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Seller Core Dashboard - User Manual

Seller Core Dashboard - User Manual

Seller Core - User Manual

Introduction

Reason Automation’s Seller Core Dashboard is designed to give reporting insight to Seller Central clients across the domains of advertising, traffic, sales, and operations (inventory and returns). Read on to learn more about the Seller Dashboard, and some of its features.

Current version: 2.3

What’s New in Version 2.3?

The latest version of Seller Core dashboard includes new features to improve user experience and increase insight.

Improved Navigation

A new, more compact navigation scheme allows you to switch easily between reports in a subject matter group.

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Localized Currency

Seller Core 2.3 detects the currency code for monetary values and provides the appropriate currency symbol across sales, inventory, and purchase order data.

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Streamlined and Expanded Executive Reporting

To make preparation and sharing of Exec reports even easier, reporting elements on these pages are now fixed to, and optimized for, a particular distributor view. Dedicated Sourcing and Manufacturing reporting sections mean these reports are always ready to go as soon as you select your reporting date. We’ve also added a Year-level reporting summary with YTD values.

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New ASIN-level analysis

Right-click on any ASIN from any report inside Seller Core Dashboard, and drill through to an ASIN Detail page that provides at-a-glance diagnostic information about that ASIN.

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Custom Categorization

Amazon category data is often inconsistent, and rarely maps well to a Seller’s category definitions. The latest Seller Core Dashboard leverages Reason’s Product Catalog Upload feature, allowing you to group your products by custom categories and other customizable attributes to suit your needs.

  • View reports grouped to your own custom category and subcategory
  • Add up to 10 custom tags for further custom filtering. For instance, flag seasonal products, track promotions, or add custom product attributes.
  • Upload your own custom product titles that will replace Amazon titles in all reports whenever available

Category and subcategory slicers appear on most reports to the right of charts and visuals as shown below. Additional filters (customizable tags) can be controlled via the Filters panel.

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Choose Between ASIN or SKU

Chances are you’re more familiar with your SKU or manufacturer part number than with ASIN. The new Seller Core Dashboard lets you flip most ASIN-level reports to a SKU-based display, and back, at the click of a button (SKU is sourced from custom catalog upload. Currently supports only 1:1 SKU-ASIN mappings).

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Dashboard Requirements

Required Tables:

  • sales_and_traffic_detail_sales_traffic_by_child_item
  • inventory_age
  • inventory_all_listings

Optional (but Recommended) Tables:

  • returns_customer_returns
  • ads_sponsored_brands_campaign
  • ads_sponsored_display_advertised_product
  • ads_sponsored_products_advertised_product

Glossary

A list of measure names, abbreviations etc. used in this dashboard. For common Amazon metrics definitions, see Seller Central.

bps/basis point - used to represent absolute change in percentages, contribution to total/change. 100 bps = 1 percentage point. A metric that is 6% this month and was 5% last month has seen a 100 bps increase.

‘Month’ - appended to a measure, means Amazon monthly aggregated data was used, either because Amazon does not provide daily data or it would not be appropriate to aggregate (usually refers to inventory data)

‘Week’ - appended to a measure, means Amazon monthly aggregated data was used, either because Amazon does not provide daily data or it would not be appropriate to aggregate (usually refers to inventory data)

'LM' - appended to a measure, means for last (previous) month.

'LY' - appended to a measure, means for last year.

'MoM’ or ‘YoY' - appended to a measure, means Month over Month or Year over Year. The relative difference of measure in selected vs. previous period. E.g. $10K last year, $11K this year = +10% relative YoY difference.

'MoM Abs’ or ‘YoY Abs'- appended to a measure, means Absolute MoM or YoY difference. E.g. $10K last year, $11K this year = +$1,000 absolute YoY difference.

Traffic Paid % - ad clicks as a percentage of total GVs

ACOS - Advertising Cost of Spend, calculated as ad spend/attributed sales and expressed as a percentage

TACOS - Total Advertising Cost of Spend, calculated as ad spend/all sales and expressed as a percentage

ROAS - Return on Ad Spend, calculated as attributed sales/ad spend and expressed as currency, e.g. a $6.00 ROAS means $6 in attributed sales for every $1.00 in ad spend. ROAS is the inverse of ACOS.

Reporting UI - Controls and Details

Most reports are provided in monthly and weekly versions (built via aggregation of data at the daily grain when possible). A series of controls appear at the top of each report, allowing selection of time period and other report elements.

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Reporting Month (or Week) - selects the current, or latest, month/week for time-series reports, or the focus month/week to be used for single-month reports, for all report elements on the tab.

Lookback - for charts/graphs and tables showing historical data by month or week, selects how many months or weeks back the reports should show.

ASIN - For most report tabs, you can filter the entire page to a single product/ASIN

Showing Period over Period Change - Relative and Absolute Values

Changes between periods in simple measures represented by a number - e.g. traffic of 50,000 Page Views - are appropriately expressed as relative changes (a percentage amount). However, we avoid using relative change for compound metrics such as Conversion. To see why, consider the example below, where conversion has improved by 1 percentage point in both tests. If we assume traffic to be constant across both tests and both periods, these two conversion increases yield the same outcome - an increase in ordered units equal to (0.01 * Page Views). However, the relative change measures might lead us to assume that the outcome in Test 1 is preferable, when in fact it is only larger because the base is smaller.

