Welcome to Basilio Inc. ‘s Build. Grow. Exit Big: Your Guide to Selling on Amazon. If you’re contemplating launching your own business as an Amazon seller, stay with us, as we will cover all the vital aspects of building a successful and profitable business on Amazon.
It’s a general truth that Amazon is nowadays considered the world’s largest e-commerce platform. As of 2018, Amazon boasted $233 billion in revenue, with over 5 million third-party sellers operating across Amazon’s 12 worldwide marketplaces. There’s no doubt that setting up a business on Amazon can yield significant profits. However, if you truly aim to succeed on this platform, you should ensure that you are doing everything by the book.
This is precisely why our team, led by Jerome Basilio, has created this comprehensive guide. It will help you grasp every minor aspect required for building a successful business on Amazon.
Amazon Accounting Report
In this section, we will discuss the essential reports required for bookkeeping and managerial purposes, specifically focusing on inventory, sales, and payment reports. To assist you in generating these reports, we have prepared a comprehensive document titled “Amazon Accounting Reports.” It provides step-by-step instructions on how to generate each report. It is important to note that certain reports may take up to 1 hour to generate, so if you don’t see the report immediately, we recommend checking again later to ensure its availability.
Payment Reports play a vital role in managing your Amazon business finances, providing a comprehensive overview and detailed breakdown of your sales, fees, and the payments you receive from Amazon. By understanding the different types of payment reports available and how to generate them, you can gain valuable insights into your financial activities and make informed decisions.
Statement View: The Statement View report offers a summary of your current and previous orders, refunds, fees, and other transactions. It also includes the balance that Amazon has disbursed or will be disbursing to you. To access this report, navigate to the Reports tab, select Payments, and choose Statement View. You can specify the desired statement period from the drop-down menu labeled “Your Statement for.” Additionally, you have the option to find a specific transaction by entering the order number. The Statement View report provides summary reports on the screen for easy reference.
All Statements: The All Statements reports are pre-populated payment reports categorized by Settlement Period. These reports offer both summary and detailed information about each transaction. They can be viewed as a summary or downloaded in tab-delimited and XML formats. To generate All Statements reports, go to Payments, select All Statements, and choose the desired report format, such as View Summary, Download Flat File V2, Download Flat File, or Download XML. These reports provide a comprehensive breakdown of transactions with various components divided among different rows.
Date Range Reports: Date Range Reports allow you to create customized payment reports for a specific date range. This type of report presents each transaction on a single line with components divided into columns. To generate a Date Range Report, navigate to Payments, select Date Range Reports, and click on “Generate a report.” In the Generate Date Range Report dialog box, choose the report type (Transaction) and specify the reporting range, either by month or custom dates. Click Generate to generate the report, which will then appear in the list on the Date Range Reports page.
Transaction View: The Transaction View report provides a detailed view of each transaction, displaying various components divided among different columns on the screen. You can filter the view by transaction type, such as Order Payment, Refund, Chargeback Refund, FBA Inventory Liquidation, A-to-Z Guarantee Refund, Service Fees, Shipping services purchased through Amazon, Paid to Amazon, or Other. Additionally, you can search for a specific transaction by entering the order number in the “Find a transaction” box. Once you’ve set your desired filter settings, click Update to display transactions for a particular date range or statement period. If needed, you can download a tab-delimited file of those transactions for further analysis.
Inventory Reports
Is a critical aspect of running a successful Amazon business, and having accurate and up-to-date information about your inventory is essential. While your own accounting software may not provide detailed insights into your FBA inventory, Amazon offers a range of reports that can provide granular data to help you effectively manage your inventory. It’s important to note that these reports in Seller Central can provide more accurate information about inbound shipments, missing items, reserved inventory, transfers between warehouses, and even damaged inventory, which may not be reflected in your accounting software.
Keeping your inventory information regularly updated in your books can be a time-consuming and tedious process, and most sellers opt to update this information annually for tax purposes. However, regularly accessing and reviewing the available inventory reports in Seller Central can help you stay informed about your inventory position and make better-informed decisions.
Within the Inventory Tab, you’ll find a variety of reports under Inventory Reports, including the Inventory Report, Active Listings Report, Amazon-fulfilled Inventory Report, Open Listings Report, Open Listings Report Lite, Open Listings Report Liter, Canceled Listings Report, Sold Listings Report, Listing Quality and Suppressed Listings Report, and the Referral Fee Preview Report (Beta). While each of these reports serves specific purposes for inventory management, they may not provide comprehensive data for accounting needs.
