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There are over 9.7 million sellers registered on Amazon but only 1.9 million of them are active.
So what has happened to the rest of the 7.8 million sellers?
There can be multiple reasons why those sellers are not selling in Amazon’s marketplaces at the moment. And one of them is: Their sales went down and they couldn’t fix it.
Why am I not getting sales, what to do if sales go down, what causes sales decline, if all such questions are popping up in your mind, you’re at the right place.
Here, we will discuss in detail all the reasons why Amazon sales go down and how you can fix them.
So, whether you’re already facing this issue and want to fix them or having preemptive preparation, continue reading this blog.
Your Amazon sales can be down for any of these reasons:
Usually, the revenue figures (Today’s Sale, Total Balance, etc) from your Seller Central homepage can tell you if you are facing a sales dip. However, it won’t draw a complete picture. You need to know a complete breakdown of previous data to understand how this dip has come about and what SKUs are the most affected.
Having this nuanced understanding is only possible by looking into the relevant reports. For that, you have to expand the Reports drop-down menu from your Seller Central Homepage and click Business Reports.
On the left side, you can find the sales data dashboard.
From here you can fetch data for any time period and for every individual ASIN. Also, you can see the sales data in the form of graphs to have a better understanding of sales trends with respect to time.
Whenever you see a drastic drop in sales, you need to carry out these three checks. Completing this checklist will make it easier for you to identify the root cause and address it.
If any of your listings have been inactive or suppressed, you will notice a visible decline in sales. So, whenever you come across a sales dip, expand the Inventory drop-down menu from your Seller Central homepage and open the Manage Inventory section.
Scroll down and choose the Inactive and Search Suppressed filters to see if you have any such listings.
The poor account health of an Amazon seller is another telltale sign of reduced sales volume. Open the Account Health page from the Performance drop-down menu of your Seller Central homepage.
If the pointer shows yellow (at risk) or red (unhealthy), it means you are in trouble. In such a case a dip in sales is more likely to be followed by the deactivation or suspension of your seller account.
Losing the Buy Box of a certain listing also means a reduction in sales. Therefore, check all your listings and see their Buy Box status. If you have lost the Buy Box for one or more of them, it may explain to you “why am I not getting any sales on Amazon?”
Many times you don’t get the signs discussed above when your sales are down. All your listings are active with no search suppression, and your account health remains in the green ‘healthy’ zone but you are still losing out on your sales— so what to do in such scenarios?
If you couldn’t pin down why your Amazon sales are down, you need to consider these 9 factors. Here we will walk you through those issues as well as their solutions.
It is almost impossible for any seller to keep its sales at the same level every month. If you will see yearly data of any ASIN, you will see the ups and downs. In short, it is common for any seller to see sales slumps for any of their products at any given time of the year.
Now let’s try to understand why those slumps usually come about.
All Months Are Not Equal for Amazon FBA
No matter how strong your brand and product are, you may face a sales dip in some months of the year. For instance, you may already know that the last quarter of the year is the most happening time for sellers. From Black Friday to Cyber Monday and Halloween to Christmas sales, all those bumper sales seasons come in the last three months of the year.
Then, there are good outings for sellers in summer boasted by school holidays and Prime Day sales. Therefore, you may face a sales dip in February-March with shoppers going into a slumber after a long sales streak starting from the end of October and extending to mid of January. Similarly, you may struggle in achieving your sales target in the slow period of August-September.
Your Products Have a Seasonal Element
Besides the marketplace’s sales season, the seasonality of your product can also cause a sales dip, depending on the time of the year. For instance, you may not see the required sales volume for swimsuits, beach umbrellas, sunglasses, camping gear, gardening equipment, and bird feeders in the last months of the year.
Similarly, skiing equipment, leather apparel, and tire chains won’t have bumper sales during the middle months of the year. Moreover, if products make for good gifts (e.g. vases, snack boxes, beauty kits, etc), they are more likely to get better sales around holidays and festivities and may not be sold like a hot cake for the rest of the year.
The Solution
As an FBA seller, you can’t do much about how sales bouts come on Amazon marketplaces. However, you can always capitalize on them. Make sure you are on top of your game with inventory, product listings, and pricing during Prime Day, Black Friday, Easter, Halloween, Christmas sales, etc.
