Toolbox Notes

Safe Amazon Automation with SP-API: Rules That Protect Your Account

Thu, 05 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In automation, safety comes first

A seller account is the business itself. That's why SellerMorning was built from the start on one principle: the official way, on your own PC, applying only what you approve.

SP-API: Amazon's official channel

SP-API (Selling Partner API) is the official channel Amazon opens so programs can read a seller's inventory, orders, finance and listing data. You register a developer app on your own account and get approval only for the roles you need (inventory, orders, pricing, listings, Brand Analytics and so on). Ad data uses the separate Amazon Ads API.

Only pages the API can't provide are opened in a browser, just to read them, with generous pauses between clicks so it never puts load on Amazon's site.

The top of the program shows the SP-API and Ads API connection status. On this day only SP-API was connected, with a reminder to renew the token (the program's screens are in Korean).

How data flows in SellerMorning

Safeguards

What	How
API keys, sign-in	Stored with Windows account encryption (DPAPI) or the Mac Keychain; they can't be decrypted on another PC
Seller details	Seller ID, email and brand live only in settings, not in code; a release package is refused if they appear in it
Sales data	Saved only as Excel on your PC; never sent to any server other than Amazon's
Edits	Check → apply only the rows the seller selects → log the original and allow revert (part 5); ads are never changed
Excel formula injection	Customer search terms or product names starting with ‘=’ are saved as text, never run as formulas

Versions

The program carries a version number (MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH), and each version is kept as a package. If a new version has a problem you can roll back at once, and your sales data, settings and sign-in stay as they are.

Wrapping up

Over 15 parts, this series went from becoming an Amazon seller to the daily checks on account health, inventory, orders, ads and listings, and to SellerMorning, which does that work for you.

We still use SellerMorning every day and keep improving it. New features and what we learn along the way will keep showing up here.

Interested in SellerMorning or want to try it? Email us at toolbox@toolboxnotes.com.

Amazon seller series

Anyone can become an Amazon seller
The real challenge after you start
Sales data at a glance
Ads at a glance
Listings at a glance
Keeping your account healthy
FBA inventory without stock-outs or overstock
Finding problems in orders and returns
Reading conversion in business reports
Finding drop-offs with Brand Analytics
Guarding your Buy Box from hijackers
Getting reimbursed for lost FBA inventory
Check profit before you change a price
A 15-minute morning routine
Safe automation with the official API (this post)

Based on personal experience. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Policies and fees are as of the time of writing — check Seller Central for the latest.

A 15-Minute Daily Routine for Amazon Sellers

Tue, 03 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The program works overnight; you just decide in the morning

There's no need to run each feature by hand every day. Schedule a time and the program runs them in order; in the morning you read one page, Today's Summary.

The Seller Central home page. Sales, orders, inventory and finance figures sit under separate tabs, so a morning check means clicking through several places. Figures are masked.

Setting up the daily run

Pick a time (for example 08:10) under ‘Daily auto-run’ in the desktop program; it registers with Windows Task Scheduler (launchd on Mac).
The PC must be on at that time.
It runs home → action items → account health → all listings → FBA → orders → business → ads → listings → Buy Box → funnel → finance (weekly). Ad reports are requested first and waited on while the rest runs.
When it finishes, a desktop notification shows the most urgent item and the P0 and P1 counts.

The desktop program: tick features to run them in order, or see results right away in the Today's Summary tab (the program's screens are in Korean).

A 15-minute morning routine

Check the notification (1 min) — just see whether there is a P0.
Handle P0 (5 min) — things for today, like a policy violation or a stock-out while selling. The summary's ‘how’ column has the menu path.
Scan P1 (5 min) — Buy Box, reimbursement deadlines, low stock; decide what to do this week.
L1 ad suggestions (4 min) — apply only the reversible ones, like negatives and small bid changes, in the Ads console.

Part of a real Today's Summary (sales, SKUs and ASINs masked).

Weekly and monthly

When	What
Weekly	Review the funnel, file reimbursement claims, check the effect of past ad suggestions
Monthly	Clear aged stock, update costs, apply title drafts, check API token renewal reminders

Amazon seller series

Based on personal experience. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Policies and fees are as of the time of writing — check Seller Central for the latest.

Amazon Seller Fees and Profit: Find Your Break-Even ACoS Before Repricing

Sun, 01 Nov 2026 00:00:00 GMT

How much of the price do you keep?

Cut the price by a dollar and you may sell more, but what you keep after fees shrinks more than you expect. Five things come out of every Amazon sale.

What a sale price is made of

Item	Details
Referral fee	A share of the sale price (usually around 15%, by category)
FBA fulfillment fee	A per-unit fee by size and weight
Storage	Monthly storage, plus surcharges for aged stock (part 7)
Cost and logistics	Manufacturing cost and shipping to the US
Ad spend	The cost of orders that came through ads

Example: cutting a $25 product to $23

These figures are an example to show the math. Real fees vary by category, size and weight.

Item	Price $25	Price $23
Referral fee (15%)	$3.75	$3.45
FBA fulfillment fee	$4.50	$4.50
Storage (per unit)	$0.30	$0.30
Cost and logistics	$7.00	$7.00
Left per unit before ads	$9.45	$7.75
Break-even ACoS	37.8%	33.7%

An 8% price cut takes 18% off what you keep per unit, and shrinks the room for ad spend with it. To keep the same profit, you would need to sell about 22% more units.

Check the 2026–2027 fee changes too

These come from notices in Seller Central (as of November 2026). Factor them in before setting a price.

A 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge applies to FBA fulfillment fees and related fees in the US and Canada.
Holiday peak fulfillment fees apply from October 15, 2026 to January 14, 2027.
Amazon has announced referral and FBA fee changes starting January 15, 2027, so recalculate with the new fees.

