Amazon Analytics Glossary

A working glossary of the Amazon seller analytics terms XBR reports on. These are the operational concepts behind the dashboards — the inputs that move profit inside an Amazon account.

Seller Central

Amazon Seller Central is the web interface third-party brands use to manage their Amazon business — listings, inventory, advertising, and reporting. It exposes roughly 1,500 reports, most of which are operational noise relative to the small number of decisions that actually move profit.

Buy Box

The Buy Box is the featured offer on an Amazon product page that the “Add to Cart” and “Buy Now” buttons default to. Buy Box win rate measures the share of page views during which a given seller holds that featured offer; losing it diverts sales to competing offers on the same listing.

IPI Score

The Inventory Performance Index (IPI) is Amazon’s score measuring how efficiently a seller manages FBA inventory over time, factoring in excess inventory, sell-through, stranded inventory, and in-stock rates. A low IPI can trigger FBA storage limits.

FBA

Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is the program in which Amazon stores, picks, packs, and ships a seller’s inventory and handles customer service and returns. FBA introduces multiple cost layers — storage, fulfillment, and long-term storage fees — that materially affect per-SKU profitability.

ACoS

Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS) is the ratio of advertising spend to advertising-attributed sales for Amazon ads, expressed as a percentage. It is a common efficiency metric for Sponsored Products and related campaigns, but it does not by itself reflect true post-fee profitability.

SKU-Level P&L

A SKU-level profit-and-loss statement reports real profit for each individual product after every Amazon fee, advertising spend, and promotional rebate — not revenue and not gross margin. It reveals which products are genuinely profitable and which are quietly losing money.

Customer Lifetime Value

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) estimates the total profit a brand earns from a customer across all of that customer’s purchases, rather than the value of a single order. On Amazon, repeat purchase rate, review velocity, and cohort behavior are the signals used to project whether a future customer cohort is more or less profitable than the last.

Organic Rank

Organic rank is the position a product holds in Amazon’s unpaid search results for a given keyword. It is driven by relevance, conversion, and sales velocity, and is treated as an operational input that can be influenced — through listing, pricing, and inventory changes — rather than a passive metric to watch.