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Like any business, selling on Amazon requires discipline. As a seller, you can’t win the Amazon marathon with the arbitrary use of listing optimization and PPC schemes. You also need a carefully planned to-do list for every day, week, month, and quarter for all Amazon tasks.
If you’re not sure how to break down your overwhelming workload into simple daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly routines, download the Successful Amazon Seller Cheatsheet. It covers all required activities to run an Amazon FBA business with success. Let's dive in.
First of all, check your email linked to your Seller Central and ZonGuru account. You will find out a lot of new developments that may need your attention through email notifications. Here’s the list of things that you’ll find out through email.
Besides checking email, these are the daily tasks you need to take care of via your Seller Central dashboard or ZonGuru tools.
It is important to keep track of daily sales volume as well as the share of organically and PPC-driven sales. ZonGuru’s Business Dashboard makes it quite easy to have your eyes on those important numbers.
After selecting and applying the date, the Business Dashboard provides all metrics and figures for that particular day/duration.
When you scroll down the Business Dashboard page, you can see the Sales Breakdown widget.
Here, you can see a pie chart that gives you a daily sales breakdown of both organic and paid sales. You get the actual figures along with their percentages without running any calculations.
It is important to know what your numbers are after leaving out the working expenses. Again, Business Dashboard comes in handy where you can find your daily net profit with all calculations already done by ZG’s responsive algorithm.
First, select the previous day from the Custom Range (as shown above) and then locate the Net Profit section on Business Dashboard to get the daily net profit numbers.
You can also see a very comprehensive yet easy-to-understand profit breakdown under daily net profit. This breakdown column gives you a detailed look at daily gross revenue, Amazon fees, Cost of Goods Sold (COGS), advertising costs, and refunds. With this daily detailed overview, you can find out any unexpected uptick in Amazon service charges and subsequently escalate the issue with Seller Support. Similarly, daily ad cost is also a good indicator of how well you’re doing with your marketing (PPC) activities.
You can further expand this table to get a detailed breakdown of Amazon fees and advertising costs.
Best Sellers Rank (BSR) on Amazon is a good indicator of how a certain listing is doing in a particular category and niche. This ranking is quite dynamic and sometimes even undergoes hourly changes. Therefore, it is a good practice to see the BSR of your listing every day to see how your listings are doing in the given product category. This ranking can give you a fair idea of how competitive a niche or sub-niche is.
Open the product page of your listing and scroll down to the Product details section
On some product pages, BSR is given under the Additional Information section.
A good optimization regimen always entails a strong feedback mechanism where you track keyword performance and modify your listing content and PPC maneuvers accordingly. Suppose you have optimized a listing for some top relevant keywords and now want to see how the listing has done against those keywords.
The Position Change parameter is the key performance indicator here. By looking at this data point, you can see for which keywords your listing is doing well and where you need to replace the keywords or change their position in the listing to get better results.
Here, the given listing has gone up four positions for the keyword “door draft stopper” in the last 30 days. Meanwhile, its position for the keyword “draft stopper” has dropped by ten places in the same period. All the columns here are updated daily.
Once you enter an ASIN in the Keyword Tracker, ZonGuru automates the performance tracking for you. This means you can come back whenever you want and see how your listing is faring for the given set of keywords.
It is also important to mention here that you’re not bound to track the performance of a listing only for the top ten most relevant keywords. If you have used a keyword list from the Keywords on Fire (KWOF) session in your optimization work and want to see how a listing is performing for those keywords, you can use Keyword Tracker for that.
You can track the performance of up to 50 keywords of your listing by synching Keywords on Fire with Keyword Tracker.
Performance notifications are the call-for-action messages for sellers to ensure they maintain their account’s health. Checking performance notifications daily and resolving them promptly is essential to maintain the selling ability of your account.
Keeping tabs on inventory data is essential for maintaining good sales volume and supply chain regimen. Therefore, an Amazon seller who wants to cut above the rest should check their “Inventory Health” daily.
You can easily do that by looking at certain metrics in the Manage Inventory Health section on your Seller Central account.
The Sell-through rate is the number of units sold and delivered over the past 90 days divided by the average number of sellable units in fulfillment centers during that time. It is a good metric to assess the efficiency of your supply chain. A higher sell-through rate implies a robust supply chain as well as good sales volume. The Inventory Health section also shows you the drop or increase in the sell-through rate in the last 90 days.
Then, there is the Inventory age section. Inventory age shows the age of your in-stock units. It helps you to quickly identify how long your products have been in fulfillment centers and if they will be subjected to long-term storage fees. In the above example, you can see four units have inventory age within 60 days. Then four units have an inventory age in the range of 61-90 days. Lastly, 438 units have an inventory age between 91 and 180 days.
