Amazon Launches 'Amazon Retail Analytics'

Amazon Retail Analytics offers a comprehensive suite of reports and metrics designed specifically for Amazon Vendors. Amazon's retail analytics is available to Amazon vendors through Vendor Central, where reports enable vendors to monitor sales, manage inventory, and track operational performance. In addition to ARA, Amazon Brand Analytics is another tool for brands and sellers, providing insights into shopper behavior, search terms, and market trends. The analytics suite includes both the catalog report and catalogue report, which help vendors assess product listing quality, inventory performance, and key operational metrics. Amazon vendors can also benefit from integrating other analytics tools alongside ARA for a more complete understanding of their business and to enhance decision-making.

What is Rapid Retail Analytics and Real Time Sales?

Rapid Retail Analytics offers vendors a real-time view of sales, traffic, and inventory data via API in order to track performance against those metrics throughout the day. The real time sales report provides live updates on real time sales, ordered units, shipped units, and shipped revenue on an hourly basis. The API delivers detailed sales data, including ordered revenue, product sales, and average order value, allowing brands to track how many units are sold and monitor goods sold in real time. The inventory dashboard and inventory report help vendors manage stock levels, while the operations report and traffic report provide important metrics on operational and traffic performance. Data tables within the dashboard allow for easy comparison of current performance to the previous period, and prior sales data can be leveraged for forecasting and inventory planning. These tools are essential for gaining insights and extracting actionable insights from important metrics to optimize sales strategies.

Why Does RRA and Brand Analytics Matter?

Typically, Vendor Central retail analytics data updates with a 2-day lag. The forecasting report and demand forecast tools use prior sales data to estimate future weekly customer demand, helping brands optimize inventory planning.

With RRA, brands can access hourly sales/traffic/inventory data in order to optimize their assortment and visibility in near real-time during tentpole events like #PrimeDay to hit targets. Net ppm and the net ppm report allow vendors to track profitability by accounting for sales discounts, customer returns, and hand units in their calculations. Market basket analysis and search terms reports can be used to identify cross-selling opportunities and optimize product listings based on high-performing search term and featured offer metrics.

1 + 1 = 3 w/ Amazon Marketing Stream & Rapid Retail Analytics

Last year, Amazon launched Marketing Stream - a similar hourly API data stream, but for advertising metrics (ad traffic/conversion/spend/etc). With the combination of both Marketing Stream and RRA, brands will now be able to view hourly trends of sales and traffic metrics against media performance (think real-time budget allocation based on inventory, increasing paid traffic during periods sales are slow, etc.). Certain analytics features and reports are available to both sellers and vendors, enabling a unified approach to data-driven decision making.

Any pitfalls for brands using Amazon Vendor Central?

• While data is power, data also needs to be actionable. Similar to AMC, this should not just be a dashboarding exercise. If you are going to invest time and energy with RRA, make sure you have a POA to utilize the insights gained
• Actioning on real-time data in real time is hard. Things break. BUT... flexing these muscles now will pay dividends in the future