Amazon

Figuring out how much you’re making, how much you need to make, and how much you could be making is integral to running an Amazon business. Fortunately, some of the information you need is already built into the platform via Amazon’s business reports. That said, these reports on their own don’t offer much insight or enhanced Amazon sales analytics. For this reason, it’s important to consider what kind of additional data you need to evaluate profitability.

Amazon seller analytics tools fall into eight categories, and seven of them share the same gap: none of them reconcile the settlement. They measure rank, bids, price, reviews, stock, or estimated margin from a data source that is upstream of the money. The settlement, the two-week statement where...

Amazon's Detail Page Sales and Traffic report tells you how many people visited each of your product pages, how many units they ordered, and what those orders were worth, for a date range you choose. It is a traffic and conversion report. It says nothing about what Amazon charged you, what the un...

Most sellers track ad spend as one monthly number and call it marketing. That number hides which products advertising is making profitable and which it is quietly burning down.

Amazon reimburses you when it loses or damages your inventory. Booked wrong, those reimbursements either inflate your sales or vanish into a clearing account nobody reconciles.

The settlement report is the only document that tells you what Amazon actually did with your money. Most sellers never open it. The ones who do reconcile in minutes instead of arguing with their accountant for hours.

A close is not done when the bank reconciles. For an Amazon seller it is done when settlement, COGS, inventory, fees, and tax all agree. Here is the sequence that gets you there.

Amazon will happily show you sales. It will never show you, in one place, what you actually keep after every fee it charged. That number is the only one that matters, and you have to build it yourself.

Sellers pick FBA or FBM on logistics and customer experience. The choice quietly rewrites your cost structure, your inventory valuation, and the per-unit margin you think you are earning.

The inventory value on your balance sheet should equal the units you actually own, costed at what you paid. For an FBA seller spread across warehouses and transit, those two numbers drift apart fast.

The 1099-K threshold has been falling for years, and far more sellers now receive the form. The form has never been your taxable income, and confusing the two is how sellers overpay or trigger a notice.

The twelve questions Amazon sellers ask most, answered without the throat-clearing. If you run a multi-marketplace business above seven figures, you should be able to answer all twelve.

Your Amazon dashboard says you earned $84,000 this month. Your bank received $61,000. Neither number is wrong, and if your books treat the deposit as revenue you are off by $23,000.

Amazon FBA fees in 2026 are a different cost structure than they were three years ago. Inbound placement fees, low-inventory level fees, and the storage utilization surcharge have meaningfully changed unit economics for most sellers. Here's the complete fee landscape and how to track it correctly in your books.

Amazon doesn't deposit your revenue. It deposits the leftovers after fees, refunds, FBA storage, advertising, and a dozen other line items. Reconciling that deposit to QuickBooks Online means matching every line item to the right account, not just the gross sales number.

Amazon accounting breaks the assumptions most accountants bring from traditional retail. The deposit is not your revenue. The timing is not when you think. And the cost of getting it wrong does not show up until a tax filing. This is the complete picture, in the order it matters.

The owner of Monster Pets, a top 50 Amazon seller, shares how the company has scaled so efficiently and which tools have played a pivotal role in improving profitability, visibility, and operational speed.

Struggling to understand where your Amazon profits are really going? You’re not alone. Learn how ConnectBooks helped an Amazon seller turn a confusing, unprofitable situation into a clear, profitable, and scalable business.

Ecommerce sellers can finally see the true impact of holiday returns. No more guessing your real profit for November and December just because Amazon allows returns through January. Learn about ConnectBooks powerful new feature: Returns by Order Date!

Discover how ecommerce sellers and bookkeepers can easily uncover hidden fees, ad overspend, aging inventory issues, and other profit leaks with real-time financial clarity.

Running Amazon ads without a clear plan can leave you overspending, underperforming, or both. You’re busy, and budgets don’t manage themselves. Learn how the new Budget & Planning feature from Trellis helps sellers set real goals, stay on track, and get the most out of every dollar.

Learn what Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) is, how it works, and why it matters for Amazon sellers. Discover key features, benefits, and tips to improve your advertising ROI by using AMC insights.

Learn what's changing on Amazon going into Q4, how to speed up inbounds during the holiday surge, winning pricing strategies and actionable tips to boost your rankings. Watch the video replay to get the actionable steps you can put into place today to maximize your Q4 success.

