Podcast transcript
Introduction
Welcome to Marketplace Masters, the podcast where we go beyond the surface and dive deep into the strategies that actually move the needle on the Amazon vendor platform.
Paul Sonneveld
I'm your host, Paul Sonneveld, and today we're tackling a challenge that many Amazon vendors face. How to actually unlock the full potential of your data. Let's be honest, Vendor Central is a goldmine of insights, but finding the right reports, interpreting the data, turning them into real business impacts, that's when most vendors get stuck.
Now, to help us break it all down, I'm joined by Jimmy Barber. He's the SVP of Client Strategy Digital Commerce at The Bluebird Group. Now, Jimmy has spent years at the forefront of omnichannel retail, helping brands succeed across Amazon, Target, Walmart, and Best Buy, and more. His expertise, turning data into action, helping brands navigate the ever-changing retail landscape with clarity and confidence.
Today, we're getting hands-on, walking through must-know Vendor Central reports, uncovering hidden insights beyond Vendor Central, and showing you how to move from data overload to strategic decision-making. Jimmy, Welcome to the show. It's absolutely great to have you here today.
Jimmy Barber
Thanks, Paul. Excited to be here. Hey, everyone. Excited to unpack a little bit of Amazon data.
Paul Sonneveld
I look forward to it. Just a reminder to our audience, for those of you tuning in live, this is live, which means you get the opportunity to ask Jimmy questions throughout and towards the end of this episode. So feel free to post them either in the YouTube comments or in the LinkedIn comments section of the event, and we will surface them and I'll get Jimmy to give it his best shot. All right, Jimmy, let's just set the scene here a little bit. Why are we even doing this podcast? Amazon vendors have access to lots of data, but many don't use it very effectively. Why do you think that is?
Jimmy Barber
Yeah. It's a fun one to unpack because I think there's I think there's first the question of why am I on vendor and what am I doing in vendor versus selling on the marketplace or selling through an aggregator, reseller, whatever it may be, or through distribution. I think there's to not get into that conversation, but to really hone in on the vendor conversation. The biggest challenge is it's a wholesale model that relies on Amazon submitting purchase orders to you and then selling the product as Amazon.
The typical issues I see within this area are you're working with really large catalogues. You're not usually working with a D2C brand who has a marquee SKU or a couple 10, 20, 30 SKUs. You're typically working with the thousands of SKUs. And I think the reality for most vendors is you've got multi-brand or so many SKUs that the granularity in which you can really move the data through is just challenging. It's a lot more data across a lot more data points.
I see that as maybe the biggest issue for most vendors is they work with complex data sets, typically on larger businesses, across a whole host of different items that work with different seasonalities or different spikes based off of advertising investment or whatever it may be. And so it naturally just creates some friction of when you're working with larger data sets, you have to have different tools or different mindsets. You're aggregating a lot more data and looking at trends versus digging into Ace and level daily data like, you know, I think a lot of sellers are frankly used to.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So at a thousand feet level, and we'll get into the detail here, but, you know, as you look across your client base, what would you say are the top three, the largest missed opportunities when it comes to leveraging? What's there available in Vendor Central? We'll talk about some interesting reports outside of that in a little while. But biggest missed opportunities inside Vendor Central, what comes to mind?
Jimmy Barber
Yeah, i think first and foremost like the, and this isn't a plug towards anything in the industry as much as it is just the vendor central data platform is just really a challenge to get data out of. You look at how you have to export reports to do any degree of time series analysis. in Vendor Central is close to impossible. So you're either doing the export 50 reports and compile in Excel life, or hopefully you're working with some degree of external data provider or whatever it may be.
But I think the first thing is time series data matters. Being able to get the right level of data granularity across the time frames in which you really can make value happen. It just is really hard on the vendor central platform. You go into reports, retail analytics, and it's like you can see sales, you can see traffic, you can see net PPM, but all of it is in a pretty stagnant, somewhat dated view. If you're trying to do any degree of real analysis to glean insight or to frankly be able to pull something from a lever standpoint on the business, the platform itself just doesn't really behoove you to be able to do that.
So first, I encourage folks to find some degree of either internal resource to database and store data to have a time series database, or to leverage an external provider to just be able to get this data to yourself in a manageable way. I think that is maybe one of the biggest hurdles I see just in the vendor world is the access to the data is a massive hurdle and there's a lot of solutions out there now for you to be able to get that.
