How to Use Retail Analytics in Vendor Central: Where Every Report Lives

Someone has asked you for shipped units by week across a dozen ASINs, and you are three clicks deep in Vendor Central looking for the screen that will produce it. Retail Analytics is where those numbers live, and most of the work is getting to it and then setting the handful of controls that decide what the report gives back. This walkthrough covers that path and those controls, in the order the console presents them. What each individual report actually contains is a separate question, and our guide to Vendor Central report definitions answers it report by report, so keep that one open once you have the right screen in front of you.

Where Retail Analytics Lives

From anywhere in Vendor Central, open Reports in the top navigation and choose Retail Analytics from the menu. That lands you on an overview picker, where you choose a report family before you see any numbers.

The families listed there are Sales, Real-Time Sales, Inventory, Traffic, Forecasting, Net PPM, and Catalog. Every control described below lives inside a report rather than on the picker, and most of them turn up in more than one of the seven.

Amazon also sells a premium tier of Retail Analytics, reached either through a paid vendor services package or by opening a support case in Vendor Central. Everything that follows describes the standard reports.

If You Came From Seller Central

Seller Central trains a specific habit: Reports, then Business Reports, then a left rail split into By Date, By ASIN, and a few other groupings, with Sales and Traffic by Date as the report most people open first. In Vendor Central the equivalent path is Reports, then Retail Analytics, and what you land on is organized by report family instead of by the date-versus-ASIN framing you are used to. The per-ASIN cut you would have picked off the rail in Seller Central is a filter you apply inside a report here, covered further down. If you run both sides of the business, our comparison of Vendor Central, Seller Central, and hybrid selling covers the structural differences past reporting.

Setting the Date Range and Granularity

Two controls at the top of the report decide what the numbers mean, and a mismatch in either is the usual reason your figure disagrees with the one a colleague pulled off the same screen.

1. Set the granularity. Retail Analytics aggregates daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly. Weekly and monthly carry most trend work, and daily is where you go when you need to explain one specific spike or gap.
2. Set the period. You can give it a fixed date range, a relative window such as the last several weeks or the last several months, or month-to-date or year-to-date.
3. Turn on a comparison. Once a range is set, the report will compare it against the prior period or against the same range a year earlier. Year over year is the one that survives seasonality, so set it before you form an opinion about a soft week.

Decide all three before you read a single figure, and write them down next to whatever number you end up quoting, because a figure without them attached is not something you or anyone else can reproduce a month later.

Distributor View: Manufacturing vs. Sourcing

The Sales and Inventory reports carry one more control that changes the population of ASINs underneath the numbers: the distributor view, which has two settings.

Sourcing View shows the ASINs Amazon purchased from you under your vendor code, which makes it the narrower of the two. It is your own POs and your own shipments.

Manufacturing View shows every ASIN carrying your brand, whatever vendor code Amazon bought it through, and Amazon reserves it for the registered brand owner, so a vendor who is not the brand owner of record will see only the sourcing side.

The difference matters the first time the two disagree. A brand selling through more than one vendor code, or whose products also reach Amazon through a distributor, will see a larger number in Manufacturing View, and that gap is volume Amazon bought from somebody other than you. Both numbers are correct for the question they answer, so work out which question you are answering before you quote a figure, and name the view when you send it on.

The Traffic, Forecasting, Net PPM, and Catalog reports have no distributor view at all, so if you are hunting for it on one of those screens you can stop looking.

Filtering to Specific ASINs

Report pages carry an additional-filters control that narrows the view to a specific set of ASINs, up to 100 at a time.

This is the control that turns a brand-level summary into something you can act on. Filter to the twelve ASINs in next month's promotion, or the five a buyer asked about on a call, then set granularity and comparison, and the report answers the question you actually have rather than averaging it away across the catalog. The filter applies to what you see on screen and to what you export, which matters for the download below.

The Other Controls on the Page

Three smaller controls change what you are looking at, and all three are easy to miss.

• Program view. A vendor selling into more than one Amazon program can switch the report between them. Retail is the default, with other programs such as Amazon Fresh and Amazon Business available where the account sells into them. If a total looks too small, check this before you check anything else.
• Currency. Reports default to the marketplace's local currency and can be switched, which matters the moment you consolidate several marketplaces into one figure.
• Column sorting. Clicking a column header re-sorts the table. On a long ASIN list that is the fastest way to find the worst performers without exporting anything.

Downloading a Report

A download control on the report page exports what you are currently looking at, as an Excel or CSV file.

Read that literally, because the view you have set up is the view that lands in the file. Nudge a control, download again, and the second spreadsheet looks almost identical to the first while answering a different question. Two habits prevent most of the confusion that follows:

• Set every control before you download, never after.
• Rename the file the moment it lands, with the report, the range, the granularity, and the view in the name.

What Vendor Central Will Not Give You Across Reports

Everything above operates on one report at a time. Three limits appear the moment a question spans more than one.

History. Each report has its own lookback window, and once a date falls outside it the console stops showing it to you. The per-report spans are in our report definitions guide, and the practical consequence is that history you have not exported may not be retrievable later.

Joins. A download gives you one report, on one range, in one view. Putting shipped units next to on-hand inventory next to open POs for the same ASINs over the same weeks means exporting each report separately and matching them up in a spreadsheet, every time the question comes up.

Repetition. None of the setup above is saved for you, so a weekly read means walking the same menu path, resetting every control by hand, and stitching the same exports back together before anyone can look at a number.

That last layer is the one InsightLeap runs continuously. It pulls product-level Vendor Central sales, inventory, and purchase order data on a schedule, keeps historic VC reports past the point the console retains them, and holds them together so the cross-report comparison already exists when you sit down to look. The features page covers what that includes.

Where to Start This Week

Open Reports, then Retail Analytics, and pick the Sales report. Set granularity to weekly, the period to the last thirteen weeks, and the comparison to year over year before you read anything on the screen. Check which distributor view you are in and note it down, filter to the ASINs you actually care about, then download the file and rename it with those settings in the name. That gives you one clean baseline export, and next week you repeat the sequence with the same settings so the two files line up.