Learn how sellers can drive more sales with Amazon influencer marketing. Find the right influencers, use Amazon’s Influencer Program effectively, and track results to maximize success.

In today’s hyper-competitive marketplace, price is more than just a number—it’s a signal to both the algorithm and the customer. The right price at the right time can be the difference between winning the Buy Box and watching your sales stall. That’s where automated repricing tools come into play.

Introducing Estimated FBA Storage Fees: Stay Ahead of Your CostsAt ConnectBooks, we’re always looking for ways to give you greater control over your business expenses. Our latest feature, Estimated FBA Storage Fees, integrates directly into your Profit & Loss (P&L) reports, providing real-time visibility into your monthly storage costs.

The allure of financial freedom draws many entrepreneurs to the vast online marketplace that is Amazon. But knowing where to begin your journey with Amazon FBA can feel like stepping into a dense jungle. Imagine turning Amazon FBA into a reliably lucrative business - that's exactly what this article helps you do, providing a roadmap to prosperity.

At first glance, selling on Amazon seems like the perfect way to build a strong, profitable eCommerce business. After all, Amazon is the largest eCommerce website in the world, and it gives your store unprecedented access to consumers across the globe. However, there’s a catch. Actually, there are quite a few catches. The reality is that it is not free (or even cheap) to sell products on Amazon.

It’s not always easy to get the hang of Amazon’s internal algorithms. As a general rule, products that have a better selling history will rank higher in Amazon’s search results. However, selling history isn’t the only factor to consider, and a good selling history still won’t guarantee that your products get seen ahead of the products of your competitors. This is why it is so important to analyze up-to-date and accurate data when you want to make more sales, create more opportunities, and ultimately scale your Amazon business.

Having Amazon inventory is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, you have items to sell; on the other hand, you have to figure out a way to store, ship, and track every single item. It can be overwhelming, and if you don’t have a system in place, you could end up losing money and customers. Fortunately, Amazon makes it pretty easy to choose how you want to manage your inventory.

A lot of online business owners treat QuickBooks as the be-all and end-all of eCommerce bookkeeping — and for good reason. QuickBooks simply does more than most other accounting software options out there, and typically at a better price point. But if you specifically sell on Amazon, you might wonder if QuickBooks is actually the right solution for you.

It’s easy to get bogged down in all of the different data and financial reports compiled while running an eCommerce business. Though you should always stay on top of your finances and work to make sense of the information at your disposal, it’s particularly important to understand profit and loss (P&L) statements and how they can help you build sustained growth and profitability in the eCommerce space. Naturally, a financial statement won’t magically make your eCommerce store more profitable, but it will give you a lot of the tools you need to understand how to cut costs and maximize profits.

Deciding which selling channels to use for your eCommerce store is a huge part of planning your business. While many business owners choose to sell on more than one channel, you’ll only want to pick selling channels that can meet your needs. Some are objectively better than others, but many of the biggest players in the business — like Amazon FBA and Shopify — are great all-around options.

Many Amazon Sellers who are just starting out might be able to get by with Amazon’s built-in reports. While they are very limited, these reports can accommodate sellers who just make a handful of sales per month or use Amazon as a side hustle.

Whether you’re just starting out as an Amazon Seller or you’ve been managing an online business on the platform for a while now, you may be wondering if it is a profitable endeavor over the long term. Naturally, profitability is highly dependent on a wide range of factors, from product selections to market conditions.

As an Amazon Seller, fees can seem like the bane of your existence. You work so hard to sell and market your products, only to see your profits hampered by endless fees.

Six Amazon exports carry almost everything a seller needs to know about money: the settlement and payments data, Business Reports, advertising reports, the FBA inventory and inventory age data, the returns and reimbursement detail, and the Fee Preview. Each answers a different question, none of t...

An Amazon storage fee calculator is a spreadsheet with one row per SKU and four numbers per row: cubic feet per unit, average units on hand, the storage rate for the month, and the units that have crossed the aged-inventory line. Multiply across, add the aged surcharge, and read the total against...

A monthly Amazon sales review that gets run is six steps long, takes about three hours by hand the first time, and ends with three written decisions. Reconcile settlements to deposits, pull units and sales by SKU, layer fees, ads, returns, and COGS onto each SKU, rank by contribution, flag what m...

