How to leverage Amazon Inventory Reports on Seller Central

Managing your Amazon inventory, your listings and orders can become quite challenging, no matter the size or category of your business. Therefore, selling on the Amazon marketplace requires you to be an expert in inventory management, as it is key to your business’s success. A way for you to reach that is through Amazon inventory reports.

This article will help you understand the importance of Amazon inventory reports, and how Amazon handles reporting for brands who sell on its marketplace, notably the Active listings report, and the Cancelled listings report.

Amazon inventory reports are core to Amazon sellers and vendors’ business success. They provide you with the necessary information on your product listings, stocks, and the selling rate at a given period. This information displays SKU, competitive pricing, stock availability, ASIN details, and more for your current offers.

There are 14 types of Amazon Inventory Reports that allow you to understand your inventory performance. Some of these reports are more important than others at specific times. For instance, evaluating the daily inventory report if you’re considering selling trending products.

However, there are other essential inventory reports that you can use regularly.

This article will break down the most used Amazon Inventory Reports, and go through other types of inventory reports in brief.

The active Listings Report provides you with a summary of all your listed products on Amazon at the time your report is run. It contains in-depth information about each of your product listings, including BMVD shipping settings, condition, and item-notes.

It is the most required report, as it offers you an accurate and concise overview of your selling account while enabling you to fully understand your product, price, quantity, and more.

• Log into your Amazon Seller Central account and select “Inventory Reports.”
• Select Active Listings Report in the inventory’s report page menu.
• Click on “Request Report” to download your report.
• Once your report is ready, open it in a spreadsheet (Microsoft Excel or Notepad) on a .txt format.                 

The Active Listings Report contains approximately 27 columns. But you should identify the most important ones as some of those columns don’t display any data in the report.    

• Item-name: refers to the title of your Amazon product listing. It merely includes 80 characters while cutting off the longer titles.
• Item-description: This part includes your Amazon listings’ product description, and it enables you to spot the ASIN details that you have entered previously.
• Listing-ID: You can find the listing-ID when you aim to edit your listing manually. This field is created internally by Amazon to help you track a product listing.
• Product-ID: This represents the value of your Amazon listing. It can either be your ISBN, ASIN, EAN/UPC, and more.
• ASIN1: Represents the product ASIN of the item listed
• Product-ID-Type: It is generated when you want to create an Amazon listing.
• Price: Your product price is displayed here by Amazon, and no currency is shown.
• Quantity: It displays the quantity of stock available on Amazon at the moment.
• Seller-SKU: This part showcases the SKU details allocated to your product listing, either by you or by Amazon, upon the creation of your listing.
• Open-date: This field displays the time and date of your Amazon listing, created in the format: YYYY-MM-DD HH-MM-SS. 
• Fulfillment-channel: Displays your fulfillment settings. It shows “Default,” which implies Merchant Fulfilled, or “Amazon,” which implies Amazon FBA.
• Will-ship-internationally: This field showcases your shipping settings, with 1 = Yes, and 0 = No.                                                                                                     

Active Listings Report provides you with all the necessary information on active listings that are up for sale. It makes sure that they are available to purchase and listed on Amazon.

This report is of good use if you want to edit, improve, or remove data from your inventory loader file. It lets you track all the needed information by updating your stock levels and other associated details in your inventory program.

You can use this report to modify your sale prices by including product costs on discount for a specific period after you download your inventory loader file.

And if you are aiming to increase sales to a particular product line, or plan to have a seasonal sale, the active listings report is an excellent way for you to achieve that. (Leverage DataHawk’s Amazon Sales Estimates to get instant sales figures of any product on Amazon)

This report also helps you edit the lead time to ship orders and aids you avoid suspensions and warnings while keeping it flexible in busy times.

Finally, the Active Listings Report helps you clean your inventory and ensure it doesn’t contain old or incorrect stocks, since they eventually become a liability on Amazon if you are not selling your products actively or selling them inauthentically.

Amazon Cancelled Listings contain inactive listings that Amazon canceled. This report is a handy tool as it enables you to understand why some listings are inactive and provide you with ways to improve them. And although Amazon offers you a list of Amazon inventory reports, you won’t be able to find the Cancelled Listings Report immediately, as you have to contact Seller Support to get it.

The Cancelled Listings Report includes all listings that Amazon has canceled. It does not contain items that are canceled by the seller, sold out, or purged with a stock loader. This report efficiently monitors inactive listings and visually displays them.

Note: You should check your performance notifications or access your Account Health dashboard to understand why a listing has been removed.

The cancelled listings report enables you to identify the listings you have made inactive and those that Amazon has blocked.

This report is a way for you to fix the inactive listings, reactivate them, or altogether remove it. After turning the listing to an active one, thanks to this report, you will be able to make profit once again.               

Other than the Active Listing Report and the Cancelled Listings Report, there are different types of  Amazon Inventory Reports. You can find:

• Open Listing Report: This report includes all of the current open listings available for acquisition at the time you request it.
• Open Listings Lite and Open Listings Liter Reports: Standard versions of the Open Listing Report, the difference between them is:
• Open Listings Lite Report: Includes the seller-SKU, product ID, quantity, and price.
• Open Listing Liter Report: Includes only the seller-SKU and the quantity.
• Inactive Listings Report: The only difference between this report and the Active Listings Report is that it contains listings that are blocked, have zero quantity, listings that exceeded their sale end date, listings that are suppressed, and listings that are not opened.
• All Listings Report: This report involves active, inactive, and incomplete listings, and includes summaries of all products for a specific merchant solely.
• Referral Fee Preview Report: Includes information about listings available for purchase at the time you request the report. This report provides a referral fee estimation of your currently listed product price, without including the shipping or packaging fees.
• Sold Listings Report: Contains all products sold on Amazon.
• Amazon Fulfilled Inventory Report: It enables you to make fast decisions about deleting listings from Amazon or upgrading inventory quantities. It is only accessible if you use Fulfillment by Amazon.
• Listing Quality and Suppressed Listing Report: it contains listings with quality errors, and if they are acute, they will be hidden from Amazon search results until you fix them.

For more information on how to fix your suppressed listings, read our article on: “How to fix Amazon suppressed listings and tips to avoid it.”

You can use DataHawk to get detailed Amazon seller reporting to build an unfair advantage selling on the hyper-competitive Amazon eCommerce space.

To download an Amazon inventory report:

• you can first go to Inventory and select Inventory Reports.
• Then choose the type of report you’d like to download from the menu list.
• Press Request Report button and come back to this page later, as the report generally takes up to 45 minutes to generate.
• Click on Download when the report status is “Ready.”
• Save your file in .txt format, and open it, for instance, on Microsoft Excel.

Amazon Inventory Reports enable you to level up your reporting and analytics game and remain on top of your inventory. They are an efficient way for you to set competitive pricing, plan your stocks beforehand, and monitor sales volume while keeping your listings error-free and always available.

Although it takes time to utterly understand your Amazon Inventory Reports, especially non-FBA sellers, the rich information you finally gather helps you make the right decisions, and eventually meet customer demands. Make sure you look into all the other business reports using Amazon Sales Reporting Tools available in the market.

If you found this article useful and would like to explore other interesting topics on Amazon, make sure to check the articles down below.