P1
P2
Absolute Change
Relative Change
Test 1
5%
6%
100 bps
20.0%
Test 2
15%
16%
100 bps
6.7%

ASP (average selling price) is not a compound metric, but similarly benefits from representation of change as absolute. In the example below, two products see an increase of $10 in ASP. Again, a larger relative change is seen with the first product due to the smaller base. This is more useful than in the Conversion example, since extreme ASP movements are of interest. However, the effect on revenue in both product examples below is the same, providing units are also the same, since revenue = units * ASP. A better focal point would be to prioritize ASINs by absolute increase or decrease in revenue, and then evaluate the impact of ASP and unit changes to that output.

P1
P2
Absolute Change
Relative Change
Prod 1
$20
$30
$10
50.0%
Prod 2
$80
$90
$10
12.5%

For the above reasons, the following metrics in our dashboards are expressed in terms of absolute change:

ASP (Average Selling Price)- changes between periods expressed in currency, e.g. +$2.50 MoM.

ACOS, Conversion, CTR, ROAS - absolute change in bps

Graphical Display of Relative and Absolute Change

To reinforce the above concept in charts and graphs, relative changes are shown in a linear form as with Page Views YoY below. Graphs of compound metrics will often show the previous period (e.g. last year’s) value as a stepped line for comparison to the current period, as this provides a more readable understanding of change between periods than showing the change amount itself.

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Reporting Tabs

Exec (Executive Summary)

These reports provide high level summaries of key metrics across all domains in both tabular form (vertically by month/week) and KPI charts. A summary bar at the top shows period-over-period change for top KPIs. A new year-level Exec Summary shows full year and YTD metrics in tabular form and

Traffic

Page Views (GV) and Conversion are shown at the top of these reports in both graphical and tabular form, the latter along with ordered units (the second input to conversion, along with traffic).

Lower down are ‘movers and shakers’ - the products that are driving the largest period over period change in key metrics. These tables reflect the “current month (or week)” selected at the top. and show products with largest Page View count overall, as well as largest gains and declines.

Traffic - KPIs
Traffic - KPIs

Sales

Similar in layout to Traffic reports, the Sales reports focus on Ordered Product Sales, Units, Total Order Items and ASP. Top gainers/decliners in OPS are shown toward the bottom of the page.

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ASIN Detail

Whenever you need to dive deeper on an ASIN that you find anywhere inside the Seller Core Dashboard, simply right-click to drill though to ASIN Detail. You’ll land on a new report optimized for fast-read reporting at an ASIN level across all major KPIs, allowing you to quickly diagnose potential product-level issues. Use the back arrow (top left) to return to your previous page when done.

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ASIN Browser

This report shows a list of all ASINs with “mover and shaker” KPIs that you can sort and filter to find product-level drivers of change. Once you have a target you want to see more about, right click to drill through to ASIN Detail.

Inventory

The Inventory tabs feature common inventory KPIs at the whole-business and product level, sourced from the inventory_age table, including Available Quantity Sellable (with weeks of cover) and inbound quantity.

We introduce a metric we call USI, which stands for Understock Sales Impact, designed to highlight opportunities where inventory is low and demand is high, meaning a stock-out will be consequential. USI estimates the sales impact of a stock-out over the next four weeks by subtracting four week demand from current units on hand, and multiplying it by by ASP. For instance, if your average weekly demand is 1,000 units for a product with ASP of $25, and you only have 1,500 units in stock, your USI is (1,500 - ((4 * 1,000)) * $25, or $62,500. Your four week demand is 4,000 units, and you only have 1,500 in stock - you’ll be out the sales on the other 2,500 units unless something changes. Key takeaways:

  • Negative USI values are bad.
  • 'USI + Inbound' includes on-hand and inbound units - if this value does not improve significantly vs. USI, understock issues are not going to be solved by inbound product.

Ads (Advertising)

Two ad reports (’combined’ and ‘by ad type’) are provided at the weekly and monthly level, for a total of four advertising tabs.

Ads (Combined)

The first two graphs on the combined ads reporting tab put ad-attributed sales (using the 14-day attribution window value) in the larger context of OPS and Ad Spend. On the left, Paid % of Revenue (Ad-Attributed Sales/OPS) is shown alongside the inputs to this metric. On the right, Ad spend is shown with attributed sales across Sponsored Display, Brand and Product ad types.

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The middle left chart shows ad impressions by ad type with CTR (green line), and on the right, spend is shown across the three ad types in combination with ‘Traffic Paid %’, which shows ad clicks as a percentage of total GVs.

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The remaining charts show ACOS and ROAS by ad type, along with ad spend. A summary table below the charts groups these metrics in tabular form. Below that are movers and shakers - top ASINs driving change across impressions, clicks and ad spend.

Ad_Type

These tabs repeat some of the reports from the Ads (Combined) tabs, but each ad type is broken out separately, giving a focused look at performance by ad type.

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Returns

The Returns report tabs show overall product return trends, along with details such as returns by reason, top returned products by OPS and ASIN-level return details.

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