As a solution, and I just see that as like, we should be able to move past that one pretty quickly. And yet it's still a big hurdle. If you're, you're leveraging the vendor central platform, you just really can't get the data that you need out of it in a timely manner. Yeah.
Paul Sonneveld
Now I can certainly relate to that. Obviously, we get on my platform, but It's the thing that's, I mean, I guess it's a good thing for us, but there's sort of the only be able to look at certain like time buckets, right. Not getting that trend. I mean, even from an API point of view, it's not easy, you know, I think like daily reports for every single ASIN, like every it's one API call, right. It's not like, give me the whole time series. No, you have to like. you know, chop it up, put it together, and then you can do something with it. So yeah, they don't make it easy.
Jimmy Barber
Yeah, they just they just rolled geo data back out for vendors. And even that it's like, you know, it's an added filter, and a column that you it's just like the data structure is not super friendly to the analysis that you'd actually want. And so that's kind of first in it. I always struggle whenever you have to leverage more to be able to run a business.
I'd love for you to be able to run the business through the platform, but the challenge I think has been they've deprecated so many different features in that platform that the API source of data really is the most valuable one. And if your team, you know, internally is not able to tap into that, being able to get that data, it's just really valuable. And frankly, like you don't want that to be the stone you're trying to unturn every day. It's just the access to the data.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, for sure. Well, let's get into, I guess some of the more practical and pragmatic things, right? So top vendor central reports that every vendor should be using. I mean, if you're sort of coming across a new client and they're not looking at anything, what's on your recommendations list? These are the must reports. If you're not looking at these daily or weekly, you're probably missing out. What floats to the top there for you?
Jimmy Barber
Yeah. You have your generic reports of traffic, sales, inventory, conversion, and then your loyalty statistics around repurchase rate or reorder rate. I think most vendors are living in a more of a traditional retail business, and so they're used to reporting on year for year, month over month, and more generic CPG or retail-based metrics. I know on the seller side, we do a lot more visibility at the daily level. I started my career working with Walmart stores and most people in the Walmart retail world don't look at daily level sales always. It's usually rolled up to a weekly level.
There's some nuances of just when you're working into a wholesale world, typically you're looking at data on a week-over-week basis or a month-over-month. But so I think, I think there's kind of some, some generic data sets that you're always going to have to kind of check a box on. But we spend a lot of time kind of bucketing. Really kind of the customer journey into like really four key funnel parts.
You have the top of the funnel, which is your traffic, right? It's how are we getting people onto the actual pages and what does that metric look like? What's the KPI for it? What are the levers that we can pull for it? And how do we benchmark that year over year or whatever it may be?
You have the second layer, which is really engagement. This is where the data is maybe the worst on the vendor side. You have good traffic data. You can see glance views at the ASIN level down to the weekly or daily level on the vendor side. You've got good visibility to that. Engagement is a little trickier. You get good data from the advertising side, so engagement, we're talking click-through rate. In the Shopify DTC world, we'd be talking about time on page. This is where maybe the worst data availability exists, at least in the vendor side. But click-through rate and overall ability to engage and promote your item on deal pages or wherever it is in the Amazon universe. That's typically the middle stage that we're looking at is the engagement. How often and at what rate do people engage with your products?
You drill down the next layer, conversion. We can see that we have traffic, we have orders, we have sales. We can back into conversion and we can kind of spit out at the weekly or daily level how, when we get people to the page, how often are they buying?
And then the last one is loyalty. And this isn't true for every business. You have some seasonal businesses that maybe have a 12-month purchase cycle or not have a repeat purchase cycle at all. It may not be relevant, but we almost always look at loyalty. A lot of folks in the vendor model are trying to drive a loyalty on the prime ecosystem platform. And so repeat purchase rate, repeat order rate matter a lot. Subscribe and save matters a lot. And those are the metrics that we dig into on that side.
And so those are the four buckets I always like to lump things into. And it helps you focus on where is the problem, particularly if you're a vendor and you're working across large catalogues. It's really hard sometimes to understand where is the leaky bucket. And I found that those kind of four events in the customer journey are the easiest way to bucket where are our biggest issues. And then you can kind of start to dig into each one of those and understand what's happening at the ASIN level or subcategory level or brand level, whatever it may be.
