Morning Must-Do’s on Amazon

You sit at your desk with your coffee, check your emails, log into your Seller Central Account, and see your sales for the day. Your listings are optimized, and your product is in stock, so what else is there to do? Amazon has a plethora of rules and tools for your account, some of which you know, but maybe others have flown under your radar. It’s essential to learn the basics of each Amazon segment to ensure you’re keeping your account healthy and current for optimum sales growth. 

The Price Is Right – Amazon Metrics & Features Offered

When you first log into Seller Central, you probably check the top of the page for current metrics, including your Buy Box win percentage. This percentage tells you the ratio of times you owned the Buy Box compared to every time the product’s detail page was viewed. If you click on this number, Amazon gives you the resources to increase your Buy Box percentage. The first tab contains inactive offers, which are pricing alerts where your price is not within the bounds of your minimum and maximum prices, and your listing is not shown for sale.

The next pricing tab contains Featured Offers. Here Amazon makes pricing suggestions to help you win the Buy Box. These are split into Featured Offer Ineligible and Featured Offer Eligible. Featured Offer Ineligible is a listing where no one has the Buy Box because the item is featured at a lower price elsewhere – on or off Amazon. Featured Offer Eligible is when someone else on Amazon has the Buy Box, but your minimum price is not competitive with theirs.

Put Out the Fires – Account Health & Performance

Amazon is a maze of buttons and notifications that can often go unclicked if you don’t know where to look. Behind many of those blue links are raging fires that can damage your account if not addressed. A vital place to start your day is in the Performance tab. Everything here is essential to keeping listings active and generating sales.

Start with your Account Health. This page holds metrics that impact the standing of your account, items on this page with warnings, if left unchecked, can lead to deleted listings or even account suspensions. The first part of this section is the Customer Service Performance. In this area, you can see your rate of Defective Orders, which includes three metrics: Negative Feedback, A-to-Z Guarantee Claims, and Chargeback Claims. Each of these has its own section in the performance tab where you can dive deeper into the issues.

Policy Compliance notifies you if any of your listings potentially violate the Amazon Guidelines. For example, Amazon will tell you if you can’t sell a particular brand, if someone has filed a complaint about your listing, and if anything related to a detail page that Amazon deems suspicious. An alert here doesn’t mean that your product is a goner. You can often open cases or provide documentation to reinstate your listing.

The Shipping Performance section is relevant only for accounts that have Seller-Fulfilled listings. You can identify how many orders were sent late, canceled, or did not have a valid tracking number provided on time. Amazon isn’t unreasonable and knows mistakes happen, so they set a standard for how many mistakes you can have before raising red flags (or yellow). Each section lets you see the metric’s benchmark for optimum account health.

At the bottom of the page are the Policy Compliance Requests. This is where Amazon will request specific documentation for items such as testing results and certifications to declare that the listings are authorized to make claims of safety and sustainability, ensuring safe products.

There are two additional sections in the Performance Tab that the Account Health Section doesn’t cover. The first is the Performance Notification section which often has overlapping information from the Account Health section. Amazon will send you a detailed explanation of any issues with listings or account health or listing issues, including deactivations, suppressions, and customer experience.

The last section is Voice of the Customer, a wonderful tool to keep your products from winding up in the Account Health or Performance Notification sections. You can measure the Customer Experience or CX rating for your listing. It shows how many products were returned versus how many were sold for each listing and then gives you the top reason customers selected for their return. You can go into each section and read specific comments. This can help you determine a course of action – such as fixing a detail page, inspecting a product’s quality, or deciding whether a product may have been mislabeled. VOC can help you take necessary actions before Amazon does.

Taking the Hint – Inventory Planning & Case Log

No pricing problems or account health notifications? That’s great! But that doesn’t mean the morning is over. Your inventory page is a beacon of helpful tips for your account. Even if you think your item is optimized, it could be that some information hasn’t been saved correctly, or there’s a field you didn’t know to provide. It’ll be found in the suppressed section if it’s a significant attribute. Suppressed items can either be ones that will not show in Amazon search results or, worse, completely inactive detail pages. You also have quality alerts for fields you can provide to help index your product to be more searchable.

Those aren’t the only suggestions Amazon has for you. Hop over to the health section, where you will find the link to your case log. You might have a number here that shows any cases that require attention. These could be cases you’ve opened and are awaiting a reply from Amazon, but make sure to investigate for cases opened by Amazon. These can include optimization suggestions for your listings, updates needed on settings and contact information, or a response for a case started over the phone.

The Inventory Planning tab is the last section I dive into each morning. Amazon tells you which ASINs have excess quantities or need to be restocked. In addition, there is a summary of item age and projected cost of the item storage for items in excess. They’re even helpful enough to provide tips on how to get that excess moving. Amazon doesn’t want stagnant inventory any more than you do.

Lunch Break – Pruning Amazon Account Health Issues

Depending on the health of your account, this list may have taken you all morning, but hopefully not all afternoon. If you check these boxes daily, keeping your account current becomes easier and less time-consuming. You get into a rhythm and learn the language for dealing with Amazon issues. Before you know it, you’re getting through your morning account check before your coffee can get cold.

About the author: Michele Tucker is a Key Account Manager at Kaidako, an Amazon-centric agency helping brands and manufacturers realize the full potential of direct-to-consumer sales on Amazon. Passionate about understanding what drives consumer behavior, Michele has used her passion for product research and wordsmithing to drive double-digit annualized growth for many of her clients.