Seller Central's built-in tools

Finance → Profit analytics → Revenue calculator — enter a price to see fees and what's left per product.
Finance → Profit analytics — cost and profit trends per product.
Products → Manage pricing → Automate pricing — adjusts prices by rules; always set a minimum price.

The calculator works one product at a time, though, and you enter ad spend and your own costs yourself.

The Revenue Calculator in Seller Central works out fees and profit for one product at a time.

In SellerMorning

Price change preview — when a price row is checked in listing and price edits (part 5), it fetches Amazon's fees for the new price (referral and FBA) through the official API and shows what's left per unit.
With your costs entered — it adds profit, margin and the change from today's price; a price that loses money applies only with separate approval.
Guard on big changes — a change of more than 30% from the current price also needs separate approval.
Break-even ACoS — from the same costs it works out how much ad spend each product can bear and uses it as the ad target (part 4).

Break-even ACoS = (price − Amazon fees − cost and logistics) ÷ price

If ad spend goes above this share of ad sales, orders that came through ads lose money.

Amazon seller series

Anyone can become an Amazon seller
The real challenge after you start
Sales data at a glance
Ads at a glance
Listings at a glance
Keeping your account healthy
FBA inventory without stock-outs or overstock
Finding problems in orders and returns
Reading conversion in business reports
Finding drop-offs with Brand Analytics
Guarding your Buy Box from hijackers
Getting reimbursed for lost FBA inventory
Check profit before you change a price (this post)
A 15-minute morning routine
Safe automation with the official API

Based on personal experience. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Policies and fees are as of the time of writing — check Seller Central for the latest.

How to Claim FBA Reimbursements for Lost or Damaged Inventory

Fri, 30 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Amazon loses inventory too

In FBA warehouses, stock gets lost or damaged, and sometimes a customer is refunded but never returns the item. Amazon reimburses most of this automatically, but some cases slip through, and then the seller has to file a claim within the deadline.

The updated reimbursement policy

Item	Details
Claim window	Cut sharply from October 23, 2024 (previously up to 18 months); warehouse loss or damage must be claimed within 60 days of being reported
Customer returns	Between 60 and 120 days after the refund or replacement
Amount	From March 31, 2025, based on manufacturing cost, not sale price (loss after a customer order: sale price less fees)
Evidence	Invoices, proof of purchase and shipping records may be required

Windows and terms can change, so also check the FBA reimbursement policy in Seller Central Help (summary of the changes).

Where to see it in Seller Central

Supply chain reports → Inventory Ledger — receipts, shipments, lost, found and damaged events
Supply chain reports → Reimbursements — reimbursements already paid
Help → Get support — claims for missing reimbursements

The hard part: a ‘lost’ event is often offset by a later ‘found’, or reimbursed on another day, so you must match both reports over a long period to see what is truly unpaid.

The Reimbursements page in Amazon Fulfillment Reports. You pick a date range and download a file before you can see anything.

Finance and reimbursements in SellerMorning

Pulls 18 months of inventory ledger, reimbursements, returns, refunds and FBA fees through the official API and matches them.
Nets losses against later finds, and reimbursements against reversals, leaving only what is still unreimbursed. Cases under 30 days old are marked ‘waiting’.
Finds orders that were refunded with neither a return nor a reimbursement.
Lists each case with its deadline, Reference ID and the menu path to file it; cases near their deadline go to P1 in Today's Summary.
The seller files the claims. The program only finds them.

The finance and reimbursements Summary: claimable lost or damaged units and refunds without returns, with deadlines and how to file (SKUs, amounts and Reference IDs masked; the program's reports are in Korean).

Amazon seller series

Anyone can become an Amazon seller
The real challenge after you start
Sales data at a glance
Ads at a glance
Listings at a glance
Keeping your account healthy
FBA inventory without stock-outs or overstock
Finding problems in orders and returns
Reading conversion in business reports
Finding drop-offs with Brand Analytics
Guarding your Buy Box from hijackers
Getting reimbursed for lost FBA inventory (this post)
Check profit before you change a price
A 15-minute morning routine
Safe automation with the official API

Based on personal experience. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Policies and fees are as of the time of writing — check Seller Central for the latest.

Lost the Amazon Buy Box? How to Spot and Handle Hijackers

Wed, 28 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Who holds the buy button?

The ‘Add to Cart’ and ‘Buy Now’ box on the right of a detail page is the Buy Box (Amazon now calls it the Featured Offer). When several sellers sell the same product, only one gets it. Most sales go through this box, so even on your own brand's product, losing it cuts sales sharply (Featured Offer guide).

What decides it

A Professional account — Individual plans can't win the Buy Box.
Price — item price plus shipping; an offer priced far above others can drop out entirely.
Fulfillment — delivery speed and Prime eligibility; FBA has the edge.
Seller trust — Order Defect Rate under 1%, account health, track record.
Stock — when you run out, it goes to another seller.

Hijackers

A hijacker joins your brand's page and sells at a lower price. It may not be genuine or even the same product, which hurts your reviews too. If you are in Brand Registry, you can respond with ‘Report a violation’.

When a hijacker joins

Check the offer — in the ‘Other sellers’ list on the detail page, note the seller name, price and fulfillment (FBA or FBM).
Check it's genuine — if in doubt, buy from that seller (a test buy), compare the product and packaging, and take photos.
Report it — use ‘Report a Violation’ in Brand Registry for counterfeit or trademark infringement, with the test-buy evidence attached.
Check your own offer — make sure your price, stock and delivery keep you competitive for the Buy Box meanwhile.