Similarly, if your products are seasonal and their sales dip during the off-season are hurting your revenue goals, try to add “perennial products” to your seller portfolio. For instance, there are some product categories like Home & Kitchen, Beauty & Personal Care, fast fashion items, and pet supplies that see steady sales throughout the year.
There might be a case where your sales strategy or Amazon marketplaces are not to be blamed for your declining revenue. Sometimes, it’s bigger external events and an economic outlook that can affect your sales. For instance, the pandemic and recent inflation have made customers finicky about their shopping preferences.
It means it is not easy for sellers to easily sway customers anymore. Shoppers want to ensure they get a bang for every buck they spend.
There is a massive cutback by consumers on luxury goods during the pandemic. Then, post-pandemic inflation has only made things worse.
In short, if you're selling products that are on the higher side of the price point spectrum, you may face a slump in sales. In such a scenario, you need to keep tabs on monthly inflation rates and customer surveys that highlight recent buying trends and tendencies.
The Solution
If your sales are down because most of your products can be categorized as luxurious with hefty price tags and your Amazon sales strategy for such products hasn’t worked out, you may need to pivot. Try to launch products with low price points and high usability i.e. essential products. There are many product categories that you can explore in this regard.
From cleaning items to laundry supplies and kitchen to home improvement and hardware, many products continue to have solid sales history on Amazon despite inflation woes.
Sales Spy can come in quite handy during this research. You can find out how different essential products are doing in a particular category in terms of sales volume and revenue/profit. This aided research will help you make an informed decision about including a product that is infallible to inflation and shrinking buying power.
For many customers, it all comes to the price tag at the end of the day. In the e-commerce space, the price has also gained a lot of importance because it is easier to compare prices of a similar product offered by multiple sellers.
Therefore, even if you are pricey just by some cents or a buck in a competitive space such as Amazon, you may lose customers to competitors. Suppose your private label brand offers a door draft stopper at $19.99. And your competitor has the same item listed at, say, $17.50 (with an almost similar rating and reviews aggregate). There are high chances that this price difference will pay off in your competitor’s favor.
In the Wholesale and Arbitrage space, the competition is more cut-throat since multiple sellers are vying to win the Buy Box of the same listing. Here, even a difference of some cents may lead to you losing the Buy Box and getting your sales impacted.
The Solution
Therefore, keep an eye on the pricing of your competitors. However, it can be quite time-consuming to manually check their prices by opening their product listings. To streamline this monitoring, you can use Product Pulse. This tool can act as your watchman to notify you about all the important listing changes including the price of your competitor’s ASINs. This way you can promptly re-price your offer as well.
A competitor has reduced its offer price by $10. Not knowing about this could mean a loss of sales and customers to that particular competitor. Getting a timely notification will ensure you can also make your pricing competitive.
For people operating in the Wholesale and Retail Arbitrage space, the price changes are very crucial to win the Buy Box. They can use repricer software and implement a dynamic pricing strategy to ensure they can always match the current Buy Box value at any instant.
Inventory management is at the center of running any retail business and Amazon FBA is no exception. Despite knowing the importance of inventory management, many sellers couldn’t manage it properly, and as a result, face a sales dip. The most common and glaring mistake in this regard is not maintaining the supply chain.
In other words, if your product is running out of stock too often, you are facing serious inventory mismanagement. To begin with, a listing will become inactive if it’s out of stock for a long. A listing not making any sales for considerable time periods will have a slower sales velocity. This in turn will impact its organic search ranking and slip it to lower numbers, thus creating a cycle that will further aggravate the issue of reduced sales.
The Solution
You need to maintain a robust supply chain mechanism if you don’t want to lose out on revenue because your listing is OUT OF STOCK. You will need an inventory management tool that can help you have a streamlined overview of your inventory.
For instance, it can tell how many units of a certain product are in stock and for how long they can last (based on previous sales data). Such inventory management applications also let you configure automatic restocking so that you never run out of stock.
Also, make sure your Inventory Performance Index (IPI) is in the good range. IPI is a metric that reflects how good a certain FBA seller is with their inventory handling.
