Amazon provides Vendors with a platform to access their Sell-In and Sell-Out data known as Amazon Vendor Central. Vendor Central also provides raw data for various reports, such as Operations and Purchases Orders. The major downside of Vendor Central is that it does not offer any intuitive data visualizations and downloading multiple reports across different data sets is extremely time-consuming.
As a vendor, the two main performance indicators you need to analyze are "Sell-in" (what goods Amazon purchases from you) and "Sell-Out" (what Amazon sells to the end customer). These metrics exists both in units and values.
What is the difference between Sell-In and Sell-out ?
Sell-in (in Units or Sales) refers to how much Amazon bought from you as a vendor.
Sell-out (Units or PCoGS) refers to products sold and shipped by Amazon to the end customer.
What is the difference between Sourcing and Manufacturing ?
When Amazon sells your product to the end customer, it can either source it from your inventory (Sourcing) or from a different distributor, a whole-seller or use cross-border inventory (Manufacturing).
Sourcing
Sourcing metrics (Units or PCoGS) refer to sales and inventory Amazon has sold and sourced from your inventory only. Sell-out units (Sourcing) are the units shipped from Amazon to the customer and previously sourced from you. PCoGS (Sourcing) are the costs that Amazon incurred to purchase those articles from you as a vendor.
Manufacturing
Manufacturing metrics (Units or PCoGS) aggregate sales and inventory for items that have been identified with your brand, regardless of whether Amazon purchases the items directly from you as a vendor. In PAN-EU, this includes sales from cross-border inventory through European Fulfilment Network (EFN).
N.B. Manufacturing data should only be available to the manufacturer with an ARA Premium vendor account but Amazon is susceptible to change its conditions.
ARA Basic vs ARA Premium
The availability of your historical data depends on whether you have access to Amazon Retail Analytics (ARA) or Amazon Retail Analytics Premium (ARAP). The main difference is that with ARAP you are able to get all your historical sales data, however with ARA Basic you can only get daily data as far back as 7 days and monthly data as far back as 2 months. ARA Premium subsequently represents a significant additional cost for Vendors to have access to this length and delineation of historical data. See full benefits for ARA Premium in the Amazon Help section.
Example of basic reports in ARA Basic
Example of advanced reports in ARA Premium
How does Seelk Studio help you analyze Sourcing and Manufacturing metrics?
Seelk Studio's Business Intelligence app helps you analyze your operational retail performance and track your sales activity on Amazon.
Seelk Studio added-value is that it aggregates and stores all your data at the most precise time supplied by Amazon. You will always have access to your historical data!
Seelk Studio aggregates closed Purchase Orders from Vendor Central to determine the amount of Sell-in units and sales received by Amazon.
Seelk Studio aggregates Sales diagnostics reports from ARA to determine the PCoGs and sell-out units sold and shipped by Amazon.
Seelk Studio's platform give users the freedom to access the data they need most through configurable data visualization, sortable data tables and custom exports using custom filters and date range comparison.
You can access and export raw sales data from Seelk Studio and it is available to you anytime.