A seller who legitimately resells genuine products may not be a violation, though. Confirm with a test buy before reporting.

Where to see it in Seller Central

Business reports — Featured Offer (Buy Box) percentage by ASIN
Manage products — number of sellers and Featured Offer status per product

But the percentage only drops after a few days, and there is no record of which seller joined when.

Pricing Health in Seller Central lists offers that are not eligible for the Featured Offer or are priced close to it.

Buy Box check in SellerMorning

Every day it reads the offers on all selling ASINs through the official API and checks who holds the Buy Box.
A seller who wasn't there yesterday is flagged as a new hijacker.
ASINs where you lost the Buy Box, or where no one has it, go to P1 in Today's Summary and to the ads feature for an ad review.

The Buy Box check Summary. On this day all 213 ASINs were clear (the program's reports are in Korean).

Amazon seller series

Based on personal experience. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Policies and fees are as of the time of writing — check Seller Central for the latest.

How to Use Amazon Brand Analytics to Find Where Shoppers Drop Off

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From search to purchase: where do shoppers leak?

A shopper sees your product in search (impression), opens it (click), adds it to the cart, then buys. Brand Analytics is Amazon's built-in tool that puts numbers on those four steps.

Brand Analytics in Seller Central

Available to brand representatives of brands enrolled in Brand Registry, on a Professional account. Menu → Marketing → Brand analytics (Amazon overview).

Report	What it shows
Search Query Performance (SQP)	Impressions, clicks, cart adds and purchases per search query that led to your products, and your brand's share
Search Catalog Performance (SCP)	The search funnel per ASIN: impressions, clicks, cart adds, purchases
Top Search Terms (TST)	Each search term's rank and its top clicked products
Others	Customer Journey Analytics, Customer Loyalty Analytics, Consumer Behavior Analytics and more (the menu changes often)

Data comes by week (Sunday to Saturday). To download, you generate it and then wait in the Download Manager.

In 2026 Amazon improved the Top Search Terms report by removing bot traffic that was inflating some keyword metrics. According to Amazon's notice, starting with Week 14, 2026 data, search volume for some keywords may look lower; that reflects more accurate data, not a drop in real customer interest. Keep it in mind when comparing before and after.

Brand Analytics → Top Search Terms in Seller Central. The menu at the top leads to Search Query Performance, Customer Journey Analytics and the other reports.

Four-step search funnel and what to check at each step

Weekly ASIN funnel in SellerMorning

Pulls SCP every week and compares each ASIN's four steps with its four-week average.
Tells you what to check at each step: fewer impressions → keyword rank, ad exposure, stock; lower click rate → main image, price, coupon, rating; lower purchase rate → reviews, price, delivery time, Buy Box.
Shows an eight-week trend, and a before-and-after comparison of two weeks around a listing edit.
Brings in sessions and Buy Box from the business report, so drops caused by losing the Buy Box stand apart.

The weekly ASIN funnel Summary: this week's overall funnel and actions for ASINs below their four-week average (some figures and SKUs masked; the program's reports are in Korean).

Amazon seller series

Anyone can become an Amazon seller
The real challenge after you start
Sales data at a glance
Ads at a glance
Listings at a glance
Keeping your account healthy
FBA inventory without stock-outs or overstock
Finding problems in orders and returns
Reading conversion in business reports
Finding drop-offs with Brand Analytics (this post)
Guarding your Buy Box from hijackers
Getting reimbursed for lost FBA inventory
Check profit before you change a price
A 15-minute morning routine
Safe automation with the official API

Based on personal experience. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Policies and fees are as of the time of writing — check Seller Central for the latest.

How to Read Amazon Business Reports: Sessions, Conversion and Buy Box

Sat, 24 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Sales = visits × conversion

If sales fell, one of two things happened: fewer people visited the detail page (sessions), or a smaller share of visitors bought (conversion). Splitting the two shows what to do.

Sessions	Conversion	What it means	Check first
↓	Flat	Fewer people are finding you	Search rank, ad exposure, stock
Flat	↓	Visitors look but don't buy	Price, reviews and rating, images, Buy Box
↓	↓	Both fell	Buy Box and stock first (they hit both)
↑	↓	New visitors don't match the product	Whether ad search terms and targets fit the product

Where to see it in Seller Central

Site map → Other resources → Business reports → ‘By ASIN’ on the left → Detail Page Sales and Traffic By Child Item.

Metric	Meaning
Sessions	Visits to the detail page (repeat views in one day count once)
Page views	Total times the detail page was shown
Units ordered, sales	Units and amount ordered in the period
Conversion (Unit Session %)	Units ordered ÷ sessions
Buy Box % (Featured Offer %)	Share of views where your offer held the buy button

You can pick any date range, but comparing with the previous period means downloading twice and lining them up. The last two or three days' figures may still change.

Note that as of November 2026, the Business Reports page shows a notice that Business Reports is retiring at the end of the year and asks sellers to move to Custom Analytics. If you rely on these metrics, find where they live in the new menu ahead of time.

The Business Reports sales dashboard in Seller Central. Reports by date and by ASIN are in the left menu. Product details are masked.

Business report in SellerMorning

Downloads this and the previous period and lays them side by side per child ASIN (yesterday, 7, 14 or 30 days).
High traffic, low conversion — ASINs with plenty of visits but under half the store's average conversion; time to check price, images, reviews and description.
High conversion, low traffic — ASINs that sell well but get few visits; candidates for more ad spend.
Collects ASINs with Buy Box under 90% and drops of more than 30%.
Also reads the conversion card and top search terms from the Marketing workspace.

The business report Summary: sessions, conversion and Buy Box against the previous period, plus the ASIN groups to check (sessions and sales masked; the program's reports are in Korean).