Paul Sonneveld
Makes sense. I was actually going to ask you a little bit around the, probably a little technical here, but the manufacturing versus sourcing views on things. Certainly, some of the data you're talking about, things like glance views, be able to drive conversions off that, very much only available on their manufacturing view.
Jimmy Barber
Yeah.
Paul Sonneveld
And I guess what we're finding is, a lot of vendors that we deal with, they actually have underlying catalogue setup issues. It's a little bit like garbaging garbage out. It turns out that maybe for half their portfolio, manufacturing views aren't switched on for those ASINs. All of a sudden, data looks really distorted and all of that. What advice do you have around data accuracy and maybe some of that cleanup, making sure that your foundation that you're building on is correct?
Jimmy Barber
It's funny because I think you can get so advanced in this Amazon data world so fast and you start digging into AMC is the latest greatest trend or whatever the buzzword is around these new data sets. But then the reality is, it's like, are the base data sets that you're looking at right? And it's funny because sourcing manufacturing continues to be a pain point even in 2025 of like, if it's wrong, you're just looking at all the wrong data.
And there's not a lot of instances where your sourcing should be higher than your manufacturing. Um, and, and, and so there's like, there is these simple gut checks. It's one of the reasons why when I look at like the most valuable reports in vendor central, like one of them is actually the catalogue report. And understanding when I look at the vendor catalogue and I look at ASIN title, you know, your UPC, all your kind of product specs that come with it. Is it right? And are the right items that are attached to my brand code or my vendor code in that catalogue and then vice versa?
The challenge I've seen with that is it's like a lot of these vendors are working with 10,000 items across massive portfolios. And it's like you can't realistically cleanse that data yourself if you're a data analyst and using support and kind of working through your vendor manager or whoever it may be. That's where I've found more and more. It can really hamper your business if you don't have the accuracy part right. We built systems internally to be able to check that accuracy, but there's a lot of external solutions.
I found that more and more as a recommendation is that one of the best parts of working with some degree of a provider in this space as a vendor is your catalogue accuracy actually matters a lot. If you lose browse node availability or you fall under the wrong browse node because Amazon's new AI or variation kind of sorting is auto sorting you into a different browse node, it can really impact your business. And we've seen instances where, you know, browse nodes fall off entirely and your items become unfindable. You have an ASIN that should be in your catalogue in Vendor Central, and it's just not. And yet you're reporting on it week in, week out.
And so there's a lot of instances where we found it is just really helpful to have some stop gaps. And when you're thinking about the ROI finance conversation of that investment, if you're the analyst or the sales manager or the marketing manager over in charge and responsible for Vendor Central. I always encourage you to say it's a little bit of an insurance policy on top of you getting visibility into the analytics and being able to analyze your business across timeframes and more and more data.
There's also just some healthy gut checks that come with that. You can do it manually. It's possible. You can export a lot of reports and you can pull from Keepa or look on the actual product pages. You can do the self-validation, but typically it's across so many different items and so many different categories that that's where I think it really shines to have some degree of a partner in that space.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah.
Jimmy Barber
And it's crazy that that's still like, I mean, we've been talking about that for like, you know, 10 years, Paul, right? It's like, it's sourcing manufacturing. It's nothing new. And yet we, yeah, we still see vendor codes. Nothing has changed. Nobody has changed anything on the back end to our knowledge and you'll pull stuff and it it's changed. And so, it's a good reminder of you've got to have stop gaps and checks and balances kind of in place all the time.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think a very practical tip that we often do for our clients, if we run into issues, just download all your ASINs where you're getting, say, ship revenue on a sourcing view, and then download all your ASINs where you're getting audit revenue and glance views, and just match those lists and see, right, are there any ASINs in your sourcing view that don't even appear on your audit revenue view or your manufacturing view? That in itself will really shine a spotlight on where your gaps are. And it's really worth getting those fixed before you even dive into any data analysis and the like.
Jimmy Barber
Yeah. Yeah. One of the common ones we'll kind of add to that is to then pull on the PO side. And it's like any ASIN that's recorded a PO in the last 12 months. Like we should have ordered revenue and net received inventory and glance for you, like simple kind of check. But it's like, if we shipped you the ASIN, we should have the data on the ASIN. And yet again, yeah, it's not always the case.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. So let's, by the way, I'm seeing a couple of questions flow in. I'm going to leave those until a little bit later. Some of them go a little bit deeper, but Gareth, thanks for your question. I haven't forgotten about it. And just to prove that this is a live show, so. Please keep those coming.
