If your brand is selling on Amazon, you know how important understanding and tracking your inventory is. Keeping up with supply and demand is a huge factor in brand reputation on Amazon, making inventory even more critical. Add Amazon’s notorious long-term storage fees into the mix and all of a sudden understanding your Amazon inventory reports is downright life or death. In this article we’ll take a quick look at inventory reports and demonstrate how Amazon handles reporting for brands who sell on the marketplace.
So, what exactly is included in an inventory report? While this type of inventory reporting and analysis can be tedious to some, it’s important for manufacturers to know exactly what is taking up space in their warehouse so they can accurately plan output schedules. Inventory reports are a comprehensive summary including all of a specific manufacturer’s products. The three main things every inventory report must include are:
1. Inventory List
The inventory list is a rundown of all the products currently in stock. Most inventory reports include a brief product description, SKU number, and more details – the more information the better. It’s important to also include items that may no longer be in stock in order to keep tabs on how past products performed.
2. Price
Including the price of products on the inventory report is important as it helps track the return from each item. Every brand is different, and you can choose to include the manufacturing price, the sale price, or even the profit ‘price’. Many inventory reports include all of this information for a richer picture of inventory results.
3. Stock Status
The stock status refers to how much of a certain inventory item is left in stock. This number can refer to individual items or boxes of items depending on the industry. Tracking stock status is a good starting point for developing complex inventory management strategies.
With the above information in hand, manufacturers can analyze how current output levels relate to demand levels, how much is being spent on storage both in private warehouses and Amazon facilities, and how customer demand is impacting product supply. Without this basic knowledge of how an inventory is performing on a weekly or monthly basis, manufactures can quickly lose sight of where products are going, how they’re holding up in the marketplace, and how to best adjust operations.
When it comes to selling on Amazon, keeping track of inventory reports is another ballgame entirely. For brands leveraging Amazon Seller Central accounts, there are detailed Amazon Inventory Reports that provide some visibility into how products are performing on Amazon. Brands who are using Fulfilled by Amazon services also have the ability to track inventory details.
Amazon Inventory Reports have some different, more complex types of reports that typical in-house inventory reports might not include, such as:
Recommended Removals: This is an extremely important and helpful report that lists products that are close to being flagged for long-term storage fees.
Daily/Monthly Inventory: These automated reports show the total inventory in Amazon-owned fulfillment centers, including the total product quantity, location of specific products, and disposition of units.
Inventory Health: The Inventory Health Report provides an overview of sales and current inventory. This is where brands can see current sellable and unsellable products, as well as reasons why certain products are ‘unsellable’.
Inbound Performance: This report provides details about specific product shipments a brand sends to Amazon fulfillment centers. Brands can see any issues or resolutions that might have occurred, as well as the total number of products received to specific warehouses.
These are only a few reports available to brands in Seller Central. The main goal of these reports is to provide more visibility and transparency into what exactly is happening behind the scenes with your products once they are shipped to an Amazon fulfillment center.
Although Amazon has definitely stepped up its game in recent years when it comes to inventory reporting and inventory turnover analysis, there is still the process of understanding and decoding the reports to consider. For many manufactures – especially those that are not part of seller central or that don’t participate in the FBA program – coming up with these detailed reports can be difficult and often requires excessive amounts of manual data gathering and time. Even just reading the extensive reports from Amazon can take serious time and patience as there is no such thing as customization in the Amazon marketplace world. Every Seller Central report is the same, whether or not the information outlined is important to you and your brand.
With a dedicated integrated marketplace retailer like SupplyKick helping to track and manage inventory reporting both on the Amazon marketplace and in your own warehouses, your brand can become more efficient, more knowledgeable about the marketplace, and deliver higher output levels to consumers. The team of experts at SupplyKick can help decode Amazon Inventory Reports and pull out the main points quickly so you don’t have to waste time. Our team of experts can also build custom reports for manufacturers not a part of the FBA program for complete visibility into how your products are performing.
See how SupplyKick can help your organization take inventory reporting to the next level – get started today!
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For press inquiries, please contact Molly Horstmann, mhorstmann@supplykick.com
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