Amazon seller series

Anyone can become an Amazon seller
The real challenge after you start
Sales data at a glance
Ads at a glance
Listings at a glance
Keeping your account healthy
FBA inventory without stock-outs or overstock
Finding problems in orders and returns
Reading conversion in business reports (this post)
Finding drop-offs with Brand Analytics
Guarding your Buy Box from hijackers
Getting reimbursed for lost FBA inventory
Check profit before you change a price
A 15-minute morning routine
Safe automation with the official API

Based on personal experience. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Policies and fees are as of the time of writing — check Seller Central for the latest.

How to Analyze Amazon Orders and Returns: Find the SKUs Losing Sales

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Not ‘how much sold yesterday’ but ‘what changed’

When sales drop, the total alone doesn't help. You need to know which SKU, from which day and in which region. Returns work the same way: a SKU with a high return rate signals a problem with its description or quality.

Where to see it in Seller Central

Orders → Manage orders — check orders one by one (unshipped, cancellation requests)
Orders → Order reports (All Orders) — download every order for a date range
Orders → Manage returns → Returns and recovery insights — return rates and reasons
Order reports → FBA customer return reports — reason and status of each return

Two things to watch. Order times in reports and on screen are recorded in US time (UTC in some files), so they easily end up a day off from Korean dates. And with a unified North America account, All Orders mixes in orders from the US, Canada and Mexico.

Manage Orders in Seller Central lists orders one by one, so seeing the overall picture takes extra work. Order IDs, products and amounts are masked.

Order report in SellerMorning

Choose yesterday, last 7 days or last 30 days; it compares automatically with the previous period of the same length.
Converts every order time to US Central time to set the date, and keeps only Amazon.com orders.
Shows daily trends, a SKU ranking (biggest gainers and losers) and sales by state.
Flags SKUs with cancellation over 5% or returns over 10%, and seller-fulfilled orders close to their ship-by date (rate alerts are skipped when counts are too small).
Data already fetched the same day is not fetched again.

The order report Summary: key metrics for this and the previous period, plus highlights (order counts, sales and SKUs masked; the program's reports are in Korean).

What to fix first, by return reason

For a SKU with a high return rate, look at the reasons in the return report to see what to fix.

Common return reason	Check first
Wrong size or fit	Size chart, measurements in the images
Not as described	Whether the title, bullets and images match the real product
Defective or damaged	Packaging, pre-shipment inspection, supplier quality
No longer needed, ordered by mistake	Mostly normal; look only if the share jumps

Amazon seller series

Anyone can become an Amazon seller
The real challenge after you start
Sales data at a glance
Ads at a glance
Listings at a glance
Keeping your account healthy
FBA inventory without stock-outs or overstock
Finding problems in orders and returns (this post)
Reading conversion in business reports
Finding drop-offs with Brand Analytics
Guarding your Buy Box from hijackers
Getting reimbursed for lost FBA inventory
Check profit before you change a price
A 15-minute morning routine
Safe automation with the official API

Based on personal experience. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Policies and fees are as of the time of writing — check Seller Central for the latest.

Amazon FBA Inventory Management: Avoid Stock-outs and Aged Inventory Fees

Tue, 20 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Too little or too much stock both cost money

FBA inventory costs you on both sides. A stock-out loses sales and search rank; stock that sits too long adds surcharges (2026 aged inventory surcharge guide).

Cost	When it applies
Monthly storage fee	Every month, by volume (higher in October–December)
Aged inventory surcharge	Units stored more than 181 days; rises in steps as stock ages
Low-inventory-level fee	Stock too low for the sales pace (under about 28 days of supply)
Capacity limits	A cap on how much you can send (based on forecast sales and the Inventory Performance Index, IPI)

According to a notice in Seller Central (as of November 2026), from February 1, 2027 the monthly storage fee and the aged inventory surcharge merge into a single Unified Monthly Storage Fee, and the low-inventory-level fee switches to a new days-of-supply calculation. Exact rates and bands change often, so check the fee pages in Seller Central.

Where to see it in Seller Central

Supply chain → Manage Amazon inventory — available, inbound and reserved units per SKU
FBA dashboard — IPI and its drivers, storage utilization, expected aged-inventory surcharges
Manage shipments — units received per inbound shipment
Supply chain reports → FBA inventory reports — all of the above as an SKU table to download

There are plenty of screens, but working out which SKU to send, when and how many is still left to you.

Manage Amazon inventory in Seller Central: inventory health, total units, days of supply and inventory age per product. Product names, ASINs and sales are masked.

FBA inventory in SellerMorning

Pulls the FBA inventory report once a day and works out days of supply for every SKU: under 14 days is ‘restock now’, under 30 days is ‘restock soon’ (both adjustable).
Ranks stock-outs, stock that can't sell (inactive), slow movers, unfulfillable units and short inbound receipts.
Reads IPI, utilization and surcharge estimates from the FBA dashboard into the summary.
Passes near-stock-out products to the ads feature, which suggests lower bids so you don't pay for ads on products you can't ship.

The ‘Needs attention’ sheet of the FBA inventory report (SKU, ASIN and product names masked; the program's reports are in Korean).

When and how much to send

You can set the restock point with simple arithmetic.

Daily sales = units sold in the last 30 days ÷ 30
Days of supply = (available + inbound units) ÷ daily sales
Send when days of supply is about to fall below ‘production, shipping and check-in time + a buffer’

For example, if you sell 4 units a day, it takes 35 days from dispatch until the stock is checked in at an FBA warehouse, and you keep a 14-day buffer, send the next batch before stock falls below 196 units (4 × 49 days).