Jimmy, I want to sort of talk about a slightly different topic here because we're talking about Vendor Central, but actually there's this other thing over here called Seller Central, right? What's it got to do with vendors? I don't know, but what can vendors get out of Seller Central? Let me make the question really like, because I think this is probably one of the most underutilized avenues for vendors to get much more insightful data. Tell me more. How do you think about this and what are the data gems out there or the insights gems that Seller Central can provide to vendors?
Jimmy Barber
Yeah. I think a lot of folks in the Amazon space love to talk about this one and what platform should you sell on. And the right way to go to market. And I think what I have found is, I think there's some general timidness around operating on both platforms. And Amazon obviously has terms of service and stuff that you've signed up for, depending on what platform or kind of medium you sell through, you have agreed to some things.
And so what we have found is there is, when you look at the model, theoretically, a vendor manager at Amazon is the equivalent of an owner of a seller account. They are purchasing the inventory. They have full visibility to the product, how it sells, who's buying it to some extent, and are able to analyze that data from an inventory perspective, how they stock it, how they're storing it, how they're shipping it.
That role is a little bit reversed on the seller model where you as the owner of the brand, arguably have that responsibility to buy the inventory and make sure that the inventory is available and then make sure that the consumer experience is positive. Amazon owns all of that on the vendor model. Really as a seller, you own all of that on the seller model.
The benefit is, is though, when you're operating on the seller model, you get a lot more of the data to be able to make those kinds of decisions. So you get, you know, best example is search query performance report. You get just basic level search term reporting and what items are converting and working well at the search term level.
Theoretically, that's really the retail team at Amazon's job because they're the one buying the product and taking the responsibility to sell it and analyzing where does it sell the best and how do we sell more of it. How do we connect more shoppers with the products that they're looking for? What we found is you can have both accounts open. You don't have to sell through both accounts. And I think that there's some risks and the whole Amazon universe can debate whether you should operate on both models or what that should look like. I won't go into that one.
But you can operate and have both accounts open. When you have that, you get access then to a lot of those reports. And I don't know if, frankly, a lot of people know that. You can open a seller account, pay 40 bucks a month as a vendor, and make sure that you connect correctly through brand registry. Amazon knows who you are. They know what you're doing. Don't list any inventory or any offers.
But then you can get access to a lot of this data that sellers have been getting access to for years. There's two big benefits to it. One, it's a totally different way to look at the business. Does a retail team at Amazon really care? Not really. It's not really how they look at the business, they manage the business, but it gives you, as the owner of the vendor business, way more control over your advertising strategy, your inventory strategy, your promotional strategy, even your keywording strategy, whenever you're writing for your listings.
It gives you a level of insight that even third-party marketplace providers can't really get you in the same light. And that's just like one report. You can go down a whole host of lists of product opportunities. There's tons of stuff in Seller Central that you just don't see as the vendor. And so I always encourage folks that if you're trying to understand and learn from your business more and you're able to analyze it at that level, that's really where the rubber meets the road. Like Amazon's platform is a search engine. And so you've got to be getting some degree of search term level data to be able to optimize the platform. And the problem, I think, for a lot of vendors is they're just operating with retail level data on a search driven platform.
And the challenge with that is all your data is reactive. You're not able to actually see what the customer interactions are. And the benefit of when you get that is, is you can actually start to pull some levers, steer the ship to what's working, and then hopefully, you know, steer away from the things that don't. But that's what we found to be most really tactically valuable. Search query performance is a phenomenal insight report. Everyone in the seller community has been using it for years. And I'm like, vendors, you can do this. And even if it just gleams small insight, at least you know what your number one search term is. You don't even get that visibility on the vendor platform.
Paul Sonneveld
40 bucks a month, right? At least in the US. In a professional account. Yeah, 39.
Jimmy Barber
The price hasn't changed in a while.
Paul Sonneveld
That's good. Don't start to sell the same ASINs that are in your vendor account though.
Jimmy Barber
I wouldn't recommend that.
Paul Sonneveld
As per Jimmy's note, this is not about hybrid selling, and we've done lots of other episodes on that. This is just about, hey, for a little incremental cost, you can get access to a whole range of additional insights, including the search query reports. Interestingly, I think that's just been made available via API, which is nice, but for sellers only, right? As expected. So that is great.
