Why Should Sellers Export Data out of Amazon Seller Central?
November 14, 2024
by Aivy Tran-Nguyen, Marketing Manager
The reporting in Amazon Seller Central may provide some valuable insight into your business, but the platform's user interface (UI) can limit your ability to fully leverage the data. The UI is designed for basic reporting and may be inefficient for sellers looking to scale their operations and make data-driven decisions. To overcome these limitations, downloading and working with your Amazon data outside of Seller Central is a strategic move that allows for deeper analysis and serves as a more accurate indicator of how your business is doing. Here's why you should consider downloading and utilizing your data.
Amazon’s UI Hinders Data-Driven Growth
While Amazon’s system provides basic sales and marketing reports, its UI is restrictive. Sellers are limited to summarized views, like weekly sales reports, which don’t always provide the level of granularity needed for strategic decision-making. Reports in Seller Central are updated inconsistently, making it difficult to track changes in real-time. The manual effort required to pull different reports and combine data adds unnecessary complexity and creates room for errors, hindering your ability to adapt to changing market conditions.
Why Export Amazon Sales Data?
To unlock the full potential of your Amazon business, exporting your data is crucial. Here are a few reasons why:
1. Access to Granular Data
One of the biggest drawbacks of relying solely on Seller Central’s UI is its limited data granularity. Exporting your data allows you to break down sales, inventory, and marketing performance at a more detailed level. For instance, you can analyze sales by individual SKU, by day, or even by geographic region. This granular level of detail is essential for understanding which products are driving your success, identifying high-demand regions, and spotting seasonal trends. These insights allow you to make smarter decisions regarding inventory management, marketing campaigns, and pricing strategies.
With detailed, day-by-day sales reports, for example, you can quickly identify trends that a weekly or monthly summary might mask. By exporting and analyzing granular data, you can uncover patterns that indicate product seasonality, the impact of marketing efforts, or even shifts in customer behavior.
2. Custom Analysis
By exporting data from Seller Central, sellers can integrate multiple data sources and create custom views. Instead of viewing sales, traffic, inventory age, and ad performance metrics in isolation, you can combine these datasets into a single, cohesive analysis. This capability is crucial for large catalogs where analyzing performance by product line, collection, or other attributes offers a more strategic perspective than evaluating individual products alone. With custom tagging, categorization, and segmentation, you can better understand product trends and prioritize actions based on comprehensive data analysis.
Read More: Amazon Seller Central Reporting Tools to help your business
3. Automation
Once you decide to use your data outside Seller Central, you can begin to automate many reporting processes. Solutions that allow you to automate data downloads give you the ability to generate more accurate reports, while reducing manual work and ensuring that critical insights are readily available. This efficiency means you can spend less time prepping data, and can get clearer signals which allow you to respond faster to market trends, manage stock levels proactively, and streamline performance monitoring.
4. Data Ownership and Governance
Amazon Seller Central’s built-in reports are useful, but they don’t give you full ownership or control over your data. By exporting your data and storing it in your own database or cloud solution, you ensure that you always have access to accurate, historical records of your business performance. This independent control allows you to implement your own data governance protocols, ensuring that the data remains accurate and reliable over time.
Owning your data allows you to track historical trends over longer periods, which is critical for forecasting and planning. The ability to maintain multiple years of detailed data helps you identify long-term shifts in product demand, price sensitivity, and customer behavior. It also provides you with a robust data set that can be used for forecasting, allowing you to make more informed decisions regarding product launches, inventory purchasing, and marketing spend. Owning your data ensures that you’re not limited by Amazon’s report retention policies, giving you the freedom to maintain and manipulate the data as you see fit.
How to Prioritize Amazon Seller Central Reports to Download
Amazon’s Seller Central provides various data reports, each with unique value for sellers. Understanding which reports to prioritize can help streamline your data management process and ensure you're equipped with the right insights. Here’s a breakdown of key report types and their significance:
Snapshot Reports – These reports are only available as "snapshots," meaning they capture a single moment in time without historical data retention. Regularly downloading these is critical to preserving data that Amazon won’t store for future reference.
Inventory Age - a snapshot of the current inventory at Amazon's warehouses, categorized by the duration it has been at Amazon
Inventory All Listings - provides a quick look at all active listings, helping you manage SKU availability effectively.
FBA Customer Returns - returned FBA purchases by SKU and outlines the condition of the returned item reason for the return, and fulfillment center where the merchandise was processed.
Reserved & Restock Inventory - shows the status of inventory that is being processed for customer orders, transfers between fulfillment centers or have been sidelined for various reasons at an Amazon fulfillment center.
Reports with Limited History - Amazon offers some reports with limited historical data, meaning they must be downloaded frequently to avoid losing valuable information.
Multichannel Order Fulfillment (available for only 30 days) tracks fulfilled orders outside Amazon's marketplace, providing a fuller picture of order management and customer experience.
All Sponsored Advertising (retained for 60 days) crucial for tracking ad performance and ROI on your advertising spend, ensuring you stay agile in your marketing strategies.
FBA Order Fulfillment Details (one-year) contains data on order accuracy and cost efficiency,
Inventory Ledger (retained for one year) records all inventory transactions, supporting year-end reconciliation and providing insight into inventory movement.
Subscribe & Save Performance (one-year retention) gives detailed information on subscription-based sales, helping you optimize for recurring revenue.
Financial & Business Reports –Unlike other reports, financial and business reports have extended history, making them especially useful for audits, reconciliations, and long-term financial planning.
Transactions/Remittance Report details payment information, essential for ensuring financial accuracy and transparency in your Amazon payouts.
Sales & Traffic by SKU and Child ASIN provides granular performance insights, helping you make data-driven decisions at the product level.
Promotion & Coupon Performance measures the success of promotional efforts, guiding future campaign planning and allowing you to refine your promotional strategy over time.