Usually, you get an email notification on any update if you’ve launched a case with the Seller Support team. Nonetheless, it is a good practice to see the Case Log section in your Seller Central profile once in a while, especially if you’ve opened more than one case at a time.
Apart from things that you need to oversee daily, some Amazon tasks should be taken care of on a weekly basis.
If you want to rule a niche, you must keep tabs on every new competitor entering it. It can be done through a manual search. However, a streamlined and time-efficient way to find new competitors is to use ZonGuru’s Niche Finder.
Here, you can find the top 25 ASINs for the given keyword (heated coffee mug for home) in a glimpse. You can see if some new listings are making their way among the top ranks. Moreover, you can find the level of competition of those new ASINs by looking at their Listing Strength (LS). LS is a score that Niche Finder calculates while factoring in multiple attributes of the given ASIN. The higher LS score means the corresponding ASIN/listing is tougher to beat.
The sponsored ad campaigns from your seller account need weekly supervision. By appraising the performance of your PPC campaigns every week, you will always know which campaigns are paying dividends and where you may need to make changes.
Besides appraising PPC performance, you may also want to optimize the PPC activity to make the most of every cent of your marketing budget. This is also done in the Campaign Manager section.
Whether you want to adjust bids for different ad placements, exclude some phrases from the campaign (through negative keywords), or change your daily PPC expense, you can do it from here.
Amazon allows you to develop customer engagement via email. As a professional seller, you must capitalize on that opportunity. However, crafting follow-up and feedback emails and sending them to relevant buyers is a lot of work without automation.
You can use ZonGuru’s Email Automator to trim down the tiresome part of email campaigns. Email Automator provides you with a list of readymade templates from its library. You can also create new email templates from scratch.
It is essential to be aware of what seller feedback you’re getting. Like product reviews, customers also provide seller feedback regarding their overall shopping experience with you. Good seller feedback is necessary to attract more customers, win Buy Boxes, and prevent account suspension.
Having a swift response against negative ratings helps you maintain good seller feedback. Therefore, we recommend checking this performance section on Seller Central every week.
Every week, check how your competitor ASINs are doing. You should look at their sales numbers and any significant changes to the listing content and features. ZonGuru’s Sales Spy and Product Pulse are quite useful for this analysis.
You can use Sales Spy to find out about the revenue, sales volume, BSR, and estimated profit of your competitor ASINs for any time period.
Once you add an ASIN to Sales Spy, it starts tracking the sales numbers of the corresponding listing, which you can see whenever you want.
After sales data, you can see the changes to the listing content and features of your competitor ASINs. You can use Product Pulse for that.
There are 15 parameters for which Product Pulse monitors a listing. The Latest Change column shows you the date at which a modification to the corresponding value (price, status, ratings, etc) has occurred. Then, there are Old and New Value columns to show you the degree of change.
For instance, Product Pulse tracks price and lets you know if your competitor has changed the pricing (possibly to win the Buy Box or undercut others in the niche). Then, it also tracks modifications to Title, Bullets, Description, and Backend Keywords that suggests the competitor might have added, replaced, or removed keywords to further optimize their listings.
On top of that, you can keep tabs on multiple listings through a single window/interface. You can take a glance at any listing and its changes within seconds by clicking on the eye button.
Listing Quality Dashboard is relatively a new feature on Seller Central. It essentially recommends actions that can improve the quality of your listing. As a result, you succeed in making your product more visible to Amazon search algorithms. Also, taking care of those recommendations can help you decrease the return rate and prevent listing suppression.
It is worth mentioning that you don’t always need to fill in the missing attributes. If you think a missing field is not relevant to your listing, you can leave it as-is.
If you want to be on top of things with your inventory planning, you need to use ZonGuru’s My Product feature. Here, you can enter the manufacturing time, shipping time, and 3PL stock values that automatically sync with ZonGuru’s Business Dashboard.
Once you enter the relevant values here, you can go to the INVENTORY SUPPLY section on the Business Dashboard every week and see how you’re doing on that front.
The Inventory Supply widget on Business Dashboard gives you a quick overview of how you are doing with inventory for different listings. The In-Stock column shows the number of units that are available in fulfillment centers for delivery. The Take Action column serves as a reminder for when you need to restock the inventory from the supplier.
If the inventory age of your stock is high, you can make this check a monthly task.
Some Amazon work is not recurrent like the tasks we’ve discussed above. You can break down that work into monthly tasks.
Check every month if all your Listed ASINs are indexed for the relevant search queries and keywords. This check is essential to ensure all your products remain visible for all the relevant shoppers’ queries. The easiest way to check the keyword indexing of your listing is to use ZonGuru’s ASIN Index Checker.