For accounting purposes, we recommend utilizing the Inventory Health and Manage FBA Inventory Reports, as they can offer more relevant and comprehensive insights. To access these reports, simply navigate to the Reports tab, then Fulfillment, and within the Inventory section of the left-hand tab, click on “Show more…” located directly underneath the Inventory Event Detail link.
By utilizing these inventory reports, you can gain a better understanding of your inventory health, identify any potential issues or opportunities, and optimize your inventory management strategies to drive success in your Amazon business.
Inventory Health
The Inventory Health report is a valuable tool that offers comprehensive insights into the status of your inventory on Amazon. This report provides a detailed view of your inventory, including essential information such as Merchant SKU, FNSKU, title, condition, total unsellable quantity, total sellable quantity, sellable age, estimated long-term storage units, estimated long-term storage fees, removal units requested, shipped units in the last 30 days, weeks of cover based on trailing 30 days of sales, your price, and the lowest AFN price.
With this report, you can easily assess the health and performance of your inventory. It allows you to identify any unsellable items, track the age of your sellable inventory, understand the estimated long-term storage costs, monitor the units requested for removal, evaluate the recent shipment activity, calculate the weeks of cover based on sales data, review your pricing strategy, and compare your price against the lowest AFN price.
By leveraging the insights provided by the Inventory Health report, you can make informed decisions about your inventory management. You can take proactive steps to address unsellable inventory, optimize storage and removal strategies, adjust pricing to remain competitive, and ensure that you maintain an adequate supply of products based on the demand observed in the trailing 30-day sales data.
Regularly reviewing the Inventory Health report empowers you to maintain a healthy inventory status, reduce storage costs, maximize sales opportunities, and ultimately enhance the overall performance of your Amazon business.
Manage FBA Inventory
The Manage FBA Inventory report is a valuable resource that provides detailed information about your FBA inventory.
This report, available for download, offers insights into various inventory metrics, including:
- AFN Warehouse Quantity: This indicates the total inventory quantity stored in FBA warehouses.
- AFN Fulfillable Quantity: This represents the portion of inventory that is currently available for purchase and fulfillment from FBA warehouses.
- AFN Unsellable Quantity: This reflects the inventory that is deemed unsellable due to defects or damages.
- AFN Reserved Quantity: This includes inventory that is reserved for various reasons, such as being in the process of being received by Amazon, sold but pending shipment to the customer, under review, or being trans-shipped to another fulfillment center.
- AFN Total Quantity: This provides the overall sum of the above quantities, giving you a comprehensive view of your total inventory.
- Per Unit Volume: This metric specifies the cubic meters of space occupied by each product in your inventory.
- AFN Inbound Working Quantity: This quantity represents the inventory amounts based on completed and pending replenishment orders in the Manage FBA Shipments section.
- AFN Inbound Shipped Quantity: This indicates the inventory amounts that have been shipped to FBA warehouses.
- AFN Inbound Receiving Quantity: This reflects the inventory amounts currently in the process of being received into FBA warehouses.
The Manage FBA Inventory report is particularly useful for sellers with fewer than 50 SKUs, as they often find it convenient to access this information directly from the Manage FBA Inventory screen within the Inventory Tab, rather than pulling the full report.
Sales Reports
Sales Reports provide valuable insights into your business performance and can be likened to the functionality and appearance of Google Analytics. To access these reports, simply go to the Reports tab and click on Business Reports.
By default, you will land on the Sales Dashboard, which offers a comprehensive overview of your sales data. The dashboard displays today’s sales along with comparisons to previous periods, such as yesterday, the same day last week, and the same day last year, all presented on an hourly basis.
To further analyze your sales data, you can apply various filters
Date Filters: Click on the arrow next to Today’s date to access different filter options, including Today (hourly display), Week to date (daily display), Month to date (also a daily display), and Year to date (monthly display).
Product Category Filters: Expand the drop-down arrow in the Product Category section to filter your data by specific categories or choose to display data for all product categories.
Fulfillment Channel Filters: Use the drop-down arrow in the Fulfillment Channel section to filter sales data based on Amazon (displaying only FBA products), Seller (displaying only products fulfilled by merchants), or both.
The default view on the dashboard presents data in graphical format, enabling you to easily compare sales between different timeframes and identify seasonal trends. However, you can switch to Table View in the top right corner of the Compare Sales section to view the data in a tabular format. Additionally, you can download the data displayed, based on your applied filters, as a CSV table by clicking on the Download option in the top right corner of the dashboard.
