If you want to grow your Amazon sales and profit margins, you need reporting structures that allow your teams to monitor your account performance and inform their decisions in real-time.
Yet most brands struggle because their teams either lack visibility into their own performance or cannot connect it with Amazon’s.
Dashboards can help, but data alone won’t move your business forward. What matters is enabling your teams to act by escalating blockers quickly and realigning priorities across the business.
So today, we’ll explore how to structure, prepare, and deliver high-impact Amazon Business Reviews that help you move the needle and win the buy-in of your leadership team.
We’ll cover:
- What a business review is
- Why they are important
- When to hold business reviews
- How to run effective business reviews
- Common pitfalls to avoid
What is an Amazon business review?
You can think of an Amazon Business Review as a structured reporting that combines commercial, operational and strategic data points to evaluate how your business is performing on Amazon.
Unlike standard dashboards or ad-hoc reporting mechanisms, business reviews translate data points into insights about existing challenges and opportunities for leadership and functional teams within your organisation.
As a result, these reporting workflows allow you to review your performance versus plan, understand key blockers to budget targets and inform leadership teams about any intervention areas to bring the business back on track.
Why should you run regular business reviews?
Running regular Amazon Business Reviews gives you the visibility and structure to manage the customer account proactively instead of reacting when it’s too late.
This is important, as spotting performance trends early allows your teams to identify where intervention is needed to protect your bottom line or where positive trends can be amplified to drive sales growth.
Vendors that run regular business reviews also support building the muscle to respond to Amazon’s Vendor Management in a more informed and data-driven way. That’s important, since Net PPM targets, margin compensation requests, and annual negotiations require your teams to think on their feet.
Last but not least, regular reviews break down silos across sales, marketing, finance and supply chain. By showing how each function impacts the Amazon performance of your brand, you create the structure to escalate blockers quickly, secure resources and gain buy-in from senior stakeholders who need to see why Amazon deserves attention.
When should you run a business review?
Business Reviews work best when they are part of a fixed schedule. Ad-hoc reporting may highlight urgent issues, but it rarely builds the consistency and accountability you need to manage Amazon effectively.
I strongly recommend running weekly, monthly and quarterly business reviews, and here’s why:
Weekly Business Reviews (WBRs)
WBRs are short, focused reporting mechanisms to track the latest developments in your Amazon business and flag areas that may need immediate intervention.
Tip: Limit the time your teams spend on a WBR to no more than 45-60 minutes. Reviewing only one week doesn’t allow you to draw meaningful conclusions from any data spikes you might experience. Instead, focus on immediate intervention areas.
Monthly Business Reviews (MBRs)
MBRs allow for a deeper look at your performance versus plan and budget forecasts. They connect the dots between sales, logistics and marketing, allowing you to discuss key blockers and opportunities across divisions.
Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs)
QBRs are strategic reporting mechanisms that zoom out from the reactive Amazon account firefighting. They inform about your progress against annual plans, evaluate major initiatives and any adjustments to the strategy for the account. Most QBRs run half a day with leadership and cross-functional teams present.
How to run effective Amazon business reviews
Chances are you’re already running some form of business review. But ask yourself: do these sessions truly drive action beyond your sales team, and influence functional leads to make better decisions for your Amazon business?
A business review should never be just a box-ticking exercise. Instead, it should help your teams understand the drivers of your Amazon performance, translate those insights into actions and assign clear ownership of any defined follow-up steps.
If you want to establish high-impact business reviews in your organisation, I recommend following my P.R.I.M.E. Reporting Framework:
- Plan your budgets and priority KPIs
- Ready your tools and automate the data delivery
- Implement clear ownership and escalation paths
- Maintain a regular reporting schedule
- Establish standardised reporting processes
1. Plan your budgets and priority KPIs
The first step in running effective Amazon Business Reviews is deciding what you actually want to measure. Too often, brands look at weekly, monthly, or year-over-year trends without benchmarking their performance against their own commercial targets.
This leads to a lot of reporting activity, but no clear sense of whether the business is on track to hit its goals. You can avoid this by defining annual budget plans that inform your quarterly targets across three KPI pillars:
- Top Line (Sales)
- Bottom Line (Margins)
- Operational Performance
Below are some examples of which KPIs fall into each category:
| Metric Type | KPI |
|---|---|
| Top Line | Net Sales |
| Top Line | Shipped Revenue |
| Top Line | Average Selling Price |
| Top Line | Average Cost Price |
| Top Line | Market Share |
| Top Line | Organic Search Rank |
| Top Line | Total Ad Spend |
| Bottom Line | Gross/Net Margin |
| Bottom Line | Net PPM |
| Bottom Line | Lost Buy Box |
| Operations | Out of Stock Rate |
| Operations | Vendor Lead Time |
| Operations | Fill Rates |
| Operations | Customer Returns |
| … | … |
2. Ready your tools and automate the data delivery
Amazon is the world’s most data-driven retailer. But that doesn’t mean you will find every data point in Vendor Central’s Retail Analytics. On top of that, Amazon’s API changes almost every month, introducing data accuracy issues that require entire tech teams to resolve.