On the other side, a SKU whose current stock would take more than 180 days to sell will leave units that hit the aged inventory surcharge. Send less, or move it with a discount or promotion.

Amazon seller series

Anyone can become an Amazon seller
The real challenge after you start
Sales data at a glance
Ads at a glance
Listings at a glance
Keeping your account healthy
FBA inventory without stock-outs or overstock (this post)
Finding problems in orders and returns
Reading conversion in business reports
Finding drop-offs with Brand Analytics
Guarding your Buy Box from hijackers
Getting reimbursed for lost FBA inventory
Check profit before you change a price
A 15-minute morning routine
Safe automation with the official API

Based on personal experience. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Policies and fees are as of the time of writing — check Seller Central for the latest.

Amazon Account Health Rating (AHR): How to Avoid Account Deactivation

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

If your account stops, everything stops

Amazon rates every seller account with an Account Health Rating (AHR) from 0 to 1000. If it drops too low the account can be deactivated, and sales, ads and payouts all stop (AHR guide).

Score	Status	Meaning
200–1000	Healthy	Normal; new accounts start at 200
100–199	At risk	Deactivation may come soon
0–99	Unhealthy	Eligible for immediate deactivation

Where to see it in Seller Central

Menu (☰) → Account health → Manage account health shows three groups.

Customer service performance — Order Defect Rate (negative feedback, A-to-z claims, chargebacks) under 1%
Policy compliance — intellectual property, authenticity, product condition, listing policy and more; each new item lowers the score
Shipping performance — late shipment, cancellation and tracking rates for seller-fulfilled (FBM) orders; N/A is normal if you only use FBA

The hard part is opening this page every day and spotting what changed since yesterday. A new policy violation simply adds one more line, and many come with a response deadline.

The Account Health page in Seller Central: the Account Health Rating, order defect rate and policy issues in one place. Order counts are masked.

Also check Account Health Assurance at the top right. Eligible sellers are enrolled in it, and Amazon won't deactivate the account as long as you work with Amazon to resolve any issues. If you're enrolled, it says ‘You're enrolled!’.

Account health in SellerMorning

Reads the score and metrics daily and shows the change since last time.
Keeps policy issues in an issue register, so only new ones are reported and nothing is collected twice.
Puts affected products, claims (chargebacks, A-to-z, SAFE-T) and Voice of the Customer in the same file.
A falling score or a new violation goes to the top of Today's Summary (P0).

The daily account health report: score and change, each metric's target and status, and counts by policy category (the program's reports are in Korean).

What to do when the score drops

Find what's new — check All Issues for the items that went up and the products they affect.
Check the deadline — many policy issues come with a response deadline, and missing it can mean suppressed listings or a further drop.
Fix the cause and respond — edit the listing or gather evidence such as invoices, then appeal or submit a plan of action from that issue's page.
Watch for a few days — confirm the resolved issue leaves the list and the score recovers.

Amazon seller series

Based on personal experience. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Policies and fees are as of the time of writing — check Seller Central for the latest.

Amazon's 75-Character Title Rule: How to Audit and Safely Bulk-Edit Listings

Fri, 16 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Listing rules keep changing

Since July 27, 2026, Amazon has required product titles of 75 characters or fewer, spaces included, in every category except media. Extra detail moves to a new field, Item Highlights (125 characters), and titles that are still too long are gradually rewritten by Amazon's AI. Brand owners enrolled in Brand Registry get 14 days to review the change first.

Titles are not the only rule. Bullets, search terms, Item Highlights and images all have length, character and background rules, and breaking them can drop a product from search or stop its sales. In our own store, 201 of 262 active or incomplete listings were over 75 characters.

This last post shows how to check listings, then apply fixes safely after reviewing them.

Listing check: hundreds of listings against the rules at once

The listing check only reads and compares four sources: the All Listings Report (titles, status), the Category Listings Report (bullets, search terms, Item Highlights), Seller Central's Manage products pages (search suppression, fixes needed), and the amazon.com detail pages customers see.

Item	Rule checked
Title	75 characters or fewer; no word more than twice; no banned characters (! $ ? _ { } ^ ¬ ¦) or promotional phrases
Bullets	Five, each 10 to 255 characters; no emoji, ™, ®, links or unsupported claims
Search terms, Item Highlights	Search terms within 249 bytes; Item Highlights within 125 characters
Detail page	At least 7 images; white-background main image of 1000 px or more; A+; rating 4.0 or higher
Status	Incomplete; inactive with stock; search suppressed; detail page removed

Results are ranked from P0 (hurts sales or visibility now) to P3 (for reference), and detail pages are checked starting with the products that spend the most on ads. Problems Amazon itself flags, such as an attribute value over its allowed length, come up as P0 at the top of Today's Summary.

P0 items in Today's Summary: Amazon's notice that an attribute such as Item Highlight is over the allowed length, next to the action to fix that attribute in Edit product (SKU and ASIN masked; the program's screens are in Korean).

The Summary of the listing check report: counts by level and the top problem types (the program's reports are in Korean).

Features that draft the fix for you

Title drafts — for every title over 75 characters, it drafts a 75-character title from the core product name and high-volume search phrases, and moves the rest into an Item Highlights draft (125 characters). It also lists popular search terms the draft left out.
Buy Box and hijackers — every day, for each selling ASIN, it checks who holds the Buy Box and whether a seller who wasn't there yesterday has joined your page.
Weekly ASIN funnel — it compares Brand Analytics search impressions, clicks, add-to-carts and purchases with the last four weeks' average to find the stage where customers drop off, and compares two weeks before and after an edit to show its effect.

The Title drafts sheet: a 75-character title draft, an Item Highlights draft and missing popular searches side by side (brand, SKU and ASIN masked).