Beyond the Sales Dashboard, you’ll find an array of comprehensive Business Reports below the Dashboard Link. These reports offer deeper insights and can be both viewed and downloaded. This section provides a wealth of valuable information to help you analyze your sales performance, track trends, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your business strategy.
With Amazon’s Sales Reports, you have the power to understand your sales data in real-time, identify patterns, and take informed actions to drive growth and success in your business.
The By Date section in the Sales Reports provides a comprehensive overview of your sales data, allowing you to analyze performance on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Each row represents a different day (or week/month, depending on your selected view) and aggregates SKU data. This format combines data for all your items, including key metrics like buy box percentage, average selling price, and average offer count. It offers valuable insights into your overall account performance for a given period.
By Date
Within the By Date section, you’ll find subsections such as Sales and Traffic, Detail Page Sales and Traffic, and Seller Performance. These subsections differ mainly in the default display of included columns of information. However, you have the flexibility to customize the view by selecting additional data columns for display. By doing so, you can simultaneously view both sales data and seller performance data within any of the subsections.
For the By Date reports and the Detail Page Sales and Traffic report with the By ASIN section, you can switch between date-based reports and SKU-based reports using the Pivot button located above the results table. This allows you to analyze your data from different perspectives and gain deeper insights into your sales performance.
It’s important to understand a few key terms used in these reports: sessions and page views. Amazon defines a session as a customer visit to an Amazon.com page, which lasts for 24 hours. This means that even if a customer views multiple pages within that 24-hour period, it will be considered as one session. On the other hand, page views represent the actual number of times a customer visits a page. Within a single session, a customer can have multiple page views. As a result, your reports may show a higher number of page views compared to sessions, reflecting the customer’s interaction with your product pages.
The By ASIN section in the Sales Reports offers valuable analytical data for assessing SKU-level performance, including metrics like Sessions, Page Views, Buy Box percentage, Units Ordered, and Ordered Product Sales. These reports provide comprehensive insights into the performance of individual ASINs (Amazon Standard Identification Numbers) within your inventory. The data in these reports is generally available for up to two years.
By ASIN
Within the By ASIN section, you’ll find subsections such as Detail Page Sales and Traffic, Detail Page Sales and Traffic by Parent Item, and Detail Page Sales and Traffic by Child Item. All of these subsections provide the same column data, but with a few key differences. The Detail Page Sales and Traffic by Parent Item subsection only displays data for parent items, while the other two subsections include both parent and child items. Additionally, the Detail Page Sales Traffic subsection allows you to pivot back and forth with the By Date Reports, offering more flexibility in data analysis.
These reports can be viewed on the screen and filtered based on your preferences using the options available in the top right corner. You can also download the reports in CSV format from the top left-hand corner, enabling further analysis and sorting of the data. The granular information provided in these reports allows you to assess SKU-level performance metrics, making them valuable tools for evaluating the success of your product listings.
In addition to the By ASIN section, there are other noteworthy sections within the Sales Reports. The Brand Performance section provides performance data by SKU, including customer reviews received, average customer review ratings, sales rank, buy box percentage, and missing image indicators. This section can be viewed on screen or downloaded for comprehensive analysis and comparison.
Another important report is the Listings with Missing Information report, located under the Other section. This report takes you to the Manage Inventory tool, where you can identify listings that are incomplete or contain incorrect information. This feature helps you ensure that your product listings are accurate and complete, optimizing the customer experience and potentially improving sales performance.
Inventory In Stock
The Inventory In Stock report is a valuable tool located in the Amazon Selling Coach section. It provides essential metrics to help you effectively manage your inventory and ensure that your products remain in stock. By sorting the report based on metrics such as In Stock % over time and Estimated Lost Sales (Units), you can gain insights and make informed decisions to improve your business operations.
Within the report, you have the option to click the “Edit” button, which allows you to update your inventory or initiate an inbound shipment using the Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) service. While the report provides information on average sales, sales rank, and current inventory for both FBA and merchant fulfilled products, it’s important to note that the calculations used in this report are relatively simple and do not consider factors such as trend lines or seasonality.
Additionally, the Inventory In Stock report offers a limited view of 7 or 30 days. To overcome these limitations and achieve greater accuracy in your inventory forecasting, we recommend using our replenishment worksheet. This tool provides more flexibility, allowing you to forecast for specific date ranges and consider various factors that impact your inventory needs. By leveraging the insights provided by the Inventory In Stock report and utilizing our replenishment worksheet, you can optimize your inventory management strategies, minimize stockouts, and ensure a seamless shopping experience for your customers.
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