Jimmy Barber
And a good thing, I've talked to a lot of folks, even at the executive level of companies that are nervous about infringing on Amazon terms. A good way that we have, I encourage folks to look at it. You can open a international selling account. You don't actually have to have your North America marketplace will be activated, but it's not technically active.
And so for a lot of folks, I'm like, open a UK selling instance, you're allowed to sell internationally as the domestic company if you're in the US. And so do all your legal, do your due diligence. But at the end of the day, we operate under that guys a lot where we'll run international accounts on seller and we run domestic accounts on vendor. I feel like there's a lot of fear there. It's one where you got to dot your I's and cross your T's, but I also think that the sheer access to the data is just too invaluable for you to actually control your business.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Well, one more question from me before we sort of open up to the audience here. My question was, what are the biggest mistakes? I mean, as you've sort of taken client on boards and you've done a bit of an audit there, what do you see in terms of the the biggest mistakes that they've made when it comes to using data or not using data, using data in the wrong way. In other words, what are the things that you can help us avoid, right? Learn from others.
Jimmy Barber
Maybe the hardest thing, and this will upset some people I'm sure, but I push folks really hard to analyze the data that has an action that is at your disposal. And again, on the seller side of it, there's a lot more, frankly, actions you can take. You have more control. You can control your price. You can control your inventory. You can control just a lot more.
I think one of the challenging things on the vendor side is people can spend a lot of time doing the analysis, digging through the data, doing all these things. But I'm like, look at the actions that you can control on the vendor platform and dig deep into that data. And some of your biggest controls on the vendor platform are your promotional budget, your advertising budget, your inventory and your inventory forecasting and i think a lot of folks spend too much time analyzing you know sales or or things that they can't really control their net ppm and in the reality is like some of those events can't be controlled at the right levers in your a lot better off you know, double-clicking into the levers that you can actually pull, you know, addressing if your P70 forecast is totally out of whack.
Like that is a really controllable thing that you can work back with your VM, in-stock manager, whoever it may be to say and flag, hey, we're looking at a forecast on this item and it is drastically different than the category average, than historical performance or whatever it may be. Like that is a direct action you can take to then go and influence the forecast, which will then influence your orders in the whole cycle.
I think it's maybe one of the hardest things in the vendor world is you a lot of the times have fewer levers, and yet you have bigger data. You end up spinning your wheels on all these datasets that you really can't drive any action on. And so I always try to encourage folks in the space and maybe here, one of the biggest potholes is I hear a long presentation of all the research and analytics that you did.
And I'm like, okay, great, what can we change? And it's just like, it's all fun facts, more or less. And so that's maybe the biggest thing of like root yourself first. If you're going to spend four hours today, spend the first couple on the things that you actually can change in the vendor platform. And I think that's, you know, frankly, a little bit of a hard discernment sometimes to do.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, it's, it's so true though. I mean, sometimes we just love the analysis paralysis, right? Maybe a word of advice that someone gave me many, many years ago, say, before you do the analysis, let's assume you had the answer to your question already. What would you do differently this week?
Jimmy Barber
Absolutely.
Paul Sonneveld
If the answer is, I'm not sure, then maybe do something else.
Jimmy Barber
I think that's the crux because, again, most vendors are working with really big catalogues, more complex businesses often, and analysis paralysis is maybe the most common you know, pitfall. And so I'm like, you know, start there, what can we control? What can we influence? And that's how we grow a lot of big vendors is, is focusing it, it's maybe not the prettiest stuff. But it's the stuff that really does move the needle, versus some of the more glamorous insights.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Cool. We have a few minutes left. I want to throw some questions at you. I'm going to actually throw a question that I get on a weekly basis. How do you calculate TACOS for vendor? More specifically, what do you use as the revenue component there? Do you look at ordered revenue, ship revenue, purchase orders, net receipts?
Jimmy Barber
Yeah this is one of those where it doesn't matter as much the metric that you pick but it's that you pick the same metrics over the right time period, and then you stick to it and you don't change them. But most commonly, I would say we're looking at, assuming you have manufacturing or sourcing figured out, we're looking at either sourcing or manufactured.
Typically, we're looking at ordered revenue. Most accounts shouldn't have a massive difference in order to shift. If you do, it's usually a symptom of something else going on, whether it's peak timeframe or whatever it is. But typically, we're looking at ordered revenue. I'm a big fan of looking at some degree of wholesale cost as well, because at the end of the day, that's as a vendor what you're really focused on.
