3 Reasons Amazon Sellers Need Business Intelligence

The role of business intelligence in Amazon marketing is to help executives make better, more informed decisions to benefit the overall performance. Said another way, business intelligence allows executives to work ON the business and not just IN the business. This is never more applicable than in marketing on Amazon.

Amazon does a great job at providing you with all the tools you need to have a successful store within its platform. The only problem is that there are so many tasks to manage that one can quickly become overwhelmed with the endless daily tasks needed to grow its sales, increase its traffic, fulfill orders, manage inventory, etc. At Evolved Commerce, we track a specific set of KPIs for our customer’s accounts. These KPIs have proven to lead to success yet tracking them effectively can require more time and effort than many people can afford to input without sacrificing other critical areas of the business! So, unless you pay someone to do this full time, you simply will run out of time trying to manage inventory, SEO, customer feedback, etc., and won’t be able to properly work ON your store because you’re too busy working IN you store.

1. You NEED to Know and Track Your Process

At Evolved Commerce, we have a set of Key performance indicators (KPIs) that we track to ensure our store’s progress toward preset goals. While there are several methods of affecting the progress of those KPIs, they constantly need to be tracked. If you’re not doing this and only looking at your store’s bottom line, then you likely are NOT realizing your store’s full potential! Even if you are tracking those KPIs, you might not be able to connect one KPI’s progress with other necessary KPIs in order to make clear discussions. For example, in order to see both your traffic data (sessions, conversions, and sales) along with your keyword performance data you are required to download separate reports (spreadsheets) both from Seller Central AND a third-party keyword performance website. Not only is this time consuming, it still doesn’t guarantee that clear insights will be obtained! Holding both spreadsheets up side by side will make it difficult to see how well your company is doing without some ways of aggregating the data on both sheets.

2. Macro Insights From Your Store are HARD to Gain From a Spreadsheet

This might be controversial but hear me out. I’m not saying that you can’t gain insight from a spreadsheet. What I am saying is that it is difficult to gain a clear (macro-level) understanding of how your store is doing just from viewing a spreadsheet of data. Let’s try a test of this theory. Below are three images. The first is a spreadsheet of traffic data from a seller central account. The second and third images are using the same data but have been aggregated and visualized. Try the following tests and see which allows you to find the health status of the store.

Test 1: Take three seconds of looking at IMAGE 1 and identify the store’s total number of sessions, the average conversion rate, and the total sales during this time period. Now do the same with IMAGE2. Notice that you not only see all three values but also see how you are doing compared to the previous period–indicated by the green and red text values at the bottom of each image.

Test 2. How about we try a slightly easier test? Look at IMAGE 1 for three seconds and try to identify the top three performing SKUs in the before mentioned key performance indicators. Now do the same with IMAGE 3. Now, try to imagine these reports dynamically updating every day without you having to go in and locate and download this report. Now imagine not having to follow the aforementioned process for ANY of your reports?! This brings us to the final reason why business intelligence will help your Seller Central store.

3. It’s a Competitive Advantage! Quicker Insights Leads to Quicker Decisions in a Fast Changing Market

Data has a way of telling a story. For example, in the unprecedented times we’re in now, we majorly underestimated the effect that this contagious virus had had on the world ALL because we didn’t have adequate ways to test and collect data. If world leaders and healthcare providers had access to good data sooner, we could have responded and potentially slowed the rapid growth of the virus. Most business intelligence tools are developed in a way that dynamically collects and stores data that’s relevant to the business. Having access to data as quickly as possible provides you with insights and trends that your competitors aren’t getting unless they, too are investing in business intelligence. In short, this might be the best time to have a case of #FOMO. Here at Evolved Commerce, we have decades of experience in selling on Amazon’s platform and a unique, proven path to success. Our clients deserve to see and understand how our methods work. For this reason, each Evolved Commerce customer is provided a complimentary business intelligence dashboard for their store. We invest in business intelligence because it provides us and our customers with a competitive edge!

Conclusion:

“Great people have a vision of their lives that they practice emulating each and every day. They go to work on their lives, not just in their lives.” -Michael Gerber

Business intelligence provides easy-to-process, dynamic, and actionable insight into a business and its market that can lead to better decisions; and could be the difference between success and failure in an ever changing market. Let us follow Michael Gerber’s admonition, and avoid getting too caught up working IN our business instead of working ON our business.