Tracking Amazon Listings With Alerting Tools

Finding an appropriate Amazon profit and loss analytics tool can be tricky, but DataHawk can help. DataHawk’s Amazon Profit and Loss tracking tool allows you to easily monitor your seller profit on Amazon.

DataHawk’s Profit and Loss metrics dashboard is a feature within the Amazon financial solution.

As part of DataHawk’s Amazon Analytics Solution platform, this tool allows you to keep track of your money in and your money out to determine which of your financial actions will lead to higher and more consistent profits.

To effectively measure your profitability on Amazon, it is necessary to analyze every area of your Amazon business. DataHawk lets you explore essential information on a single dashboard that helps you make sense of your sales, profit, and expense numbers.

It allows you to look at the total product’s sales and revenue generated over a selected time period. To gain insight from this data and understand the peaks and troughs, you can look at the trend lines’ gross sales and units sold.

For instance, the graph below indicates that sales were at their highest during thanksgiving week. It also demonstrates that throughout the month, sales are higher on weekdays than they are on weekends.

Simple analysis like this could help you make effective decisions regarding increasing PPC spending on specific days of the week.

Additionally, DataHawk’s Product Sales Report, accessible from within the Amazon Profit and Loss Dashboard, will help you analyze historical sales data related to each of your products and get the same insights from an ASIN perspective.

To do so, run a quick check over your Amazon fees and fulfillment fee to ensure you are not exceeding the decided threshold.

• A critical factor you should consider is the return rate and refunds.

DataHawk’s dashboard gives you a clear overview of:

• Returned Units
• Return Rate
• Commission (refund admin fee retained by Amazon for returned orders)
• Referral Fees (reimbursed amount related to referral fees charged for returned orders)
• Promotion (reimbursed amount related to promotional discounts charged for returned orders)
• Refund Shipping Chargeback
• Refund Shipping Promotion (reimbursed amount related to shipping promotion fees charged for returned orders)
• Reversal Reimbursement (fees charged for the reversal of reimbursements that were given in error)
• Tax (reimbursed amount related to taxes charged for returned orders)
• Shipping (reimbursed amount related to shipping fees charged for returned orders)
• Goodwill (concession given to a customer by Amazon on behalf of the merchant)
• Total Reimbursed Amount
• Gift Wrap Chargeback

Here is an example of the analysis you can make from the metrics: If you observe that the daily return rate is around 10%, you can determine how many stocks to order. Given that you already have the estimated sales refunded based on the return rate trend, day over day or month over month (more advisable), you can meet your revenue targets without any shortfall.

This will also help you establish when to order inventory from your suppliers without wasting any time waiting.

The table above is valuable when it comes to detecting unusual transactions that would otherwise go unnoticed, for instance, “Goodwill amount.” Since Amazon is in charge of sending some extra cash to the “refund customer” on your behalf, it is easy for you to lose track of these pennies that Amazon owes you. With this tool, you can track them regularly.

Another important expense to consider is shipping and storage.

When coupled with insights on return rate and stocks, you can determine the financial impact from each of the above factors and achieve your high-level targets with ease.

But that is not all. There is another significant expense that needs regular monitoring and optimization. Keeping an eye on this expense is supercritical to increasing profits on Amazon.

• Amazon Advertising

Another critical factor to look at when monitoring your Amazon profit and loss

Another area worth examining when monitoring your Amazon profit and loss is comparing the growth of your expenses with the growth of your revenue. However, you must not let your high revenue hide the growth of your expenses. The problem occurs when your revenue growth rate is lower than your expense growth rate, and by the time you come around to tracking it, it is too late. A common outcome of this problem is the sheer fact that you end up losing money.

Advertising is one such area. As your revenue grows, you might be paying more for advertising. Therefore, comparing the growth curves of these two is very important. By doing this, you can make informed decisions about your advertising efforts on a brand, product line, or a particular ASIN. The goal is to find and maintain a healthy balance between revenue and expense growth.

With DataHawk’s Amazon Profit and Loss dashboard, you have a comprehensive overview of your advertising expenses along with your sales and revenue, all in the same table, making it easy to measure the efficacy of your advertising efforts at large. The dashboard also provides you with a breakdown of the total amount you spend on each advertising initiative, such as the type of advertising, sponsored products, sponsored brands, sponsored display, and sponsored brands video cost.

And, if you want to dig deeper on an ASIN level, the dashboard also gives you access to an Amazon Sales and Ads History Report.

The report combines historical changes of account-level sales and advertising metrics with monthly, weekly, and daily views. By combining account-level sales and advertising metrics in a centralized view, this report builds a dashboard that provides a comprehensive overview of selling performance efficiency after advertising spend and before any other costs. Analyzing these metrics correctly and correlating them helps you identify where to make improvements to optimize your ads and sales efficiency. Here is how you can “measure selling performance efficiency post ad spend using DataHawk.”

• Cost of Goods Sold (COGS)

This aspect refers to the cost of procuring the product and getting the product to market. So, what should you be looking at?

• Production costs
• Procurement costs
• Taxes and duties

When fully accounting for COGS, you should be adding those costs to the balance of the inventory asset in accrual accounting and reducing the inventory asset as you expense the COGS over time.

As an option, you can upload your COGS. You will see on the right-hand side a button that reads “import expenses.“

This is where you can import excel files, for example, with your COGS so that DataHawk can work its magic.

Do not be concerned if the data takes a few hours to upload- this is normal as it goes through massive amounts of datasets with a fine-tooth comb to provide relevant information. You can also filter your data to zoom in on specific metrics based on date, product, etc.

Download the template to have a look.

Once downloaded, your data is aggregated by international marketplaces. Depending on your selected date range, that data is automatically converted into a single currency based on the historic daily exchange rate.

• The SKU (stock keeping unit) quantity sent from your vendor is incorrect: Check to ensure that the amount you receive from your vendor is the same as the quantity you are expecting.
• You do not receive your refunds: When a customer returns one of your products to Amazon, Amazon immediately refunds the customer the amount they paid for the item. However, your dedicated refunded payment never makes it back to your seller’s account.
• Returned items that are lost or damaged: Occasionally, items returned by customers are either lost or damaged in transit, and the seller of those items never receives them.
• Amazon does not receive your shipments in full: It is common for parts of your shipment to get lost or damaged along the way to Amazon’s fulfillment centers. Therefore, it is crucial to confirm that the SKUs you sent over to FBA correspond to Amazon’s shipment.

Now that you are familiar with the most common profitability leaks and their necessary metrics, start tracking and calculating your exact profitability on Amazon to stay on top of the competition.

To achieve profitability and maximize growth in eCommerce, you must understand each variable that impacts your profitability, from refunds to COGS. Doing so will help you optimize such efforts by proactively finding ways to increase revenue or reduce your costs.

DataHawk helps you stay aware of the impacts that specific costs and fees can have across every facet of your Amazon operation. Using our Amazon Profit and Loss Analysis lets you unveil how much additional overall profit you can capture on the marketplace — and scale accordingly.