But not everyone's used to looking at that metric. I would say TACOS is most easily understood and then relatable back into the Ads infrastructure. If you look at revenue, actual ordered revenue to the shopper, you can get yourself into some sticky situations if you're trying to look at wholesale cost over Ad spend, but then looking at revenue within the ad portal over ad spend.
So I would typically encourage looking at ordered revenue and trying to keep same metrics. But one of my favorite metric is your actual contribution profit of an item and then your Ad spend paired next to it. I don't know what the acronym for contribution margin over Ad spend is, but that's the one that really matters. That's your customer acquisition costs and that's what you're paying to buy the actual shopper out of your pocket.
Paul Sonneveld
Thank you. I very much enjoyed that answer. This is an ongoing debate and I may have won a few battles here. Yeah, that was a personal one. By quoting you. All right. Let me go back to Gareth's question. Really great one. One thing I've been trying to get to is cost per acquisition versus customer lifetime value. Trying to see new versus repeat customs in Amazon. Is that something you can see on Vendor Central or Seller Central? asking as a brand selling in Seller Central. I've got some thoughts on that, but of course, I'll let you go first here, Jimmy.
Jimmy Barber
Yeah, I think there are some great data providers in the market that are backing into lifetime value on the platform. It's a pretty challenging, frankly, calculation that I'm not maybe the biggest fan of, depending on how you're trying to optimize towards it. I've seen a lot of folks get into this CAC to LTV modeling cycle where they're trying to compare the two and acquire a shopper now because they're going to get the lifetime value of them over the next 12 months. And then a tariff happens halfway through that equation. And I'm like, well, how do you acquire that shopper for more whenever you already spent the money on them?
But so I think there's some external providers that can help you on the seller central side. There isn't a lot of availability on the vendor central side to back into actual LTV. You don't have the actual right level of data available. I think one of the things you do have available is you have repeat purchase rate. You can get orders. You can understand at the actual ASIN level within Vendor Central what your repeat purchase rate is. That's within brand analytics in Vendor Central instead of retail analytics. But you can understand repeat purchase behaviors. You pair that then with your subscribe and save data.
And I think that's really where you can start to do some of this modeling around, how much are we driving retention and loyalty to the platform versus just first time sale? That's how I would as a vendor, maybe kind of try to caveat some of the nuances of the data availability to still have a good metric around loyalty, which I think Garrett's what you're asking around is how do we, how do we have a good metric around the loyalty of this platform and what it's driving for loyalty within our shoppers? Um, not a direct answer, but maybe a little bit of a direct answer, but Paul, I would love your take of the solve.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. No, look, I think on the seller side, I mean, it's some heavy data lifting, but you can do the crunching, right? So like what we do is we look at every single order, basically ask themselves a question, have we seen this customer before? If yes, it's an existing customer. If new, and then you do the same on the ASIN level, you can build it all up and you can get to some customer lifetime value piece.
And then to your point, You can look at advertising costing, you sort of have to make this assumption to say, I've spent all this money to acquire these new customers during a particular month. So I'm going to assume that all of that was like new acquisition and therefore the average cost, average customer acquisition cost is X. Look, it's indicative, right? Because, you know, sometimes you run campaigns for different reasons. They're not always to kind of acquire.
But I think to your point earlier, it's about kind of like having a metric and then just measuring like the relative increase and decreases over time. I think that's useful. So actually you can get there on the seller side. On the vendor side, it's much harder. Right now, of course, Amazon does have through AMC, you can get some LTV stuff, particularly if you pay for the, you know, the retail data, which isn't cheap. I think within the seller side, there are some LTV or lifetime value reports as well.
I think the only caveat is be very careful, really check, check the definitions of like, for example, the way Amazon defines repeat purchase is probably not the way you want to look at it. Right. And also a customer lifetime value, Amazon basically restricts it to 12 and a half months, right? So if a customer shopped 13 months ago and they come back and they buy again, Amazon considers that a new customer. Great. You know, the advertising campaign worked. We've acquired a new customer. Well, were they really new? or actually have a look at the nature of the product. You know, are they just buying within the general kind of, you know, repertoire, right?
Jimmy Barber
Yeah.