Amazon seller KPIs are the handful of ratios and counts that tell an operator whether a product is selling, whether the ads behind it pay, what Amazon keeps, how fast inventory turns, and what is left per unit after all of it. Thirteen of them cover most of the questions a seller asks in a month,...

The Inventory Performance Index is a score from 0 to 1,000 that Amazon assigns to FBA sellers on a Professional plan, and it moves on four things: how much excess inventory you hold, your 90-day sell-through rate, how much stranded inventory sits without an active offer, and whether your replenis...

ACoS tells you what a campaign cost relative to the sales Amazon credits to it. TACoS tells you what all your advertising cost relative to everything you sold. The first is a campaign-management number, and it lives in the ads console. The second is an operating expense ratio, and it belongs on t...

Amazon Brand Analytics is a set of dashboards inside Seller Central that shows brand owners aggregated search and purchase data: which queries lead shoppers to their products, how their share of impressions and clicks compares to the rest of the store, what customers buy together, and how often t...

Profit fell 18 percent on a 40-SKU catalog, and six products account for about two-thirds of the drop: three where new ad spend bought sales at a margin below its cost, two that moved into a higher fulfillment fee band after a packaging change, and one whose return rate more than doubled. The oth...

Amazon seller analytics comes in five layers: Seller Central Business Reports, Brand Analytics, third-party dashboards, reconciled accounting data, and an AI that answers questions across all of it. Each layer sees something the one before it could not, and each has a blind spot the next one exis...

Sell it cheaper, in most cases, and liquidate only when the markdown price cannot clear the remaining fees and storage. The decision turns on one figure per option: cash you will receive from here forward, minus cash you will spend from here forward. The money you already paid for the units is go...

An Amazon inventory forecast, whether it runs on a regression, a seasonal decomposition, or a language model wrapped around either, needs four inputs from your books before it can say anything useful: sales velocity measured only on days you were in stock, lead time from purchase order to units a...

Your Amazon data is ready for AI analysis when every settlement in the period has been split into its components and tied to a bank deposit, every SKU carries a landed cost under a method you can name, fees and ad spend and refunds sit against the SKU that caused them, inventory counts by locatio...

A returned Amazon unit costs the seller the refunded price, minus the referral fee Amazon gives back, plus a refund administration fee Amazon keeps, plus the fulfillment fee that is never refunded, plus the cost of the unit if it comes back unsellable. On a $40 product that can be $30 to $45 of c...

Every question below can be answered from reconciled per-SKU Amazon data: order-date revenue, each fee line matched to its order, ad spend attributed by product, refunds matched to original sales, storage charges by SKU, and FIFO landed cost. None of them can be answered from a Business Reports e...

Cash contribution is the cash a unit of inventory will bring in from today forward, minus the cash it will cost to sell it from today forward, ignoring what was already paid to acquire it. Incremental cash contribution is the difference in that figure between two options for the same units, such ...

Week-over-week analysis on one Amazon product answers a narrow question: of the last several weeks, which one made the most contribution, and what was different about it. Done properly, the answer is often not the week with the most units. A deal week sells three times the volume at a discount, w...

A profit dashboard tells you margin fell four points last month. An analyst tells you it fell because ad spend rose on two launch SKUs, returns spiked on a third, and your best-selling product this month happens to be your worst-margin one. The dashboard is enough when you can supply the explanat...

ChatGPT is a good tool for an Amazon seller as long as the output is text: listing bullets, A+ copy drafts, replies to buyer messages, a supplier email, a spreadsheet formula, an explanation of what a settlement line item means. It is a poor tool the moment the output is a financial figure you in...

AI for Amazon sellers, in the sense that matters to your bank account, is software that reads your own sales, fee, ad, return, and cost data and answers questions about profit in plain language. It is not the listing writer, not the shopper-facing assistant on Amazon.com, and not a chatbot with a...

Amazon's FBA fulfillment fee is not a smooth function of weight. It is a staircase. Amazon's Seller Central page on 2026 US FBA fulfillment fees lays out a rate card with three dimensions: a size tier (small standard, large standard, small bulky, large bulky, extra-large), a shipping weight band ...

"Which products were profitable last quarter but are operating at a loss this quarter" is answered by computing contribution per SKU for both quarters and listing the ones whose sign changed. The harder part is the second question, why, and there are five usual causes: a fulfillment fee band chan...

