Embarking on your Amazon journey can be thrilling but ensuring you maintain optimal account performance is crucial. This article, “Amazon Account Audit: The Ultimate Checklist,” offers a comprehensive 10-step guide to help you conduct a thorough audit of your Amazon seller account. By following these steps, you’ll be able to stay compliant with Amazon’s policies, improve your sales performance, and identify cost-saving opportunities. Whether you’re a newcomer or an experienced seller, this checklist provides invaluable insights into aspects like setup, compliance, performance metrics, SEO strategies, and pricing. Dive in to unlock your Amazon account’s full potential and stay ahead in the competitive e-commerce market. Have you ever wondered why your Amazon store isn’t performing as well as you’d hoped? Imagine going through all the trouble to source a product and set up a business, only to see zero sales on Amazon or performance metrics not being met. However, this may be an easier fix than you think. All you need to do is conduct an Amazon account audit and address the issues one at a time.

More importantly, conducting this audit regularly can help you isolate any challenges preventing you from scaling your brand drastically on the e-commerce platform.

Whether you’re a new seller looking to launch a product or a seasoned seller with years of experience, we recommend regularly following a set Amazon account audit template or a good Amazon account audit checklist. We at SellerApp understand that auditing an Amazon account may be daunting. Therefore, we’ve compiled a checklist to help you get started.

What is an Amazon Account Audit?

Conducting an Amazon account audit is crucial for several reasons:

Firstly, it allows you to stay on top of any compliance with Amazon’s policies, reducing the risk of suspension or account closure due to any policy violations.

Secondly, an audit helps improve your Amazon’s sales performance by identifying areas for enhancement in product listings, pricing strategies, customer feedback, and more.

Finally, auditing an Amazon account can pinpoint areas for cost savings, optimize inventory management, enhance customer service, and ensure on-time fulfillment, all contributing to improved profitability and business growth.

Regular audits also help sellers stay ahead of the competition, maximize sales profits, and maintain a healthy and successful FBA business.

How Often Do You Need to Conduct an Amazon Account Audit?

Different sellers report different timeframes when it comes to Amazon account audit frequency. However, the frequency of the account audit ultimately depends on your sales volume, ad spend, and conversion.

You will need an audit if your sales volumes are drastically shooting up or if they’re dropping. More importantly, you will need to determine if your product conversions are low and your ad spend is high.

Of course, you will need to prioritize a deep audit depending on external factors. For example, you will need to conduct an audit when there are changes to Amazon FBA fees and figure out how it’s impacting your bottom line, and so on.

Additionally, another important moment to consider is when you’re scaling quickly. If you have a large sales volume, you’ll need to conduct an audit to ensure that you’re as efficient as possible and not wasting any money.

We recommend conducting a deep audit every 6 months and an advertising audit every 2-3 months.

Most importantly, it’s key that you follow the same Amazon account audit template that you used for the previous audit; this will help you easily compare data and isolate any issues with ease.

Self Audit VS Third-Party Audit

A self-audit is pretty straightforward; it’s when you or your internal team conduct the Amazon account audit. A third-party audit, on the other hand, is essentially outsourcing the audit to a firm that specializes in conducting these reviews.

Self-audits, while inexpensive, can give rise to more bias, errors, and may not result in a deep audit with clear insights. Third-party audits come with external expert analysis and specialized tools, giving you a more comprehensive and objective evaluation.

Sellers in the launch phase with a limited budget should conduct an audit by themselves. However, when you’re about to enter your growth phase and scale, efficiency is non-negotiable. Therefore, you will have to depend on a third-party audit.

More importantly, third-party audits give you in-depth analysis, compliance verification, and professional recommendations to enhance your Amazon selling strategy.

Major brands could depend on third-party audits. However, if you have integrated APIs and built your unique backend system, then you’re better off building your audit system as you will have metrics that are unique to you.

How to Conduct a Deep Amazon Account Audit

If you’re wondering, “How do I audit my Amazon account?”, you’re in luck. After reviewing thousands of Amazon Seller Accounts, we’ve compiled an Amazon account audit process that delivers results.

Setup Audit

The setup check of the Amazon Seller Central account audit is pretty straightforward. During this section of the audit, make sure you’ve accurately entered your business, personal, and billing information.

Additionally, check if you’ve added the right information for all of your products and Amazon store.

Of course, you only need to do this once. However, thoroughly go through all these details to make sure there aren’t errors.

Policy Compliance Audit

A detailed compliance check is essential to avoid any penalties or even account suspension. To efficiently check policy compliance on an Amazon account, follow these steps:

1. Head to the Account Health section in your Amazon Seller Central account.
2. Under the Product Compliance Requests section, look for any notices or alerts. Specifically, keep an eye on different categories of product violations like intellectual property complaints, product safety complaints, and listing policy violations by visiting your account health page regularly. Do this even if it’s not part of a formal audit.
3. If there are compliance requests, upload the necessary documentation such as a Children’s Product Certificate (CPC), General Certificate of Conformity (GCC), test reports, and/or other relevant documents.
4. Now that you’ve identified any violations, take immediate action to rectify them by understanding the issue. Prepare an appeal letter with evidence, and submit all required documents within the specified deadline.

