Amazon Catalog Analysis: How to Use Your ASINs to Drive Growth

Taking a comprehensive approach to knowing and managing your catalog is a necessary step to unlocking profitability on Amazon. High-level catalog analysis is important for many reasons, but most notably because it helps you understand your overall account performance at a big-picture view. Additionally, it helps you quickly identify areas of risk, improve productivity, focus on the most important aspects of your business, and utilize your time efficiently.

Not only is it important to maintain adequate stock, but you also need to make sure it does not become stale inventory or sit stagnant on the storage shelf for long periods of time, is the product your customer was looking for, and lasts until the next shipment from your supplier. Not only does keeping ample stock impact your Buy Box share, but it also affects your performance metrics – if you are constantly stocking out, you run the risk of customers not returning to your store for repeat purchases and receiving negative customer reviews.

With a thorough catalog analysis, you will be able to slice and dice your catalog into different groups and identify a customized strategy by item in order to reach your store’s full potential.

Prioritizing Impact vs. Effort

We recommend breaking down your focus and priorities into four areas: low effort, high effort, low value, and high value. It will be important to assess which bucket your actions will fall into in order to prioritize against your business goals.

• Low effort, high value: These actions are “low-hanging fruit,” the quick wins that should be performed immediately, such as replenishing your most profitable items.
• High value, high effort: Items that fall into this quadrant are strategic and require extensive planning, such as developing a relationship with a supplier overseas that has a long lead time but great potential for the long run.
• Low effort, low value: These will be actions that you will want to skip or at least move further down the list of priorities for the time being, such as identifying items at the end of the product life cycle and assigning them a liquidation strategy to reassess every two weeks.
• Low value, high effort: These items are time-consuming tasks that take a lot of time or manpower to accomplish and don’t always necessarily yield results that move the needle. An example of this would be evaluating a backup plan to move items when liquidation tactics were unsuccessful the first time around.

Think through the impact that each action is going to have on your business and how much effort it will take to get it accomplished, to make sure that you are allocating your time and resources properly. Having a catalog management strategy and knowing your ASINs intimately will prime your Amazon business for success, as you will be able to more accurately set targets, prioritize, take action, and measure results.

Tracking your profitable, non-profitable, selling, and non-selling items regularly will help you understand the deep connection between sales and margins and how you can optimize both simultaneously.