewhere, the comparison lives in your own numbers rather than in any one platform's console, which is the argument for planning across channels rather than per channel.
What we do with this
The weekly business report and the search terms report are the backbone of how we run an Amazon account, because between them they say which of the three failures a product is having and what the advertising is doing about it.
The same discipline applies wherever you sell: Walmart and eBay each have their own version of the same three questions, with different names and different reports.
If nobody is reading these weekly, that is usually the cheapest thing to change.
Frequently asked questions
The questions that come up most often on this subject.
The front page of Amazon's seller console: today's orders, recent messages, account health at a glance and whatever Amazon is promoting. It is a heartbeat rather than a report, and daily variance is wide enough that acting on it is usually a mistake.
The business report by ASIN. Sessions, page views, unit session percentage and buy box percentage per product separate the three ways a product can fail: nobody arrived, they arrived and did not buy, or you did not have the buy box.
Daily, briefly, and not for the score. What matters is whether something new has appeared, because a notice answered the day it lands is a reply and the same notice three weeks later is an appeal.
The share of visits to your product page that ended in a unit sold. It is the conversion rate for that listing, and it is the number to read before spending anything on more traffic: sending visitors to a page that does not convert is the most expensive mistake available.
Stock in Amazon's warehouses that cannot be sold because of a listing problem rather than a physical one: the listing was closed, deleted, or is missing something required. It is silent, it costs storage while it sits, and it is usually a few minutes to fix.
The payments report, which itemises the fees rather than netting them into a payout figure. Reading it once a month is how spreadsheet assumptions get corrected before they turn into a category that quietly loses money.
Read the reasons rather than the rate. A rising return rate on one product with the same reason repeated is either a listing that oversold it or a product that underdelivers, and knowing which is the difference between rewriting a page and changing a supplier.
A set of reports available to brands enrolled in Brand Registry: search term share, what shoppers bought instead of you, and repeat purchase behaviour. It is the only view of the wider market Amazon gives a seller, and most enrolled brands never open it.
The pulling, yes, through reports and the API. The reading, no. The value in these screens is in noticing that two numbers disagree, which is a judgement rather than a threshold.
Long enough for the recent past and not long enough for a year on year comparison in every report, so pull anything you want to compare later on a schedule and keep it yourself. The reports also finalise on a delay, so the last two days of any window are provisional.