Edits apply only after review, and can be undone

Titles, bullets, search terms, descriptions, Item Highlights and prices are edited through Amazon's official API. Nothing changes right away, though; every edit goes through five steps.

Listing and price edit flow · 5 steps

Request — write SKU, field and new value in an Excel request sheet. Title drafts from the listing check can be filled in for you.
Check — the edit is sent to Amazon as a preview only, to catch errors. Nothing actually changes. Price rows also show Amazon's fees at the new price and what is left per unit.
Apply — only the rows the seller selects are applied, after one more confirmation.
Confirm — even when Amazon answers ‘accepted’, the change takes minutes to hours to show. So the program reads it back in two stages: saved to your listing, then visible on the detail page customers see.
Revert — every change is logged with its original value; pick one in the log to restore it.

There are safeguards too. A price change over 30% or a price that loses money needs separate approval, at most 50 rows apply at once, and applied rows are marked ‘done’ so they never apply twice.

A real change log: applied time, saved-value check, detail-page confirmation time, and the original and new values (brand, SKU and ASIN masked).

Wrapping up parts 1–5

Anyone can become an Amazon seller, but as your catalog grows, success comes down to how fast you find problems each day. SellerMorning checks your data, ads and listings every day, so each morning you read one page, Today's Summary, and simply decide.

Built for	Why
Sellers with dozens to hundreds of products	The more products, the more problems slip through
Overseas sellers shipping to the US with FBA	The program handles US time zones and report waits for you
Brands with a large ad budget	Daily ad suggestions and tracking of their results

SellerMorning is the program we use every day and keep improving. We will keep writing up new features and what we learn along the way here. From part 6 on, we go deeper into each daily check: account health, FBA inventory, orders and returns, and more.

Interested in SellerMorning or want to try it? Email us at toolbox@toolboxnotes.com.

Amazon seller series

Based on personal experience. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Policies and fees are as of the time of writing — check Seller Central for the latest.

Amazon PPC Optimization: 4 Places Ad Spend Leaks and How to Fix Bids

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ad budget leaks quietly

Amazon ads cost money on every click. With dozens of campaigns and thousands of keywords and search terms, nobody can check one by one which clicks sell and which are wasted.

Most of the leaks come from four places.

Searches that don't sell — clicks keep coming, orders don't
Bids that don't fit — the keyword sells, but ad cost eats the profit
Missed chances — a search term sells well in an auto campaign but was never moved to an exact-match keyword
Ads out of step with stock — ads keep running for a product that is almost out of stock or has lost the Buy Box

The ads feature of SellerMorning finds these four every day and suggests what to change, where, and by how much.

The feature list on the left of the program. The ads features are 'Collect ad data and suggest actions' and 'Re-run ad analysis only', which reuses data already downloaded (the program's screens are in Korean).

Ads are judged together with everything else

Ad reports alone are not enough to judge ads, so the program gathers four sources and lines them up.

Source	Contents
Ad reports	Search terms, targeting, campaigns (with placements), advertised products, Sponsored Brands search terms (last 30 days, daily)
Brand Analytics	Search Query Performance (SQP), Search Catalog Performance (SCP), Top Search Terms (TST)
Inventory and products	FBA inventory, all listings (titles and prices)
Business reports	Buy Box percentage; total sales including non-ad sales

Ad reports take 20 to 40 minutes to generate, so the daily run requests them first and waits while other features run. With the Amazon Ads API connected it uses the API; otherwise it downloads them from the Ads console.

The Summary sheet of the ad report: key metrics, urgent alerts and suggestion counts by group (amounts, impressions, clicks and orders masked; the program's reports are in Korean).

Every suggestion says where to click and what to change

Suggestions fall into five groups.

Group	Examples
Bid changes	Lower the bid where ACoS is over 1.3 times the target; pause a target with 30 clicks and no orders
Negative keywords	Add a search term with 15+ clicks and no orders as a negative exact
New keywords	Harvest search terms that sold in auto or broad campaigns into exact match; add missing Brand Analytics top searches
Match, budget, placement	Adjust by placement (top of search, product pages); campaigns running out of budget
Stock and listing	Lower bids for products with under 14 days of stock; review ads for products that lost the Buy Box

Each suggestion carries the evidence (clicks, orders, spend, ACoS), the period, the rule applied and a How to do it column. That column uses the Ads console's own English menu names — which campaign, which ad group, which tab, what to type — so you can simply follow it.

The Suggested actions sheet: each row gives the Ads console menu path and the evidence (campaign names and amounts masked).

Each suggestion is also graded: L1 is a small, reversible change; L2 needs approval; L3 is a call for a person to make.

Targets from your own costs, and a check on the results

Target ACoS per product — enter cost and logistics per product in the settings file, and the program works out each product's break-even ACoS and judges against a lower target. Products without costs use a default target (for example 30%).
Protected keywords and campaign roles — list words that must never be suggested as negatives, such as your brand name, and set each campaign's role (research, performance, defense and so on).
Results of past suggestions — for the last 30 days of suggestions, it estimates whether each was carried out and compares spend, orders and ACoS for the 7 days before and after, including spend saved.
It never changes your ads — this feature gathers data and makes suggestions only. The seller changes bids, keywords and budgets after reviewing them.

The next post covers listing checks, and listing and price edits that apply only what you approve.

Amazon seller series

Based on personal experience. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Policies and fees are as of the time of writing — check Seller Central for the latest.

Amazon Inventory, Orders and Sales: One Page Every Morning

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

SellerMorning: your morning to-do list on one page

This is the program that replaces the ‘six menus, many reports, long waits’ from the last post. It runs on your own PC, gathers the reports into Excel, and tells you what needs doing now, ranked P0 to P3.

