Whether you are trying to find out why your sales are lower than expected or even negative, you can use this same process to figure out why your sales and profits may be higher than you expected as well.
The 3 key metrics in Fetcher are Sales, Costs, and Profit. By knowing how each of these are calculated you will be able to figure out where any ups and downs you see in your account come from.
Profit
Profit = Sales - Costs. This one is pretty simple as it will always be calculated with only those 2 components.
Now let's break down the Sales and Costs numbers.
Sales
In Fetcher, the Sales total includes all product sales, promo rebates, refunds and reimbursements.
Product Sales = Sales of your product. This is shown as 'sales' and the first item when you expand any of the Sales boxes either on the Dashboard or Product Breakdown tabs. This is the amount the item(s) sold for. This number is shown as a positive since its money coming in.
Promo Rebates = The amount of a discount the customer received as part of a promotion. This number is shown as a negative since it should be subtracted from the product sales.
Refunds = The amount of any refunds that were given back to the customer. This number is shown as a negative as well since it is money going out and is subtracted from the product sales.
Reimbursements = The amount Amazon pays you for anything other than product sales. This could be a payment for lost or damaged inventory or repayment if they overcharged you for something. This number is shown as a positive since its money coming in and it adds to the total sales number.
Costs
In Fetcher, the Costs total includes all costs you incurred which are Order Fees, PPC, Cost of Goods, Shipping, Recurring Fees and other. All numbers are shown as positives but since they are Costs Fetcher treats them as such and subtracts these from the total sales to calculate profit.
Order Fees = Fees Amazon charges for each order placed
PPC = Cost of advertising using Amazon Pay Per Click
Cost Of Goods (COG) = Cost of each unit sold based on what you entered in the Expenses Section
Shipping = Any inbound shipping based on what you entered as well as any reshipping data from Amazon. Both can be seen in the Expenses section.
Recurring Fees = These are any non-order related charges from Amazon such as storage fees and your monthly Amazon account charges. These fees are only shown on the Dashboard under costs and not on the Product Breakdown tab since they are not broken down to the item level.
Other = Any costs you have entered in the 'Other' section of the Expenses tab.
Now that you know what makes up each section here's how to dig in and find what you are looking for.
1. Expand each Section for better visibility.
Each section on the Dashboard is expandable, showing us the metrics included in each total.
2. Review each section.
To find Low or Negative profit:
To find why your profit is lower than expected or negative look for high or out of the ordinary numbers in the Costs section.
Some of the more common culprits would be:
- Recurring Fees
- PPC
- COGs
- Shipping
Let's look at this example, to search for anything that stands out. We're looking for charges that seem to be disproportionate to the number of sales we've made.
Recurring Fees and PPC look a bit high, so we need to take a look at both of these fees in more detail. To do that we just scroll to the bottom of the Dashboard where we will find the Cost Widget....which takes us to our next step.
3. Drill down into any costs that look high.
There is a section called 'Costs', and we can click on any section of the Costs chart to examine that particular cost. This allows us to see what makes up that cost:
Here is what it looks like after clicking on the "Recurring Fees" section:
4. Analyze and think through the data gathered.
In this example, we can see that a huge chunk of the $5,380 Recurring Fees for January is attributed to the FBA Storage Fee. Now that we know what the $5,380 includes, it seems like a reasonable number.
We can do the same thing for the PPC cost:
And after we click on the "Pay Per Click" section:
We can see that a lot of the total $3,305 PPC cost is attributed to one campaign. This is an opportunity for us to review that campaign, and to make sure that it is optimized.
To find high Sales or Profits:
If you are trying to figure out why your Profit or Total Sales number looks high you can follow the exact same process as above but instead look in the Sales box for a Reimbursement.
Since we are dealing with Sales instead of costs here you will need to use the Sales and Profit tab as well as the Product Breakdown tab to dig in further since there is no chart for sales like there is for costs.
If you are looking at the Sales and Profit tab and have identified the SKU that looks to be too high, click on the SKU name to go to the Product Breakdown tab where you can expand the sales box there and confirm that there is a reimbursement. Reimbursements are usually what will inflate a time periods sales number beyond what you are expecting.
5. Using the Bar Graph to spot trends and unprofitable (or overly profitable) days.
Another great way to dig in deeper is to use the Bar Graph on the Dashboard. There is a $0.00 Profit line, and that blue line lets us see if we were profitable on any given day and by how much.
Here we can see two big dips in profit:
And here we see a spike that is out of the normal range:
6. Isolate single days for further analysis.
We can also isolate individual days and dig into its data.
For example, let's look at the first dip in the screenshot above, which fell on January 2nd. In the top right-hand corner of our Dashboard, we should see a drop down that allows us to choose the date(s) whose data we want to analyze.
Click on the drop-down, pick the date we want to look at and Fetcher will isolate that information for us...in this case, it looks as though the Recurring Fees for January 2nd are higher than expected:
For the example with the spike in profit, you will still need to isolate the one day with the calendar and then head to the Sales and Profit tab to find the sku. From there, click on the sku which will take you to the Product Breakdown tab where you can expand the sales box and see if there is a reimbursement be calculated into your total sales number.
7. Analyze the data for single days.
And we can use the same process outlined in steps three and four to determine what's behind those high Recurring Fees. By drilling down, we can see that this is the date that Amazon put through our FBA Storage Charge:
To do this to find overly profitable days use the Sales and Profit tab to find the SKU that is causing the skewed total and then use the Product Breakdown tab to view SKU level Sales details which will show you the Reimbursements.
Of course, there are multiple ways to analyze your data and these were just a few examples of the process we often use. Having a few unprofitable (or overly profitable) days is not out of the ordinary and is to be expected for various reasons.
You just need to make sure that, overall, your revenue is outweighing your expenses. Do that and you will be well on your way to reaping the benefits of your hard work!