For any slow SKU sitting in FBA in September, the question is which of four moves returns the most cash from here forward: hold it at today's price, discount it, liquidate it, or remove it. The cost you paid for the units does not enter the comparison. That money left the bank months ago and no o...

Pausing ads on a product changes profit twice: once immediately, when the spend stops and the ad-attributed orders stop with it, and again over the following weeks, as organic rank drifts without the sales velocity the ads were feeding. The first effect tends to be positive. The second tends to b...

Talking to your data, also called natural-language analytics or conversational analytics, means asking a question about your business in plain English and receiving an answer computed from your own records. The software translates the question into a query, runs it against structured data, and re...

An AI agent is software that takes multi-step actions toward a goal, choosing the steps itself. An AI analyst answers a question and stops. For an Amazon seller, the line between them is the line between a tool that changes a price and a tool that tells you the price should change. Agents are bei...

"Why am I down in profit this month" has a five-step answer: what changed, over which periods, on which products, why, and what to do next. Skip a step and you get a fact without a cause, or a cause without a fix. Revenue flat and profit down $6,695 is a fact. Ad spend up $3,700, two SKUs moved i...

AI tools for Amazon sellers fall into six categories: listing and content generators, advertising bid managers, repricers, customer service and review assistants, demand and inventory forecasters, and financial analysts that read reconciled books. Each optimizes one thing, sees one slice of data,...

Amazon analytics AI is software that answers questions about an Amazon seller's performance by reading that seller's own sales, fee, advertising, return, inventory, and cost data. The seller asks in plain language, and the software returns a figure, the products behind it, and the reason it moved.

A question an Amazon analytics AI can answer names a product or product group, a period, a metric, and a comparison. "Which of my top 20 SKUs by revenue had a contribution margin under 10 percent in August" has all four. "How are my products doing" has none, and the answer you get back will be a ...

AI for Amazon sellers splits into six jobs: writing listings, setting ad bids, repricing, answering customers, forecasting demand, and analyzing profit on reconciled financial data. Five of those make a seller faster at something. Only the sixth answers "am I making money on this SKU," and it can...

A finished Amazon to Xero setup produces one thing. Every Amazon deposit that hits your bank feed matches, to the cent, a group of Xero transactions that break that deposit into gross sales, refunds, referral fees, fulfillment fees, storage, advertising, subscription charges, and sales tax. If yo...

The correct way to get an Amazon settlement into QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise is one summarized entry per settlement period that nets exactly to the deposit that hit your bank, with each fee type in its own expense account, plus a separate cost of goods entry driven by units shipped. Order-by-or...

The day you add a second sales channel, your inventory stops being a number and becomes an argument between systems. Here is how to settle it.

Discover why aging inventory matters and how to track inventory age and value on Amazon. Improve efficiency and decision-making with aging inventory reports from ConnectBooks.

As an Amazon seller, standing out from the competition and protecting your intellectual property is key to building a successful brand. One of the most powerful tools Amazon offers to support brand owners is the Amazon Brand Registry.

Boost your Amazon FBA profits with 11 tips to reduce costs, increase sales and improve efficiency. Discover proven strategies to elevate your business!

If you’re serious about scaling your Amazon FBA business, mastering your costs and profit margins isn’t optional—it’s essential. That’s where an Amazon FBA calculator becomes your secret weapon.

Fake reviews hurt your Amazon business. Learn how to spot fake Amazon reviews, telltale signs, and steps sellers can take to protect listings and brand trust.

Learn how to use real-time financial and competitive data to price smarter and scale faster. Watch the replay of the webinar now.

Amazon announces the end of FBA prep services by January 2026. Find out what this means for your business, get a step-by-step guide to prepare for this transition and learn about alternative options to streamline your product prep.

As an Amazon seller, reviews are your lifeblood. They influence product ranking, conversion rates, inventory planning, and paid advertising effectiveness. In this article, we share 9 safe, policy-compliant strategies for boosting reviews, without risking your Amazon account.

This comprehensive guide is designed to walk new and growing Amazon sellers through every step of the FBA journey, from setup to scale. Whether you’re starting from scratch or looking to grow your existing Amazon business, this guide is your playbook.

If you're an Amazon seller using Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), you've likely noticed a line item on your bill called "Amazon Placement Service Fee" or "Inventory Placement Fee." This charge, often overlooked by newer sellers, can have a significant impact on your profit margins.