WHY DO YOU NEED DEVELOPER ACCESS TO MY AMAZON ACCOUNT?
Your Amazon data is not shared by Amazon unless you decide to share it. As an Amazon Seller you can give access for third party developers (like us) to access reports and information from your Seller Account through Amazon’s API – Amazon's system for automated access. Such automated access can make it possible to get far more detailed information than what Amazon provides through your Seller Central account.
For us to get this information to you, you need to give us developer access as part of the sign-up process.
WHY DO YOU NEED USER PERMISSIONS FOR MY AMAZON SELLER ACCOUNT?
The Developer access you gave us provides access to most of the information we make available to you through ManageByStats. There is one report that we cannot get this way on a daily basis – Amazon’s API doesn’t have an option for generating it daily through the API. We therefore also ask for limited user permissions, so we can trigger this report to be generated daily. This is the Payments Date Range Report, and allows us to display accurate financial information to you on a daily basis.
HOW SECURE IS MY DATA?
We access your Seller account daily and copy the transactions and the payment information through several reports, and then combine this data to show the information in reports that are searchable and far more useful than the reports you can get in Seller Central. Your information is stored in a separate database for just your data, on secure servers – we never mix information from two sellers into the same database.
Your information is used solely for displaying it back to you in ManageByStats, and is not viewed or shared with anyone else.
DO YOU MAKE ANY CHANGES TO MY AMAZON SELLER ACCOUNT?
With this basic access we make no changes to your Amazon Seller account. The only things we do with your account are 1) generating reports and 2) importing them into the dedicated database we created specifically for your account.
WHAT IS THE “BUY BOX” ON AMAZON?
If you search on Google, you will find this definition of Buy Box:
The Buy Box is the little box on the right side of each product detail screen on Amazon. It may seem unimportant as a shopper, but to a merchant, it’s prime real estate. It means the most visibility, the most searches and the most sales. Essentially, it’s the Holy Grail of Amazon.
Amazon actually has a statistic called “Buy Box Percentage”, or BuyBox%.
If you are the only Seller selling a product, you will most likely have the Buy Box 100% of the time. But if there are multiple Sellers selling this exact item on Amazon, they will all get the Buy Box some percentage of the time. Having the Buy Box simply means that you are the seller whose listing is used when someone clicks the Add to Cart or Buy Now button.
HOW EXACTLY ARE THE STATISTICS ON MANAGEBYSTATS COUNTED?
The Quantity Ordered stat shows how many units have been ordered – even if they are pending orders, and even if they have not been paid for. As best we can tell, Amazon doesn’t collect the payment until they ship the item, and this can sometimes take a day or two – or more.
The Quantity Paid For stat shows how many units have been paid for – even if they were ordered earlier, and were just shipped and paid for now. Amazon provides financial information on each order after it has been shipped and paid for, so this provides actual useable detailed financial information and does not count pending orders (which may or may not end up being shipped and paid for).
The Product Sales Revenue stat shows the revenue generated by the units shipped and paid for – the ones counted in Quantity Paid For. Amazon counts the full revenue (before any discounts), so this is what this stat shows. If you sell 3 units that cost $100 each, this stat will show $300 even if you give a 50% discount and only $150 is collected from the customer.
The Net Revenue stat shows the corrected revenue after removing discounts. If you have many discount sales, the Net Revenue stat is a much better and more accurate stat for seeing real revenue.
The Amazon Payout stat shows the exact amount Amazon will pay out to you for these sales. So this is what is left for you after discounts and various Amazon fees have been taken out.
The Cost of Goods Sold stat shows your cost of good for the products sold, using the Cost information you assigned to this product in the Settings / Products page. We count the cost on units sold. We DO NOT subtract the cost of units refunded – as often refunded units cannot be resold.
The Quantity of Refunds stat simply shows the number of units refunded.
The BuyBox% stat shows the percentage of shopper sessions where your listing had the Buy Box. Amazon refers to this as the Buy Box Percentage.
The Conversion Rate stat shows what Amazon refers to as the Unit Session Percentage. It is essentially how many units were sold, divided by the number of shopper sessions viewing your product listing. If your conversion rate is 20%, then you sold 20 units for every 100 shoppers viewing your listing.
The Sales Rank stat shows your products’ Amazon Sales Rank average for the time period shown. Sales Rank can vary by the hour at times, so this is the average Sales Rank for the time period you are viewing, for the product, product line or brand you are viewing.
The Sessions stat shows number of visits to your Amazon.com pages by a user. All activity within a 24-hour period is considered a session.
The Number Of Customer Reviews stat shows the total number of customer reviews.
The Average Customer Review stat shows the average customer review score for a product.
I HAVE ADDED A NEW PRODUCT – HOW COME I DON’T SEE IT IN MANAGEBYSTATS YET?
We only download data once there is a settled transaction on a new product. And since we download overnight, if you had a settled transaction on a new product today, the data will be there tomorrow.
PRODUCTS/PRODUCT METRICS PAGE
The Products / Product Metrics page requires a couple steps to be done on your side before it will work fully.
WHY IS MY SALES RANK GRAPH BLANK?
You need to go through the Amazon Brand Registry process. We need access to a report called “Brand Performance” in order to access that information, and you will only have that report in your Amazon Seller Central selection if you have registered your brand. Amazon tells you how to do it here, and you apply here.
WHY ARE MY REVIEW GRAPHS BLANK?
This is for the same reason as with the Sales Rank graph. You need to go through the Amazon Brand Registry process. We need access to a report called “Brand Performance” in order to access that information, and you will only have that report in your Amazon Seller Central selection if you have registered your brand. Amazon tells you how to do it here, and you apply here.
WHY CAN’T I ADD A PRODUCT?
You can’t add products to the system manually yourself. New products are automatically downloaded from your Amazon account as soon as they have had sales occur and the transaction is settled. Until they have had sales occur, there is nothing to track anyway, and there is no reporting for us to pull from Amazon.
WHY ARE THE QUANTITY ORDERED NUMBERS SOMETIMES DIFFERENT THAN QUANTITY PAID FOR?
On the Stats page, all the data is financial. This means that only orders and transactions that are settled (finalized, paid for) are counted. Amazon does not provide the detailed finance data on Pending transactions.
On the Graphs page, we actually have two graphs for orders – one graph for Quantity Ordered, and another for Quantity Paid For.
Quantity Ordered shows the number of items ordered for that day/week/month etc. This includes Pending orders, like Amazon’s number.
Quantity Paid For shows the number of items paid for that day/week/month etc. This can include orders actually placed that day (or several days) before, and does not include any pending orders. So, this stat matches the financials for the day, but will not generally match Amazon’s number of orders placed that day. The entire difference lies in the difference between when an order is placed and when it is paid for.