Amazon Seller Central reports split into four families: Business reports (sales and traffic), Advertising reports (ad performance), Inventory reports (stock in the FBA network), and Payments reports (where the money went). Between them they answer nearly every question about your business, and most sellers open almost none of them.
I understand why. The reports arrive as dense spreadsheets with inconsistent names, scattered across three menus, and Amazon’s idea of a friendly interface stops at the download button. So this guide is a map: where each report lives, what it actually tells you, which ones deserve a weekly slot, and the six metrics I’d track even if you ignore everything else.
We run Amazon Seller Central reports for client accounts every week. I’ve found that fewer than a third of them drive real decisions, and in our experience the rest exist mainly to be exported once and forgotten. The recommendations below reflect that split.
Where Amazon Seller Central reports live
- Business reports: Reports menu, then Business Reports. Available to all professional sellers.
- Advertising reports: the Advertising console (Reports section there), covering every ad type you run.
- Inventory reports: under the Inventory menu, FBA-focused.
- Payments: Reports, then Payments, for transactions, settlements, and the answer to “why is this disbursement smaller than I expected.”
- Brand Analytics and Search Query Performance: under the Brands menu, for brand-registered sellers only, and honestly the most underused data in Seller Central.
Access differs by account: some reports are FBA-only, and the Brands family requires Brand Registry.
Business reports: the ones to actually read
Sales and Traffic (by date). The account-level dashboard: sessions, page views, units, revenue, conversion, day by day. This is the one I’d make weekly reading, because every problem in the business shows up here first as a moving line.
Sales and Traffic by Child ASIN (or SKU). The same data per product. This is where you diagnose: which ASIN lost sessions, which one’s conversion sagged, which quietly became your bestseller. The by-ASIN view catches what account totals hide, and in our experience that per-product drilldown is where the fixable problems live.
All Orders report (Reports, then Fulfilled by Amazon, then All Orders): a flat export of every order in a date range. The raw material for any analysis Amazon’s interface will not do for you.
Customer Shipments and Customer Returns. Order-level FBA data, and the returns report deserves more respect than it gets: return reasons per ASIN are free product feedback, and a rising return rate flags a listing-versus-product gap before the reviews do.
Subscription & Save, Transactions. Situational: essential if you run Subscribe & Save or sell B2B invoiced orders, skippable otherwise.
Advertising reports: where the money leaks show
The console reports cover Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands (including video), Sponsored Display, DSP if you use it, and Brand Store traffic.
One report towers over the rest: the Search Term Report for Sponsored Products. It shows the real queries that triggered your ads, with spend and sales attached, and it feeds the two highest-value recurring tasks in Amazon advertising: harvesting converting queries into your listings and exact-match campaigns, and cutting non-converting queries as negatives. That loop is the core of our monthly ad workflow, and the full method is in our search term optimization guide.
Also worth a monthly look: placement reports (are you overpaying for top-of-search?), and advertised product reports (which ASINs the budget actually flows to). If reading these regularly sounds like a job, it is; it is a substantial part of what managed advertising costs, and we priced that question honestly in our PPC management cost guide.
Inventory reports: the FBA control panel
Around ten reports, of which five earn regular attention:
- Manage FBA Inventory: per-ASIN quantities by condition and disposition. Your live stock truth.
- Inventory Age: how long stock has sat, and your early warning for aged-inventory surcharges. Check it before the fee does.
- Restock Inventory: Amazon’s restock suggestions and limits. Imperfect, but the fastest stockout-risk scan available.
- Reserved Inventory: units in transfer between fulfillment centers or attached to pending orders. This is usually the answer to “where did 40 units go?”, and knowing that saves a support case.
- Monthly Storage Fees: fee calculation per ASIN. Read alongside Inventory Age each quarter to decide what to liquidate, and read it twice before Q4 rates hit.
Received Inventory and the Shipping Queue reports matter during inbound windows; Daily Inventory History mostly matters for audits and reimbursement claims. Speaking of which: discrepancies between these reports (received vs sent, lost in the network) are exactly what FBA reimbursement recovery runs on, and the data trail starts here.
Brand reports: the unfair advantage
Brand-registered sellers get Brand Analytics (top search terms with click share, demographics, market basket) and the Search Query Performance dashboard (your products’ impressions, clicks, and purchases per real query). This is first-party demand data that third-party tools can only estimate. If you qualify and have never opened these, I’d start there before anything else in this article.
The six metrics to watch weekly
If the report jungle overwhelms, track these and you will catch most problems early:
- Units ordered: the raw pulse.
- Total sales: with price changes factored in.
- Sessions: traffic. Falling sessions is a visibility problem (keywords, rank, ads).
- Page views per session: comparison-shopping behavior worth noticing.
- Unit session percentage: your conversion rate, the single most diagnostic number per ASIN. Falling conversion at flat traffic means the page, price, reviews, or a competitor changed.
- Buy Box percentage: below ~90% on your own private-label listings means suppression, pricing, or a hijacker, and it explains “my ads stopped” more often than anything in the ad console.
The habit that makes these useful is consistency: same day each week, same spreadsheet, so trends surface. A number without its trend is trivia.
A simple weekly workflow that combines them
Here is the 30-minute routine we run on client accounts, in order:
- Open Sales and Traffic by date. Scan the week against the prior four. Anything moved more than about 15%? Note it.
- Drill into Sales and Traffic by Child ASIN for whatever moved. Sessions down points to visibility (check rank, ads, suppression). Conversion down points to the page (check price, reviews, a new competitor, Buy Box percentage).
- Pull the Search Term Report if ad spend shifted. Harvest converting queries, add negatives for the bleeders.
- Scan Restock and Inventory Age. Anything at stockout risk inside your lead time gets reordered now, not next week; anything aging toward a surcharge gets a decision.
- Glance at Payments. Confirm the settlement matches expectations, because fee surprises and reimbursement candidates both hide here.
Five reports, one pass, and honestly it catches ninety percent of what a fancy dashboard subscription would. We tested that claim against paid tools more than once; the tools win on convenience, not on information.
FAQ
What are Amazon Seller Central reports?
Built-in data exports covering sales and traffic (Business reports), advertising performance, FBA inventory, and payments. They live under the Reports and Inventory menus, with brand-level analytics under Brands for registered sellers.
How do I download the All Orders report?
Go to Reports, then Fulfilled by Amazon, then All Orders, choose your date range, and download the spreadsheet. It lists every order in the period and is the base file for most custom analysis.
Which Amazon report shows my conversion rate?
The Sales and Traffic Business report, as Unit Session Percentage: units ordered divided by sessions. The by-Child-ASIN version shows it per product, which is where conversion problems actually get diagnosed.
What is the most important advertising report?
The Sponsored Products Search Term Report. It reveals the real customer queries behind your ad spend, which queries convert, and which waste budget, feeding both your negative keywords and your listing’s keyword targeting.
What reports do brand-registered sellers get?
Brand Analytics (top search terms with click share, demographics, market basket analysis) and the Search Query Performance dashboard showing your impressions, clicks, and purchases per query. Both are first-party data unavailable to unregistered sellers.
Why is my available inventory lower than what I shipped?
Check the Reserved Inventory report first: units in transfer between fulfillment centers or tied to pending orders show as reserved, not available. Genuine discrepancies that persist belong in a reimbursement review, since Amazon compensates for inventory lost or damaged in its network.
Last updated: August 26, 2026. Report names and menu locations shift as Amazon reorganizes Seller Central; the Reports and Brands menus carry the current versions.