Paul Sonneveld
So I think you need to, you need to really think through that, um, as well. So, yeah, but certainly much easier on the seller side. I mean, it feasible, much harder on the vendor side. I mean, actually one thing I'm really excited about is Amazon has started to include, like subscribe and safe indicator on the actual order. So you can actually, sort of untangle this business around subscribe and save and repeat purchases and trying to get rid of that middle bit where customers just subscribe for one cycle just to get that five or 10% discount and then unsubscribe. They're not genuine repeat subscribers. So you sort of want to get a view of that as well.
Anyway, probably a little bit too detailed here, but I've got one more question for you, Jimmy. We're a little bit over time, but it's another one that is really, I was going to say, keep me awake at night. That's probably a little bit of an overstatement. Tracking the buy box, right? It used to be, I think it was the lost buy box offer or it used to be around a couple of years ago. Amazon said it's gone. There's still something in the API documentation that says we're working on a replacement. Stay tuned. I think it hasn't been updated for a couple of years. So what do you do? What do you do from a vendor perspective here?
Jimmy Barber
From a vendor perspective, you know, LBB was a really powerful thing. You know, from folks I've heard, very closely to the metric, it wasn't always the most accurate thing, which was, you know, at the end of the day, I think why I got deprecated. From last I've heard, they are working on availability to lost featured offer, which will be similar to LBB, but I think more or less trying to cleanse some of the challenges of lost buy box.
We have gotten some reports of lost featured offer. It is now a metric I think that's available to Amazon internally, doesn't exist in Vendor Central, accessible probably through your retail partner and worth asking to say, hey, how can we get visibility if you're a vendor to your lost featured offer? Featured offers becoming pretty much the norm on the seller side from a reference and terminology standpoint. So I think they're trying to keep some semblance there, but it is a tricky one to track. And yet it's actually some of the most valuable data if you have an issue on the business.
And so again, this is one that we try to get externally or tracking through some degree of on-site visibility of what's going on. But it's tricky because it's different by geo. It depends on inventory. You can be in stock in some states and out of stock in other states. You can have great delivery times in some states. You can have terrible delivery times in other states. I go back to the action, and it's like, OK, what action can we drive?
A lot of the times, I'm like, you can't force Amazon to crosstalk your inventory, so I'm not sure what we're going to change. But I know that that's something that's supposed to be in the works, and we have seen some literal Excel exports of the data set. So I'm hoping that that's something that comes back worth the question to the retail team to see if you can get any degree of glimpse into that to just know if that's a symptom on your business. If not, a lot of external providers, I think, can give you some directional data on their track and buy boxes.
Paul Sonneveld
Thanks, Jimmy. That was a very tricky one. Appreciate that.
Jimmy Barber
Fingers crossed it comes soon because it has been a while.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, we've given them plenty of time. I think they're well over the deadline by now, but yeah. Anyway, we are out of time, Jimmy, so let's wrap it up. Thank you so much for joining me today. I love how your mind works, how you kind of put some frameworks in terms of, you know, different insights. Really appreciate, you know, clarifying some of those complexities on Vendor Central Analytics and those tips on Seller Central Analytics, right? $39.95 or $99, can't remember.
Just for those of you, obviously you're in this stuff day in, day out. For those tuning in live or watching this on demand later, they're interested in learning more about how you can help them or just want to continue the conversation in some shape or form, what is the best way for you to get in touch?
Jimmy Barber
Yeah, shoot me, shoot me a message on LinkedIn. Always happy to connect and love meeting folks and hearing folks' stories, you know, in this space. I think it's maybe one of the most exciting things is to hear folks that are building or wrestling. And I'm always a proponent of trying to, you know, kind of give, let's kind of share freely knowledge, because at the end of the day, it's probably going to change in 6 months. And so it doesn't have a very long shelf life anyway.
Paul Sonneveld
Awesome. All right. Thank you so much, Jimmy.
Jimmy Barber
Yeah, cheers, Paul.
Paul Sonneveld
All right, everyone, that is it for today's episode of Marketplace Masters. Thank you so much for tuning in today. Now, if you're looking for more insights, please ensure to check out our video on-demand library at merchantspring.io. Just navigate through the resources section there for a wealth of video content on all types of Amazon vendor topics. Of course, if you are looking for vendor analytics, whether you're either looking for agency level analytics for Amazon or vendor analytics, feel free to reach out to me. I'd love to show you what Merchant Spring is all about.
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