By following these steps, you can proactively monitor your Amazon account’s compliance status, address any violations promptly, and maintain a healthy account status.

Performance Audit

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are extremely important when conducting an audit. These KPIs will help you understand where your business is failing and succeeding.

However, it’s crucial to use the same metrics each time you conduct the audit and compare the numbers from the previous audit. This will help you understand the impact of your changes.

As for specific KPIs, these will depend on each aspect of the audit. For example, the advertising section of the audit will have specific KPIs such as ad-related sales, conversions, revenue, wasted ad spend, new keyword discovery, RoAS, and ACoS.

While the KPIs will change for each section, you will also have to determine the KPIs yourself if you’re going ahead with a self-audit. You need to figure out what metrics make the most sense for your business.

Of course, a third-party audit will come with its own set of KPIs and will depend on your conversation with them.

Listing and Product Detail Page Audit

The listing and product detail page audit is extremely important as it is the page that converts your potential lead to a paying customer. You can do everything right, and if this page is lacking, you may not be able to maximize your conversions.

This audit provides insight into the performance of the listing, product detail page errors, retail readiness issues, customer engagement issues, compliance issues, and more.

Regular listing audits are crucial as they help you improve your ecommerce performance, stay competitive, and remain cash flow positive. More importantly, you can reduce the risk of any suspension or account closure.

Fundamentally, the information on the product details page enables your customer to make a purchasing decision. This is the closest they come to viewing the product without actually being able to hold it.

To conduct an effective listing and PDP audit, you should check for the following:

1. Retail Readiness: The retail readiness guidelines provided by Amazon are often overlooked. However, it’s essential to follow these to a T if you want to run effective ads and maximize sales potential. A well-optimized listing and product details page would contain the following information:
   • High-quality images with a lifestyle image
   • Easy-to-understand titles
   • Descriptive bullet points
   • Enticing A+ Content with detailed product descriptions
   • More than 15-star ratings and positive reviews

We recommend that you complete Amazon’s retail readiness course and then go through this article for more clarity.

2. CTR (Click-Through Rate) and CVR (Conversion Rate): The CTR and CVR (more commonly referred to as unit session percentage) of the ad will help you understand the effectiveness of the listing.
   • High CTR and Low CVR: If the CTR is high and the CVR is low, this would indicate that people are interested in the product but may not be convinced by the information on the product detail page sufficiently to make a purchase.
   • Low CTR and High CVR: On the other hand, if the CTR is low but the CVR is high, this would indicate that the product detail page is good enough to convert but is not getting enough views.

SEO Strategy Review

An SEO Amazon Account Audit helps sellers optimize their product listings, improve their visibility in search results, drive more traffic, and ultimately increase sales. While PPC should be a part of your short-term and long-term strategy, improving your Amazon SEO should always be a top priority.

To conduct an effective Amazon SEO audit, consider the following:

1. Brand Presence: Begin by evaluating your overall brand presence and make sure your products are competitively priced and in stock. This is especially important if you’ve already won the buy box. To effectively track brand presence and understand its share of voice on the platform, we recommend using third-party tools like SellerApp.
2. Keyword Research: When it comes to keyword research, ensure to include high-performing keywords that can help your listing rank. More importantly, include your competitors’ keywords in your listings to compete at the category level. Analyze the competition’s keyword strategy and consider incorporating relevant terms into your copy for better visibility.
3. Product Page Listing Optimization: Stellar keyword research isn’t enough to help you rank. Implement Amazon SEO best practices and use good copywriting to enhance your product page listings. While the exact ranking factors are not disclosed, tracking the performance of thousands of listings suggests key elements like titles, descriptions, images, A+ content, and brand storytelling for better engagement.
4. Keyword Index Review: After adding keywords to your listings and the backend, you need to check if they’re indexed.

Analyzing Pricing and Competitiveness

Reviewing the pricing strategy is an essential part of the account audit for Amazon sellers, especially if you’re struggling to win the Buy Box. Fundamentally, compare your product prices with competitors to understand market positioning and pricing trends.

Make sure to study consumer behavior, income levels, buying habits, and financial considerations to set prices that resonate with your target audience. The most successful brands run surveys to understand what their customers are willing to pay.

Finally, avoid pricing strategies that could violate Amazon’s policies and strive to maintain competitive yet profitable prices.

By diligently following this 10-step checklist, conducting a thorough Amazon account audit can significantly enhance your performance on Amazon, leading to increased sales and growth. Happy auditing!