This monthly check can guide you for your next listing optimization iteration. For instance, you may want to optimize your listing content for the keyword “home coffee mug” to get your listing indexed for that particular customer query.
You can also use Keyword Tracker to see if your listing is indexed and ranked for the top-performing relevant keywords.
Besides checking the listing through ZonGuru’s Keyword Tracker every day, you should also have its detailed performance assessment once a month.
You can use these three ZonGuru tools to appraise the monthly listing performance.
We’ve already discussed how to use Keyword Tracker and Business Dashboard to appraise listing performance. Now, let’s see how you can use Keywords on Fire to assess your listing performance.
You can also use this KWOF’s valuable comparative feature to see how your competitors are faring for the same keywords.
Market and competitor analysis is an important reality check for any seller. We’ve already discussed how you can use ZonGuru’s Sales Spy and Product Pulse to keep an eye on your competitor. Interestingly, you can also use ZG’s Listing Optimizer to run a more detailed monthly competitor analysis.
Let’s see how.
There are three insights from Listing Optimizer that can help you understand how your competitors are doing on the optimization front.
The Listing Optimizer analysis shows that your listing has an optimization score of 6,577, which is about average. On the left side, you can see how many keywords your listing is already optimized for.
Now, move to your competitor’s listing.
Listing Optimizer shows that this competitor has a better optimization score than your listing. It is already optimized for a lot of keywords from the list you’ve uploaded. It confirms that you may also need to optimize your listing content for the same set of keywords.
After this, identify the keywords the competitor listing is not currently optimized for.
Here, the same listing (with a good optimization score than yours) is not optimized for keywords like “snow mat for entryway”, “heavy duty door mat”, and “extra large door mat”. These keywords boast reasonable search volume so you may get an edge over your competitor if you optimize your listing for these keywords.
In the last, see the Search Terms column of your competitor.
Surprisingly, this competitor hasn’t made the most of backend keyword optimization. So, this is another optimization opportunity where you can easily get ahead of your competitor by adding a large number of relevant backend keywords to your listing.
Repeat the same exercise for other listings and you will find out how your competitors are doing with their optimization work and how you can catch up or get ahead.
If you’re a Brand owner and registered with Amazon Brand Registry, you can also use Amazon Brand Analytics to get valuable insights into the market and competition. Open Brand Analytics from the Report drop-down column of the main menu of your Seller Central account.
You can find these important market and competition insights in the Brand Analytics report.
It is important to develop a balance sheet of your Amazon operations on a monthly basis. It will give you a clear picture of your account’s fiscal performance. If you’re well-versed in basic accounting, you can do it on your own. You can get the relevant data and numbers from your Seller Central’s Payment Report, Business Report, and ZonGuru’s Business Dashboard.
Then, you can get your sales numbers from Business Reports presented on your Seller Central account.
If you have synched ZonGuru’s My Product and Business Dashboard with your seller account, you can then get all those numbers on a more user-friendly and easy-to-navigate interface.
Besides checking your inventory every week through ZG’s My Products and Business Dashboard, you should also get a monthly inventory report from Amazon to reconcile your listings with your available stock and your own records. This is an effective way to check the precision of your FBA ecosystem.
This report will be a summary of the products that you have available for sale on Amazon. The report provides the SKU, price, quantity, and ASIN for each of your current offers.
Apart from listing optimization and PPC campaigns, you should strive to generate traction from your listings from non-Amazon sources as well. The best place to create more traffic and sales for your listings are the websites that are part of the Amazon Affiliate program.
You should find affiliate websites relevant to your niche and collaborate with them so they feature your products in their review blog posts. There is one hack for quickly finding all the affiliate websites relevant to your product/niche i.e. use Google’s search operator query.
You can shortlist the websites whom you want to partner with to add another stream of traffic to your listings.
When you open the Business Reports page, you can see a section “Detail page sales and traffic” under the heading By ASIN on the left side. This report provides a comprehensive performance report at the product level. This is perhaps the most in-depth product reporting that Amazon offers to sellers.
Here, you can see how many sessions (1 session = 1 unique visit in 24-hours), page views, Buy Box percentage your SKUs/ASINs have acquired in the chosen timeframe. Then, you can find the Unit Session Percentage (USP) of your SKUs/ASINs. USP is a more nuanced version of conversion rate. It is the ratio of the total number of units sold to the total number of sessions in the given time period.
Let’s try to understand it with the help of an example.
If 4 out of 10 visitors land on your listing and place an order for one unit each, the conversion rate will be 40% while the unit session percentage will also be 40%. If 2 of those 4 buyers order 2 units each, the conversion rate will remain the same (40%) — but the unit session percentage will rise to 60%.