A better approach is to use tools that handle the complexity for you. Solution providers like Pacvue Commerce, Reason Automation or Catapult are built to keep pace with Amazon’s updates and give you reliable (Power BI) dashboards to understand your vendor performance.
Let me be absolutely clear: Automating your data delivery isn’t a luxury. If your teams still spend hours downloading reports from Vendor Central or fixing broken Excel files, you are wasting valuable time that could be used to improve the performance of your business.
Instead, use service providers to manage data accuracy and update dashboards whenever Amazon’s API changes. That way, your teams can focus on what really matters: analysis, decisions and actions that drive your sales growth and profitability.
3. Implement clear ownership and escalation paths
Once your data delivery is automated, you want to think about the ownership of your Amazon business reviews. Without clear accountability, reviews turn into endless reporting sessions where no one takes action.
Your sales team should take the lead by owning the content and narrative of the review. They deep dive into the KPIs, understand trends and provide the key insights that frame the discussion.
Functional leads such as finance, marketing and logistics should not be left out of this conversation. Instead, have them attend your MBRs and QBRs to ensure that reviews don’t stop at topline results but also address profitability and operational realities.
One important rule is to always assign single-point accountability for each action item, since shared ownership quickly leads to inaction.
Defining a RACI model (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) can help maintain clarity, especially when preparing for leadership escalations or when priorities need to be realigned.
4. Maintain a regular reporting schedule
Now, reporting consistency is what turns reactive data deep-dives into a proactive mechanism that informs your team’s decision-making on Amazon. This doesn’t have to be time-consuming either.
Hold your Amazon reviews early in the reporting cycle, ideally on the same day each week, month or quarter. This creates a routine that helps your teams know when it’s time to evaluate your account and make course corrections before it’s too late.
Then, track KPIs at the aggregated account and brand level, but also have your teams drill down to the ASIN level where needed. This balance allows you to understand the full picture of your account performance and spot specific issues in your assortment.
Use Weekly Business Reviews (WBRs) to monitor progress and resolve ad-hoc issues. Involve finance, marketing and supply chain in Monthly (MBRs) and Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) to align on profitability, operations and marketing plans. These cross-functional sessions ensure your Amazon strategy stays connected to the broader business priorities.
5. Establish standardised reporting processes
With Amazon offering an overwhelming number of metrics, business reviews can quickly spiral into hours of analysis. Worse, without structure, these sessions often turn into lengthy reports that describe performance but add little value to the profitable development of the account.
Thankfully, there’s an easy fix: Define standardised templates that reflect your business priorities and help your teams prepare business reports faster.
When reporting KPIs, use different levels of detail depending on the audience. Senior leadership often only want to understand topline sales, margin and key risks, while cross-functional teams should see detailed drivers at brand and ASIN level.
Each review should combine the following three layers of reporting:
1. Status Description
Example: In August, total Shipped Revenue (SREV) was $216MM, +$47MM (+28%) YoY and +$9.1MM (+4.4%) vs. plan.
2. Detailed Explanation
Example: Growth was driven by 1) GVs up +31% YoY from paid search traffic (+100bps), 2) ROOS down by -532bps YoY, which boosted growth of [product series], and 3) LBB down by -131bps YoY due to higher investment levels after the AVN.
3. Forward-Looking Actions
Example: To maintain topline growth, we plan to 1) [Action 1] (CTC +Xbps), 2) [Action 2] (CTC +Xbps), and 3) [Action 3] (CTC +Xbps).
This simple format keeps your reporting focused, ensures every metric is explained and ties insights directly to forward-looking actions with clearly assigned ownership.
Common pitfalls when running Amazon reviews
Even well-prepared business reviews can miss the mark if they overlook the commercial realities of your trade relationship with Amazon.
Too often, Amazon business reviews focus too narrowly on the net sales (sell-in) and gross margin performance of the brand. These metrics matter, but they only tell one side of the story.
Instead, you also want to monitor Amazon’s KPIs such as sell-out revenue (consumer demand) and Net PPM, as these give you visibility into what your Vendor Manager is optimising for and which levers are most likely to shape Amazon’s behaviour in and outside annual vendor negotiations.
Another common challenge is that vendor teams end up reporting into a void. Remember: Follow-up actions without alignment and accountability won’t create much impact.
You want to define priority KPIs with your leadership and Amazon’s Retail team so that every reporting drives decisions, improves your operational performance and increases the chances of winning the buy-in for initiatives that support the profitable development of your account.
Final thoughts
Running effective Business Reviews doesn’t come naturally to most executives. It requires a structured process that helps your team cut through complexity, align on the right priorities and take actions that protect your profit margins with Amazon.
But when reviews are supported with clear KPIs, automated data delivery, clear ownership, a regular cadence, and standardised format, they become a tool for influence rather than a box-ticking exercise.
Want to level up your performance reporting on Amazon?
Whether you want to upskill your team or overhaul your reporting process, I offer tailored consulting services that help 1P brands run a profitable business with Amazon. If you want to learn more, get in touch.