It works in two ways.

Amazon's official API (SP-API) first — inventory, orders, finance and Buy Box data come straight from the API, without opening a page.
A browser for pages the API doesn't cover — for pages such as the report center, it downloads reports in the browser, the same way a seller would, with generous pauses between clicks so it never puts load on Amazon's site.

The SellerMorning main window. Pick a feature on the left, or tick several to run in order; the run log and result files appear on the right (the program's screens are in Korean).

The data features at a glance

Each feature produces one Excel report, with a ‘Needs attention’ sheet up front so you can act right away.

Feature	What it gathers	What it tells you
Account health	Account Health score, metrics and policy compliance, claims, Voice of the Customer	Only new issues (an issue register removes repeats), score trend
All listings	All Listings Report	Inactive, incomplete and unpriced listings
FBA inventory	FBA inventory report, FBA dashboard, inbound shipments	Stock-outs, low stock, restock needs, aged-inventory surcharges, short inbound receipts
Order report	Orders (US Central time), returns	Change vs the previous period, SKUs with high returns, orders near their ship-by date
Business report	Sessions, conversion and Buy Box by child ASIN	High-traffic, low-conversion ASINs; drops of 30% or more
Finance and reimbursements	18 months of inventory ledger, reimbursements, refunds, FBA fees	Lost or damaged stock never reimbursed; refunds never returned

Each report is fetched once a day. If Seller Central already has today's report, the program downloads it instead of requesting a new one.

The ‘Needs attention’ sheet of the FBA inventory report: stock-outs, low stock and slow movers ranked by priority, with the action in the right-hand column. The program's reports are in Korean (SKU, ASIN and product names masked).

Daily auto-run and Today's Summary

Schedule a time, and every day the program runs the features above in order and wraps the results into one page, Today's Summary. If one feature fails the rest still run, and a desktop notification shows the most urgent item when it finishes.

Level	Meaning	Examples
P0	Today	Policy violation; out of stock while selling
P1	This week	Buy Box lost; lost stock eligible for reimbursement; low stock
P2	When you have time	Falling conversion; aged inventory
P3	For reference	Token renewal reminder; improvement ideas

Items of the same kind are grouped into one line, such as ‘12 SKUs low on stock’, so this one page is all you read in the morning. The same summary also appears on the program's Today's Summary tab.

The program's Today's Summary tab: counts by level, the features run today and how long each took (43 minutes in total), and the to-dos with how to handle them (sales figures, SKUs and ASINs masked).

Part of Today's Summary as saved to Excel: home-screen figures at the top, today's to-dos and how to handle them below (sales, SKUs and ASINs masked).

Your data stays on your PC

Runs only on your PC — sales data is saved only as Excel files on your computer and is never sent to any server other than Amazon's.
Secrets are encrypted — API keys and sign-in data are stored with Windows account encryption or in the Mac Keychain.
Read-only — the data features change nothing. Listing and price edits apply only what the seller reviews and selects (covered in part 5).
Windows and Mac — double-click the setup file to install what it needs; it works whether Seller Central is in English, Korean or Chinese.

The next post covers where money leaks fastest: advertising.

Amazon seller series

Based on personal experience. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Policies and fees are as of the time of writing — check Seller Central for the latest.

Why Running an Amazon Store Gets Hard: 6 Things to Check Daily in Seller Central

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

More products means more management than selling

With three products, a quick look at Seller Central each morning is enough. With dozens of products, and hundreds of colour and size variations, it is a different job.

One day an out-of-stock product keeps spending ad budget, a listing that broke a title rule drops out of search, and another seller joins your page at a lower price and takes the sale. These things happen quietly, without an alert.

This post sums up the management problems we ran into while running hundreds of products on Amazon.com.

You need to check it daily, and you can't check it all

A seller has at least six things to check every day, each in a different part of Seller Central.

What to check	Where	If you miss it
Inventory	Supply chain → FBA inventory reports	Stock-outs drop your search rank; aged stock adds long-term storage fees
Orders and returns	Orders → Order reports	Returns rise and nobody knows why
Traffic and conversion	Business reports	Conversion falls from a title or image problem, unnoticed
Ads	Marketing → Ads console	Budget keeps going to searches that don't sell
Listings and Buy Box	Products → Manage products	Search suppression; a hijacker takes your sales
Account health and reimbursements	Account health, Finance	Policy issues pile up; you miss reimbursement for stock lost in the warehouse

Going through six menus and comparing hundreds of products every day is hard to keep up. So most sellers find out only after something has gone wrong.

Seller Central is big and complex

The Seller Central site map lists about 100 pages under 10 groups: 22 under Products, 17 under Settings, 16 under Supply chain, 15 under Orders and 13 under Finance.

Even reports live in different places. Product reports, supply chain reports, order reports, business reports and Brand Analytics each sit in their own menu, and ad reports are on a separate site, the Ads console. The screens change often, too.

Seller Central home. Sales, products, supply chain, orders and ads cards share one screen with recommendations (figures and store name masked).

The main menu (☰). Supply chain alone opens nine sub-pages.

One report takes 7 steps and up to 45 minutes of waiting

Here is what it takes to get the FBA inventory report.

Open the main menu (☰)
Supply chain → Supply chain reports
Under Inventory in the left list, click ‘Show more...’
Choose FBA Inventory
Click ‘Request .txt Download’
Refresh until the report is ready (Amazon says up to 45 minutes)
Download it and sort it by product in Excel

Only after you do this for inventory, all listings, orders, returns, business and ad reports, and line them up, can you see what needs doing. Downloading is just the start.

