4 Key Metrics For Amazon Seller Central Success
How a new Amazon Seller data integration unlocks ecommerce analytic insights
All Amazon central sellers, including Amazon FBA sellers, should work toward achieving and maintaining a level of customer service that meets a set of performance goals for their seller account(s). What are those goals? These are 4 key benchmarks that Amazon sellers should be working towards:
- Order defect rate: < 1%
- Pre-fulfillment cancel rate: < 2.5%
- Late shipment rate: < 4%
- Valid tracking rate — required categories: > 95%
Do you have a sense of how well your product categories and sales is performing against these benchmarks? How are Amazon customers perceiving your efforts? As an individual seller or professional seller do you have a sense if you are trending up or down? Do you know why?
This is what Amazon says about these targets for different categories and selling requirements;
“Failure to meet these targets may result in the removal of your selling privileges. A seller who maintains a low percentage of negative feedback reflects our customer-centric philosophy. One- and two-star ratings are considered negative. A seller who works proactively with customers to resolve order problems will avoid most A-to-z Guarantee claims. We measure your claims rate using the percentage of all orders, of any status, that involved a claim. When a buyer disputes a purchase charged to their credit card with their bank, it’s referred to as a service chargeback request. Sellers are required to provide valid tracking numbers for 95% of shipments. Failure to meet the required tracking rate can result in the loss of seller-fulfilled selling privileges within the respective category. This may also affect your eligibility to participate in Premium Shipping Options”
Amazon suggests these numbers are just baseline targets. While Amazon says that not meeting these goals does not put your account in negative standing, it does say a trendline towards achieving or exceeding these goals will help ensure that your account is in good standing.
Winning the Buy Box
Amazon states that only businesses with excellent seller metrics stand a chance to win a share of the valuable Buy Box real estate. According to Amazon;
82% of Amazon customers sales go through the Buy Box, and the percentage is even higher for mobile purchases.
Amazon suggests that sellers with excellent performance can distinguish themselves from buyers by exceeding these targets. While many sellers exceed these targets, there are those that do not. The stronger you benchmark against these goals, the greater your opportunity to create a stronger, more profitable business with Amazon, including snagging a spot in the Buy Box.
So how do you get there as a seller central retailer? Those who are professionals selling on amazon.com know the key to success is tapping into data. The data they used gives in-depth information on an item sold, their product listing, subscription fees, and a host of other metrics for an amazon marketplace.
Why Are Sellers Selling Themselves Short?
As critical as these targets are, most sellers are not tapping into the data that can help them meet and exceed these targets. The highest-performing sellers drive performance by taking advantage of a key resource available to them, data.
Unfortunately, most sellers are;
- limited to the basic reporting interface on Amazon. While the interface provides basic, top-level performance metrics they have told us the built-in reporting can be complicated, underwhelming, and limited.
- downloading files to further analyze data in Excel, Google Sheets, or similar tools. While a step in the right direction, this approach has limitations. For example, daily downloads do not provide comprehensive coverage of performance metrics and quickly becomes a tedious and manual task each day. They also reported that downloading introduced errors due to manual manipulation and processing of the files.
- less efficient and prone to manual, labor-intensive reconciliation efforts between internal systems and Amazon. Especially difficult when insights on the business performance needed to be shared with others in the company.
- having difficulty understanding net profitability due to free shipping, Amazon seller fees (selling fees), referral fees, closing fees, or other charged fees
- unable to keep systems in sync. They have no 360 views of e-commerce activity or customer profiles. Attempts at doing so are cumbersome to manage and manual process day-to-day.
There are vendors like Jungle Scout or Teikametrics that provide pre-packaged insights and analytics for sellers. However, if you are serious about having direct access to data from your Amazon Seller, there is only one way to get there: Amazon Selling Partner API.
Professional sellers leverage Amazon MWS data
Professional sellers recognize that direct access to data is the key to unlocking insights that help them achieve and exceed these targets. They understand when customers may be more likely to purchase, can optimize ad spending, inform inventory management decisions, and target special offers, promotions, and other tactics. Amazon gives these leaders a path beyond report downloads; the Amazon Merchant Services API (application programming interface).
Unfortunately, most sellers default to using the basic reporting interface on Amazon which is not going to help them accelerate their selling efforts. For example, they manually download a report which can be slow and out of date.
Amazon suggests using recent and historical data from the Amazon Merchant Services API to minimize canceled and defective orders while maximizing on-time ship percentages. They state that leveraging this data will inform practices that will increase positive customer experiences, which will lead to better feedback and happier customers. This allows you to appeal to potential buyers, and ensure you have the right products to sell so you can grow your business with profitability.
Want to understand what items to sell for maximum profit? Dig into fees available product categories for your marketplace?
Get started with Amazon Seller data to fuel your analytics efforts
Interested in a code-free, fully automated data pipeline of Amazon SPI-API data to a private, trusted cloud warehouse or a data lake?
- Amazon Inventory: Get FBA Inventory Reports data for the listing, condition, disposition, and quantity to help with day-to-day inventory.
- Amazon Fulfillment: Get comprehensive, product-level detail on inbound shipments, shipped FBA orders, quantity, tracking, and shipping with FBA Fulfillment Reports and Inbound Fulfillment API.
- Amazon Orders: Order and item information for both FBA and seller-fulfilled orders including order status, fulfillment and sales channel information, and item details with Order API, and FBA Orders Reports.
- Amazon Finance: Balances, payouts, estimated and actual selling, storage, and fulfillment fee data with FBA Settlement Reports, FBA Fees, and Finance API
- Detail Sales & Traffic: Business level Sales and Traffic reports offer performance metrics for product sales, revenue, units ordered, and page traffic metrics such as page views and buy box.
- Vendor Central: Manage retail business operations with automated integration so vendors can improve and maintain performance at scale while growing business.
- Retail Analytics: Vendor Retail Analytics delivers ordered revenue, glance views, conversion, replenishable out-of-stock, lost buy box, returns, replacements, and many more.
- Brand Analytics: Brand Analytics offers sellers and vendors market basket analysis, search terms, repeat purchases, alternate purchases, item comparisons, and much more.
Interested in Amazon Selling Partner performance data?
Unify your data in industry-leading data destinations like Amazon Redshift, Amazon Redshift Spectrum, Google BigQuery, Snowflake, Azure Data Lake, and Amazon Athena. Use your favorite business intelligence, data visualization, SQL, or data science tools like Google Data Studio, Tableau, Microsoft Power BI, Looker, or Amazon Quicksight?
Check out our code-free, automated data pipelines for Amazon Selling Partner API and Amazon Advertising API.
Reach out to us at hello@openbridge.com. Prefer to talk to someone? Set up a call with our team of data experts.
Visit us at www.openbridge.com to learn how we are helping other companies with their data efforts.