Your IPI should be in the range of 400-800. An IPI below 350 can result in your penalization. Amazon may restrict your FBA inventory storage and increase storage fees. With sales already down, an increase in overheads will only make things worse.
Is your sales data showing a sharp decline after a certain date or point in time?
If that’s the case, the dip in your sales is perhaps linked to the ending of a campaign. It can either be a PPC campaign or some discount pricing that you have offered for a particular time window. Such sales drops are usually anticipated by sellers when they are aware of the campaign’s end date.
However, sellers who can’t keep up may get panicked after seeing the slump in sales. It is worth mentioning here that such drops are usually normal. However, if you notice a steeper drop in sales, then it is a cause for concern and shows that your listing is largely dependent on paid promotions or discount offers.
It is also worth mentioning here that you can also face an abrupt end to your PPC campaign and a dip in sales if there is not enough money in your linked credit card or bank account. If Amazon’s PPC payments are declined for lack of funds, Amazon is more likely to stop running your ad without notifying you.
The Solution
As an individual FBA seller, you may already have too much on your plate where you couldn’t keep up with all the campaigns you are running for all your SKUs. You certainly can’t memorize the start and end dates for each campaign and every SKU.
Therefore, it is always better to set up a campaign calendar. Having all the campaign start and end dates written in one place in an organized way will make sure you remain updated about the campaign-related highs and lows.
Having such a calendar will ensure you don’t get caught by surprise and can plan accordingly for any campaign-related changes in your sales velocity and volume.
Moreover, make sure in advance that your credit card has enough limit to pay the PPC bills in time if you don’t want your ads to stop running and bringing in sales. It is always a good idea to dedicate a credit card just for your Amazon payments (FBA fees, PPC expenses, etc).
If you have an established private label product that doesn’t need PPC pushes anymore but you notice a sharp decline in its sales, you must factor in its organic ranking for relevant shopping queries. Having a good position on Amazon SERP for relevant searches plays an integral role in maintaining steady sales velocity. And losing those top organic positions lead to sudden sales dips.
The best way to check the organic ranking of your listings is to search them with related queries and keywords as a customer. If your listing is not appearing above the fold or on the first page, it indicates that the listing is not doing well on the SEO front and this could also be the reason behind the sales dip.
The Solution
You may need to overhaul and re-optimize your listing to gain the lost ground on the organic horizon. You may need to revise your content, incorporate new keywords, and replace images to boost the organic ranking of your listing.
A tool like Listing Optimizer is a godsend if you have to fine-tune your listing for its SEO score. The tool allows you to compare the optimization of your own listing with competitors. Then, you can also sync it up with a keyword research tool to see what keywords are there and missing in your listing content.
On top of all that, you can also add content and keywords to the title, bullets, and product description of your listing then and there. You can even add backend keywords to your listing through the tool. Backend keywords are not visible on the listing page and to viewers. However, they play a vital role in how the Amazon search engine algorithm parses your listing and rank it for relevant keywords.
If you're struggling with listing optimization and want a data-driven approach to improve your Amazon sales, ZonGuru has a game-changing solution for you: our new Listing Optimizer tool. This state-of-the-art feature is backed by ChatGPT-4, one of the most powerful AI technologies, to find the best keywords for any Amazon category. It can auto-generate new product listings or rewrite existing ones using data from the best keywords in your category. The tool also allows you to import keywords directly from our Keywords on Fire tool, enhancing your listing's sales potential.
What sets our Listing Optimizer apart is its Optimization and Listing Strength scoring system, which lets you know how well-optimized your listing is. You can also compare your listing against up to 8 competing ASINs, giving you valuable insights into your competitive standing. The tool is designed to align with Amazon’s algorithm, increasing the likelihood of your product appearing on the first page. With real-time scoring and competitive analysis features, you can make informed decisions that give you a competitive edge. Time-efficient and user-friendly, this tool is a must-have for serious Amazon sellers looking to scale their operations.
It is common for sales to go down for any retail item if a fault appears in the product. The same can happen to an Amazon FBA business as well. If your sales are down and you want to know if it’s due to a product fault, go through the customer review section on your product pages. If you see a recurring complaint by customers about the product in general or any of its features, then the sales dip could be due to that fault or shortcoming.
