Tamara Vukovic is an Account Specialist at Bobsled.
In Part 1 of this article, I listed three important reports that brands should be utilizing more frequently on Amazon’s Vendor Central platform. Today, I’m going to add two more reports that will continue to boost your sales efficiency and promote ultimate success.
Here at Bobsled, we’ve had a lot of clients who are requesting specific kinds of reports to better understand key data that can point to an underlying sales issue. Let’s take a look at two more that our clients are requesting to learn more about.
Payments Reports are easy to find on the drop-down menu via the top menu bar in Vendor Central. You can condense your Payment Report even further with different types of reports that serve different needs. For example, Vital Accounting Reports are helpful for keeping your company’s finances in line.
The Financial Scorecard is helpful in reviewing any and all transactions through Amazon. I suggest that brands review their Financial Scorecards at least once a week to make sure that there are no issues such as pending invoices, product issues, chargebacks, and missing payments.
Make sure you’re paying special attention to the Shortage Invoices page. A shortage claim is filed when Amazon is unable to match vendor-shipped products with their receipts at Amazon Fulfillment Centers. If the invoice was incorrectly processed, vendors can submit a dispute to this claim by providing ample proof.
At any time, you can track the status of your dispute on the Dispute Management page. You can export all of your dispute data as an Excel sheet to keep your records organized further.
Want to take a closer look at Payments Reports? Visit our recent tutorial series on Payments and Support on Vendor Central.
Your POs Report will gather any and all data about purchase orders, giving you a full picture of your financial status on Amazon. These reports include key metrics such as the Total Cost of your purchases and the Total Cases of Purchase Orders within a given timeframe. You have the ability to adjust your timeframe within any custom parameters you want.
Like many other types of Reports on Vendor Central, POs Reports can be broken down into further detail with different subcategories. The Shipments tab is particularly helpful for brands dealing with supply chain issues or chargebacks related to shipping mishaps.
Whether through the Operational Performance Report discussed in Part 1 of this blog or through a Payments Report, you can find and dispute chargebacks in the nick of time. Most chargebacks have a 30-day deadline for dispute, and they often go unnoticed in the day-to-day operations of the company until that deadline has long passed.
We are starting to see the topic of chargebacks come up often in discussions with different eCommerce brands. When working with Bobsled, multiple clients requested specific chargeback reports in order to track and determine the root cause of it before it’s too late. Hopefully, the report will also inform brands on better ways to avoid chargebacks in the future.
One of our Amazon vendor clients, who averages between $30k - $40k per month in sales, had been getting hit with an unusual number of chargebacks. These chargebacks started around November of 2021 and reached a total of 1,341 individual charges by March of 2022. The total amount of the chargebacks reached over $3,300, putting the brand in a critical spot. With so many chargebacks being filed every week, it was getting too hard to keep track of them all. What types of chargebacks were they, and why did they keep coming in?
Here’s what we did:
We downloaded the raw report of chargebacks and disputes so we could get a better overview of what’s going on. With a detailed review, we were able to see what types of chargebacks were occurring and what actions can be taken to mitigate these disputes moving forward. We established a schedule to immediately issue reports about POs or other payments that incurred a chargeback. That way, the client can review and take care of the problem in a timely manner to avoid the 30-day deadline.
Chargebacks are a huge and hidden part of profit margin loss, so it’s important to track them as soon as they come in. Instead of waiting for them to fly under the nose undetected, you can get them resolved right away to greatly reduce future financial issues.
Depending on your brand’s specific needs and metrics, there are a few other types of Reports on Vendor Central that may be useful for you to keep a closer eye on. Here are a few more that you shouldn’t forget about:
These types of reports help you manage and track the performance of your marketing campaigns. You can search within a set time period and view all of your advertising needs at once.
Within the Sales Reports category, there are several types of key data that should be tracked on a more regular basis:
There’s one more type of Payments Report that you should know about: CoOp Deductions. When Amazon makes any kind of CoOp deduction, you’ll get a report about it. You can see a detailed view of the agreement ID, the funding type, the invoice due date, and other important information for your records. This will give you a full grasp of just how much these deductions are scraping away from your bottom line.
Take the time to learn how to make the best use of the different types of reports, metrics, and data points available to you through Vendor Central. Failing to understand the inner workings of this powerful platform of tools will have a negative impact on your brand’s performance - both in profitability and growth.
Raw reports may seem familiar to you, but it’s time to step out of that comfort zone and actualize your data in a much more appealing way. Using pivots, tables, and graphs, you’ll get a firsthand look at your company’s health, letting you identify problem areas all the more quickly.
Reports change all the time. Keep up to speed with your Vendor Central platform on Amazon and keep your customers up-to-date. Boost your account sales and performance when you team up with expert marketing specialists at Bobsled.
Master your knowledge of Vendor Central and boost your brand’s performance by scheduling a consultation with Bobsled experts today!