Amazon provides sellers with dozens of reports covering sales, inventory, advertising, fees, and performance. On the surface, it looks like everything a seller needs is already available. Yet many experienced sellers eventually discover that without a dedicated Amazon seller tool, Amazon’s native reports leave major blind spots.
The problem isn’t a lack of data — it’s fragmentation, missing context, and delayed visibility. Amazon’s reports tell sellers what happened, but rarely explain why it happened, what it cost, or what action to take next.
This is why advanced sellers increasingly rely on an Amazon seller tool like Sentrykit to connect data across profitability, operations, and account risk.
In this article, we’ll break down the most critical gaps in Amazon’s native reporting, explain why they matter, and show what sellers are missing when they rely on Amazon’s reports alone.
Amazon reports revenue well — but profitability is fragmented.
To calculate real profit, sellers must manually combine:
Payments reports
FBA fee reports
Advertising spend
Refunds & reimbursements
Storage and removal fees
Even then, Amazon doesn’t provide:
Net profit per SKU
Profit trends over time
Fee impact by category or size tier
Many sellers unknowingly scale SKUs that:
Look profitable at revenue level
Are losing money after ads, returns, and fees
Without SKU-level profit tracking, decision-making becomes guesswork.
Amazon shows:
Number of returns
High-level return reasons
What it does not show:
Return trends tied to listing edits
Supplier or batch-level issues
Financial loss per return type
For example:
“Not as described” returns may spike after a listing change
“Defective” returns may point to a manufacturing issue
Amazon reports don’t connect these dots — sellers must do it manually.
Amazon Ads reports focus heavily on:
ACOS
ROAS
Clicks and impressions
But they ignore:
Net profit after Amazon fees
Returns driven by ad traffic
Organic sales cannibalization
Inventory strain caused by ads
Campaigns that look “efficient” on paper can still destroy margins.
This gap leads sellers to:
Over-scale ads
Chase ROAS instead of profit
Miss long-term profitability erosion
Amazon’s advertising reporting documentation is available here.
Amazon’s Account Health dashboard only surfaces issues after thresholds are crossed.
Missing capabilities include:
Predictive risk indicators
Trend-based alerts
Correlation with operational data
For example:
Rising complaint trends aren’t flagged early
Repeated return reasons aren’t highlighted as risk signals
This makes Amazon’s account health reporting reactive by design.
Amazon’s official explanation of account health metrics can be found here.
Amazon inventory reports focus on:
Units on hand
Sell-through rate
Inventory age
What they don’t show:
Capital locked per SKU
Storage cost vs margin comparison
Inventory ROI
This leads to:
Overstocking low-margin products
Paying unnecessary long-term storage fees
Poor cash-flow decisions
Inventory decisions made without financial context often hurt profitability silently.
Amazon provides detailed fee reports, but sellers still lack:
Fee trend analysis
Category-level fee benchmarking
Fee impact alerts
Many sellers don’t notice:
Gradual FBA fee increases
Size-tier reclassifications
Fee creep across SKUs
By the time margins shrink, it’s already happened.
Amazon’s official payments and fee documentation can be found here.
Perhaps the biggest limitation of Amazon’s native reports is that nothing connects.
Amazon does not correlate:
Customer complaints → returns
Returns → listing edits
Ads → inventory stress
Fees → margin erosion
Each report exists in isolation, forcing sellers to treat symptoms instead of root causes.
This fragmentation is one of the main reasons sellers miss early warning signs.
Many Amazon reports:
Update with delays
Adjust historical values
Use different time zones
This causes:
Accounting mismatches
Reconciliation headaches
Forecasting inaccuracies
For businesses operating at scale, these inconsistencies create serious reporting risk.
To overcome these gaps, sellers should focus on:
Centralizing Amazon data
Tracking net profitability per SKU
Linking ads, returns, and inventory
Monitoring trends, not snapshots
This is where purpose-built Amazon seller tools provide value — not by replacing Amazon reports, but by connecting them.
If you want unified visibility across profitability, operations, and risk, you can explore tools designed for this purpose.
Amazon’s native reports are necessary — but not sufficient.
They are built for compliance and transactions, not for strategic decision-making. Sellers who rely on them alone often miss profitability leaks, operational risks, and early warning signs.
Understanding these reporting gaps is the first step toward building a smarter, more resilient Amazon business — one driven by insight, not hindsight.
