Following an Amazon search outage on Wednesday this week, Amazon business reports for merchants have not been updated for 24 hours on Amazon.com. The last updates to merchant’s sales statistics was around 7pm on Wednesday evening.
The reports that Amazon merchants are unable to access are critical as they document sales and orders, payments, and available inventory levels. Merchants need to know what stock to replenish and whilst payments still appear to be being processed, merchants can’t match them up with orders. They haven’t even been able to see daily sales numbers although some report that they can see sales in ‘Manage Orders’, just not in summaries.
Eventually, on Thursday Amazon posted a message in the Seller Central tech notifications stating “Sep 6, 2018 We are currently experiencing a system issue that is impacting Business Reports . (09/06, 6:27 PDT)”.
Ten hours ago, an SEAmod posted in the Amazon forums saying “Hello Sellers, The processing of Sales and Traffic data has been delayed, and we are working to resolve the issue. The results shown in the Sales Summary widget and on Business Reports are not accurate at this time. Actual sales are not affected. We hope to resolve this problem by tomorrow.”
The good news is that the outage of Amazon business reports isn’t impacting sellers who use third party tools via the Amazon API. If you use a multi-channel management solution then it’s unlikely you’re particularly concerned by a sales summary on Amazon not being updated. You’ll be using your third party solution to manage your inventory levels and balance them across multiple marketplaces.
The sellers the sales summary will impact most are likely to be smaller merchants who manage their Amazon sales manually and rely on Amazon business reports to keep tabs on their sales.