Reading every product review might not be feasible for many. So, all those preoccupied sellers can use Love Hate, which is an intuitive review aggregator. This tool essentially creates a cloud of commonly used words and phrases in all the reviews and classifies them into “Love” and “Hate” categories. The words and phrases in the Love category will show you what customers love and like about your product. Similarly, the Hate category will highlight all the shortcomings of your products.
Since you are searching for a product fault that has caused the sales dip, carefully look at the Hate cloud and identify the issues related to product manufacturing. Click the words and phrases in the Hate cloud to fully understand the context of the review.
The Solution
Private label sellers usually have third-party manufacturers/suppliers located overseas. In some cases, the supplier couldn’t maintain the product quality after a while. Since the seller is directly shipping from the supplier/manufacturer to 3PL or Amazon FBA centers, they couldn’t pick the downgrade that has happened to the product quality.
Therefore, it is always important to thoroughly vet your supplier before signing a contract with them. Individual sellers may find it difficult to vet such overseas suppliers. For them, Easy Source comes in handy. They can use this search portal to find the most reliable and verified suppliers for a private label product they want to sell.
Besides rating, revenue, and the time they have spent in the business, Easy Source also tells you the lead time and Minimum Order Quantity (MOQ) of the given supplier.
If you are part of FBM/MFN and do your order shipment yourself, one of the reasons behind the sales dip could be the late delivery of orders. According to Amazon’s terms and conditions, if an order is overdue for at least three days, it is considered a late shipment.
Late order delivery is one of the biggest obstacles in acquiring repeat customers. A shopper is less likely to come back to you if they couldn’t get the previous order in time. Also, late orders don’t just cause you to lose recurring sales. Those disgruntled late shipment receivers also leave scathing reviews on your product page, discouraging others too to buy from you. This compounded effect can certainly lead to a considerable cut in sales volume.
It is also important to mention here that late shipments don’t just affect your sales. If your late shipment rate is 4% or above, Amazon may suspend your seller privileges on its platform.
The Solution
The best way to deal with this nuisance is to opt for FBA. As an FBA seller, you don’t have to fret about late shipments. On top of that, you get to facilitate your customers with Prime Day deliveries. If you want to remain an FBM/MFN seller, then devise a very robust order fulfillment operation.
Make sure to sign up with shipping services and carriers that are known for their timely operations. By maintaining on-time shipping for more than 99% of orders, you won’t just maintain your sales volume but may also become eligible for Seller Fulfilled Prime (SFP) and sell your products with a Prime badge.
If you are a wholesaler or arbitrager, it is regular to compete with multiple sellers to sell the same ASIN. But as a private label seller, you don’t have that competition. If your sales are down and you see a column of “Other Sellers on Amazon” right behind the Buy Box of your private label listing, it could mean your listing has been hijacked and those listing hijackers are taking away a big chunk of your sales.
The Solution
Before anything else, you have to report the hijacking to Amazon. Then, lower your offer price to make sure potential customers don’t resort to the “Other Sellers” list due to better pricing. Also, send a strongly worded cease and desist letter to the hijacker.
Moreover, carry out all the preventive measures to deter future hijackings. This includes trademark registration, Amazon Brand Registry enrollment, and creating personalized offers with powerful branding.
Different product categories have different sales volume benchmarks to get the best-seller tag. For instance, your lawn mower and tiller listings may become part of BSR with a dozen or two monthly sales. On the other hand, you may not even get in the top 100 after making 1000s of sales of products that are considered essentials.
For books, usually you need to sell around 2000 copies of print and Kindle versions to be part of the top 10 best sellers.
An average Amazon seller makes anywhere between 74-1000 sales every month. The sales volume hugely depends on the product category and the price point.
Home and kitchen, pet supplies, beauty, and personal care products, apparel, and electronics items usually have consistent sales on Amazon throughout the year.
We hope that the above discussion helps you identify the root cause of your dipped sales and how you can deal with it. If you have set competitive prices, offer a seamless fulfillment journey, maintain product quality and remain hands-on with your PPC and listing optimization efforts, you are less likely to experience a sales dip as compared to an average FBA seller.
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