Amazon Seller Central provides far more data than most sellers ever use. It will tell you about your stranded inventory, it gives you advertising reports, sales totals, page traffic, FBA fulfillment reports. There’s a whole lot there, but you need to cut through the plethora of data to get to the essentials.
Essential 1. This is your conversion rate, shown as ‘unit session percentage’. A conversion rate of 5-10% is good; that’s better than most websites, as people tend to go to Amazon when they are ready to buy, not just looking for general information. If you have a conversion rate lower than 5% then you have an issue.
That could mean your listings page isn’t good enough. Do you use A+ content? If you qualify for it, you should definitely use it. Do you have great images and a good video?
It might mean you have bad reviews. You’ll need to do something about that. Or it could mean your price is too high – check comparative listings.
Essential 2. ‘Total sessions’. This figure shows how many customers viewed your product. So a customer who came and looked at it, went away, checked out the competition or looked at their bank to see how their budget was looking this month, then came back and bought it, only counts as one total session, even though they would count as two page views. This is a better figure than views to assess how many potential customers are looking at your product.
Obviously, if you have a high conversion rate but hardly anyone ever looks at your product, you’ve got a problem. So you need to think about how to improve traffic.
First of all, check your keywords and check what keywords your competitors are using. Then check whether your listing uses all the right keywords in the text. A small tweak to optimize your product page could get a lot more eyeballs.
You might think about how you can drive external traffic to the listing, from your website, blog, YouTube channel, TikTok or Instagram.
You might also use Amazon advertising to direct people towards the product. The work you’ve done on your keywords will come in very useful here.
Essential 3. Do you own the Buy Box? Your ideal rating is 100%. You need to own the Buy Box so people can buy your product, and so you can create ads for your product. If you’re not getting the Buy Box, then check your pricing; if your price is too high compared to other similar products, you’re not going to do well.
Sometimes, Amazon won’t give you the Buy Box if your stock is getting low. So check your stock levels – and reorder from your supplier if necessary.
Essential 4. If you advertise on Amazon, ‘advertising reports’ will tell you which search terms are driving traffic and conversions, and which aren’t. Keep refining your ads, cutting out the ones that aren’t working and spending more on the ones that are doing well. Doing that on a regular basis can give you a much better bang for your buck.
By the way, if you want to do a bit of modeling or tinkering, you can download all this data as a CSV file. That lets you open it up in your spreadsheet software, so you can run ‘what if’ scenarios, to find out for instance exactly how much more money you’d make if you could get one product’s conversion rate up from 5% to 10%, or double the number of sessions for another.
You may be surprised at some of the answers you get!