The FBA Inventory page in Supply chain reports (the report center): a report list on the left, ‘Request Download’ buttons in the middle.

So we built a tool for it

Instead of doing this by hand every day, we built a program. SellerMorning gathers the reports above, lines them up, and lists today's to-dos in order of urgency.

The SellerMorning main window. Pick features on the left; Today's Summary on the right ranks the to-dos from P0 to P3. On this day, listing attribute errors flagged by Amazon came up as P0 (sales figures, SKUs and ASINs masked; the program's screens are in Korean).

From the next post on, we go through its features one by one. First up: pulling inventory, order and sales data together in one place.

Amazon seller series

Based on personal experience. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Policies and fees are as of the time of writing — check Seller Central for the latest.

How to Become an Amazon Seller: From Sign-Up to Your First Sale

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

No factory, no warehouse required

To become an Amazon seller you need an ID, a bank account, a credit card and one product you want to sell. Amazon can store and ship it for you (FBA), and it handles payment, delivery and much of the customer service.

That is why office workers now sell as a side business, small workshops build their own brands, and manufacturers in Korea sell straight to US customers. You can open an Amazon.com seller account and sell from outside the US.

This series has 15 parts. Parts 1–5 cover the big picture, from getting started to data, ads and listings; parts 6–15 go deeper into each daily check. The full list is at the bottom of this post.

Anyone can become an Amazon seller — registering, listing and starting to sell (this post)
The real challenge after you start — you can't watch every product, and Seller Central is complex
Your sales data at a glance — inventory, orders and revenue
Your ads at a glance — ad analysis and suggested actions
Your listings at a glance — checks and edits

Getting started as an Amazon seller · 6 steps

This post groups that flow into three stages: register, list, sell.

Step 1: Create your seller account

Registration happens online. With your documents ready, the application takes about an hour; the review takes a few days.

What you need (Amazon FAQ)

Government-issued ID (such as a passport)
A credit card that can be charged internationally
A bank account to receive payouts
A phone number and email address
Business registration documents (if you have them)
Proof of address dated within the last 180 days (a bank or card statement)
Tax information

Choose a plan (Amazon pricing)

Plan	Cost	Best for
Individual	$0.99 per item sold	Testing with fewer than 40 sales a month
Professional	$39.99 per month	Serious selling with ads, Brand Registry and reports

On both plans Amazon also takes a referral fee on each sale, usually around 15% with a $0.30 minimum. Brands new to Amazon can get over $50,000 in benefits, including first-year referral-fee waivers.

Identity verification

You upload your ID and proof of address, then either send a photo of yourself holding the ID or schedule a video call with an Amazon associate. If a name or address differs by even one letter from your application, it can be rejected, so keep the English spelling identical everywhere.

Step 2: List your products

On Amazon, one product is one listing. A listing is its title, images, bullet points (five key features), description, search terms, price and stock.

Find the product or create a new one — if the product already exists on Amazon, you join its page as a seller; for your own brand, you create a new page. New products need a barcode (UPC/GTIN), unless Brand Registry exempts you.
Pick a category — it decides the fields you fill in and your fees. Some categories need approval.
Write the listing — put brand, product name and key features in the title, and the words customers actually search for in the bullets and search terms. The main image must be the product on a white background.
Set price and stock — check with the FBA Revenue Calculator that the price still leaves a profit after fees, shipping and ads.
Choose how to fulfill — one of the two below.

Method	Who stores and ships	Upside	Burden
FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon)	Amazon's warehouses	Prime badge; Amazon handles shipping, returns and customer service	Storage and fulfillment fees; stock must be sent to US warehouses
FBM (fulfilled by merchant)	You	No storage fees; full control of stock	You must meet shipping deadlines and answer customers

Most sellers shipping into the US from abroad use FBA, because international shipping for each order makes deadlines hard to meet.

Step 3: Start selling

With FBA, there is little for you to touch between an order and your payout. When a customer orders, Amazon ships from its warehouse, and the sale minus fees is paid to your bank account, usually every two weeks.

The first order rarely comes on its own, though. A new product has no reviews and no sales history, so it sits low in search results. Most sellers start like this:

Sponsored ads — put your product near the top of search results. Start with an automatic-targeting campaign to learn which searches sell.
Reviews — request reviews after purchase, and use Amazon's new-product review program (Vine).
Promotions and coupons — build early sales to lift your search ranking.

At this point you are an Amazon seller. But once you have 10 or 50 products, new problems appear. The next post covers the management struggles every seller runs into.

From part 3 on, we introduce the program we built and use ourselves to take over that work: SellerMorning. Its rule is simple: checks and suggestions run automatically, and edits apply only after the seller reviews them.

The top of the SellerMorning window, showing the Amazon API connection status and settings (the program's screens are in Korean).

Amazon seller series

Based on personal experience. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Policies and fees are as of the time of writing — check Seller Central for the latest.

Hello, Toolbox Notes

Tue, 06 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Every so often a task comes along that is just annoying enough to repeat — copying numbers between sheets, checking the same pages every morning, renaming a pile of files. At some point it becomes faster to build a small tool than to keep doing it by hand.

Toolbox Notes is where I write those tools down.

What you'll find here

The topics won't be limited to one field. If I built something because I needed it, it can end up here. For each tool I'll try to cover:

The problem — what was slow, error-prone, or tedious before
What the tool does — the main features, with screenshots
How to use it — enough detail that you could try the same approach
What I learned — the mistakes and surprises along the way

Up next

The first tool I'll write about is a helper program for managing an Amazon seller account — the day-to-day checks and number-crunching that eat up time when you sell on Amazon.

This blog is available in English and Korean. Use the language switch at the top of any page.