The goal of Sales Analytics is to give you the most up-to-date view of your sales and profitability.
This can be difficult for recent date ranges since Amazon does not release all the necessary information about sales made until the orders have shipped. Amazon does give us the number of units sold right away, so that number should always be up to date.
In Sales Analytics on the Profit Overview page, you will see your units sold for the selected timeframe and product or company level:
Here are what each of the categories under Units sold encompass:
- Units Shipped → Regularly priced (non-promo) units that have shipped.
Once a unit ships, Amazon sends us all the order details. This includes the sales price and all fees. Data for shipped units is actualized data right from Amazon.
- Promo Rebates → Any units that had a promotional price associated with them that have also shipped.
This could be a deal you are running with a discount code using Launch, coupons you are running on the listing directly through Amazon or any other promotional discount associated with the order. Units that are in the Promo Rebates group can be either Shipped or Pending.
- Pending Units → Any unshipped orders, both regularly priced and promotional.
Amazon does not give us data beyond the item and unit count for an order until it ships. Any data besides the unit count for pending units is an estimate until the order ships. Once the order ships, Amazon sends us all the actual data associated with the order and your account will update automatically as this happens.
For the pending units, since Amazon does not let us know the order details for pending units, we had to think out of the box. The estimating process uses your past sales history to 'estimate' these figures for pending units. Then, once the units ship, the actualized data is gathered from Amazon, and your account is updated replacing the estimates with the actualized values. For this reason, you will see your sales, costs, and profit numbers fluctuate throughout the dates when you have any pending units. Once you no longer see any pending units you will get the correct sales, costs, and profit numbers.
Let's take a closer look:
In this example, we have sold 20 units yesterday. 5 units have shipped and 15 units are pending.
Pending units are units that have sold but have not yet shipped. You can see if you have any pending units from the Profit Overview tab in Sales Analytics in the Units Sold section as in the example above.
This means the sales and fees you see included in the Revenue and Costs sections are a combination of actualized and estimated data. For the 5 units that have shipped, the figures are actualized, while the sales and order fees for the 15 pending units are an estimate.
Once the pending units ship, we will update these metrics to reflect the actual sales price and order fees associated with the sale.
Units will stay in pending status until they ship, but we typically see orders switch to shipped status within 2-3 days of the purchase. This can take a week or even longer if an order is being held up for any reason such as the availability of other items in the order or the shipping speed chosen by the customer.
The Estimating Process
The estimating process uses your recent sales history of the item to determine the estimated sales price and order fees. It is constantly updating its estimates for your items so that we are giving you the most accurate estimate of sales and fees possible.
If you are consistently selling an item at the same price day after day the estimate will be pretty close to the actual figures confirmed upon shipment.
Alternatively, if the item is fairly new or the sale price is often changing (coupons, split testing, promotions, etc...) the estimator will have a harder time creating close estimates as it is using the most recent shipped sales data to generate the estimates.
Sales Price
There is no need to change your sales price inside Sales Analytics. In fact, there isn't even a way to do so. This is because we get that data straight from Amazon.
If you have recently changed your price for an item and have sold a few units, at first glance you may think we are not capturing the new sales price. We are in fact capturing the new sales price as we report the exact data for each order but you may not have had any (or very few) shipped units at the new price yet. This means the estimator is still using your old price for estimates. As soon as those units with the new price ship and the sales totals are confirmed, you will be able to double-check the calculation by dividing the total sales by the number of units sold to see the new price is correct.
As we are trying to give you the most up-to-date and accurate picture of your business, we didn't want to exclude pending units from view as they can make up a big chunk of your revenue on any given day.