Inventory Performance Index (IPI) is a metric introduced by Amazon that calculates how efficiently and productively a seller manages their FBA inventory. Amazon updates it weekly.
Quarterly assessments and brainstorming are an essential part of most business models. The same is the case with Amazon FBA. Whether it is exploring new opportunities on the Amazon landscape or reviewing and reworking listing optimization in detail, there are some tasks that you need to look after once in three months.
Listing optimization can be a monthly, bi-monthly, or quarterly task, depending on how dynamic your niche is. If you’re working in a product category with cut-throat completion and changing searching trends, you may need to optimize your listing for the right set of keywords every month. Otherwise, you should review and optimize your listing after three months.
Taking care of this tremendous task has become easy with ZonGuru’s Listing Optimizer. This user-friendly tool allows you to thoroughly optimize your listing within a couple of minutes.
This page can be broken down into four sections.
First Section
Here, you have a list of keywords along with their search volume, KWOF score (ZG score), number of competitors, and the status of the given keyword in the listing.
You can hover over the ticks and stars to see where the corresponding keywords are in the listing. From this section, you can easily identify the high-volume keywords missing from your list.
Second Section
On the top left side of the page, you get this widget where all the in-review ASINs are stacked. You can click their icons to see their listing contents and optimization score in relation to the keyword list.
Third Section
Below the listing widget, you get this panel where you see the values of three different parameters for the given ASIN/listing.
Fourth Section
In this section, you can find all the listing content broken down into sections. There are Title, Bullets, Description, and Search Terms. Title, bullets, and Descriptions show the content that appears on the listing when anyone opens the connected product on Amazon.
However, the Search Terms box shows the backend keywords that a listing has used. Backend search terms don’t appear on the product page. Nonetheless, they play a part in optimizing the listing. You can use this section to fill keyword variations that may not be visually appealing or readable e.g. synonyms, misspellings, colloquial terms.
It is important to mention here that this section is editable. It means you can instantly add or remove the keywords from the Title, Bullets, Description, and Search Terms and update your listing then and there.
After you’re done with your optimization work, you can update your Amazon listing directly from Listing Optimizer. Click on the setting button on the top right corner of the content section and select the Publish on Amazon option to update the listing.
Amazon is a dynamic marketplace. You can’t bank one or two products if you’re in for the long run. Therefore, it is always a good idea to explore new products and niches for your portfolio every three months. Besides manual search on Amazon and seeking advice from seasoned sellers, you can use ZonGuru’s Niche Finder to find expansion opportunities.
A niche keyword with a low LS score and high sales volume hint at a product you can consider. In the above example, “portable stove butane” is the keyword that has relatively low LS and good sales volume. So, you may weigh up the possibility of adding butane-powered portable stoves to your listing portfolio.
Amazon has made sellers' life easy by putting up a robust tax collection service. If you’re eligible for that service, sign up for it. You will have to pay a tax collection fee to Amazon. However, it’s worth it given the amount of time and resources you’ve to set aside if you do it on your own.
For tax filing too, you have two options. Either do it manually like the good old days or use tax automation software. The frequency of tax filing varies from state to state. It can be monthly, bi-annually, or quarterly.
For everything related to Amazon taxes, you can refer to this detailed guide.
Moreover, go to Seller Central if you want to see the tax collection details for your account.
You can’t make continuous improvements to your Amazon business without the critical evaluation of your products. The simplest way to do this is to pay attention to customer reviews.
But what if you have multiple listings online where it is not possible to sit and read every single comment?
ZonGuru’s Love-Hate tool is particularly suitable for such instances. It provides you with two clouds of phrases that sum up why customers are loving and hating your product. This way you can find the areas where you may need to further improve your product.
While you already have your sources sorted, there is always a chance that you may find suppliers at better rates. Roping in a supplier with cheaper rates will help you improve your margins. Then, you can also scout for suppliers that provide better quality.
Besides online research and getting referrals from fellow sellers, you can use ZonGuru’s Easy Source to find your potential supplying partners. ZonGuru has collaborated with Alibaba (one of the largest B2B marketplace) to provide you with reliable and best of the best suppliers for any given product niche.
This quarterly scavenging can help you find some great deals to improve profit margins or product quality.
The above checklist is an essential Amazon handbook that helps you streamline your work and declutter your schedule. You can witness a significant improvement in your Amazon activity by using this 3-month roster all through the year. Whether it is about improving sales numbers, modernizing inventory planning, building a brand, or diversifying your seller profile, this all-inclusive Amazon seller checklist will come in handy.
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