Amazon sales down on last year? Seven checks, in order, before you spend more on ads

When sales fall on last year, someone usually suggests spending more on ads. Sometimes that is right. More often it is the most expensive way to find out what went wrong, because ads only fix a traffic problem. If shoppers can’t find the listing, can’t buy it, or visit and don’t buy, extra clicks just cost more.

So we check things in a fixed order, cheapest to rule out first, with ads last. Every report name below is the one Amazon uses on its UK help pages.

First, the sum behind every sales figure

Amazon’s Business Reports give you three numbers that multiply together into your sales¹:

• Sessions are visits to your product pages “within a 24-hour period"¹. This is traffic.
• Unit session percentage is units bought divided by sessions¹. This is conversion.
• Average selling price is sales divided by units¹. This is price, including any discounts.

Every fall in sales is a fall in one or more of these. Find which one, and you know which of the checks below matters most.

The seven checks, in order

Check 1: Measure the right thing

Most “sales are down” conversations start from the headline figure on the Seller Central home page. That figure mixes every product, every week and every promotion together. Start somewhere better:

• Compare the same weeks. Business Reports has a Same Week Last Year comparison that matches ISO week numbers, so week 14 is compared with week 14¹. Your sales calendar doesn’t line up with last year’s dates otherwise. Easter moves, Prime Day moves, and a deal you ran last October may not have run this year.
• Use the Child Item report. Amazon notes that the “Detail Page Sales and Traffic” report sums page views “only for days when there was sales activity on the ASIN”, while the “by Child Item” version sums them “for the entire date range, regardless of sales activity"¹. For a product that stopped selling, the first report hides the traffic you still had.
• Find the few products behind the drop. List every product’s sales this year and last, sort by the change in pounds, and stop when you have covered most of the drop. It is often three or four products, not the whole range.
• Look at units as well as sales. If units held and sales fell, the cause is price, not demand.

Check 2: Can shoppers find it?

A listing can look fine to you and be invisible to shoppers. Amazon says listings with a “search suppressed or detail page removed status are not searchable due to listing quality issues”, and tells you to check them in Fix Your Products².

The same page lists other reasons a product can’t be found: it has no offer, it has no browse node (the category it sits in), its launch date is in the future, or it has been classified as adult². Amazon says a change to an offer, browse node or launch date “can take up to 72 hours to appear in shopping results"².

While you are there, look at what changed on the listing since last year: a new title, different images, a merged or split variation, or edits made by another seller. A listing can lose sales without ever being suppressed.

Our suppressed listings guide walks through the common causes and fixes.

Check 3: Can they buy it?

A product out of stock sells nothing, and Amazon says plainly that an offer can’t become the Featured Offer while you are out of stock⁴. Check three things:

• Stock and days of cover for the products behind the drop, including every child of a variation. One popular size or colour out of stock can drag down the whole family.
• Restock Inventory. Amazon’s recommended quantities and ship dates are information you can use to balance “the cost of running out of stock (lost sales) vs. the cost of carrying too much inventory"⁸.
• Capacity limits. Your limits sit in the Capacity Monitor at the bottom of the Fulfilment by Amazon dashboard, and open shipments count towards them⁷. If a limit stopped you sending stock last quarter, that shows up as lost sales now.

Our inventory playbook covers reorder points and safety stock.

Check 4: Is your offer the one shoppers buy?

The Featured Offer is the offer behind the “Add to basket” button, the one most people still call the Buy Box. Business Reports shows a Featured Offer percentage: the share of page views where your offer was the one shoppers could add to their basket¹. Amazon says it falls below 100% when the product was out of stock, when the Featured Offer went to another seller, or when your product wasn’t available through the Featured Offer¹.

Two things changed in 2026 that most advice hasn’t caught up with:

• Every seller’s offer is now considered. Amazon’s UK page says: “As of 20 July 2026, Amazon no longer maintains a seller eligibility requirement and offers from all sellers are now eligible to be evaluated for the Featured Offer"⁵. Its main Featured Offer page gives the date as September 2026⁴. Either way, advice about “Buy Box eligibility” is out of date.
• Amazon names the main factors. They include the total price (item plus delivery), the delivery promise, free delivery and seller performance. Amazon says it does not consider seller reviews and star ratings, and that offers with or without Prime, and offers fulfilled by Amazon or by you, are equally likely to be featured “if all other factors are equal"⁴.

Then open Pricing Health. It lists “inactive offers with potential pricing errors”, which can’t sell at all until you fix them, and offers that can’t be featured “because they aren’t priced competitively compared with other retailers outside of Amazon” or are “priced significantly higher than recent prices observed on Amazon or elsewhere"³. If your own website or a retailer sells for less, this is where it shows. Our Featured Offer guide goes further, including other sellers on your listings.

Check 5: Traffic or conversion?

Now put your numbers through the sum. Here is a worked example with invented figures for one product over the same four weeks in two years.

Sales fell by £4,825. Change one number at a time to see where it went:

Traffic explains less than a third of the drop. The real story is conversion, which fell by a sixth in the same weeks that the average price rose by £1.50. If the price rise caused that fall, it cost more than it brought in. More ad spend would buy more sessions at the new, lower conversion rate. (If you change the numbers in a different order the split moves a little, but the story doesn’t.)

We have seen this pattern with a client. Sales were down on last year after a price rise to protect margin, and the conversion of their best product had halved. Our first advice was to stop scaling ads until conversion was fixed, then fix the listing: it was missing details shoppers needed to choose the right option, which also drove returns and poor reviews.

If conversion is the problem, look at what the shopper sees: the price against the products around it in search, the main image, the reviews, and whether the listing’s facts agree with each other. Our listing optimisation guide covers each.

Check 6: Did the market shrink, or did you lose share?

This is the check almost nobody runs, and it answers the question that matters most. If you are a brand owner in Brand Registry, open Search Query Performance in Brand Analytics. Amazon says it “surfaces query volume, impressions, clicks, add-to-basket and buys” for the searches that lead shoppers to your brand, including both organic and Sponsored Products results⁶.

For your top ten searches, compare this year with last:

• Search volume fell about as much as your sales did. The market shrank. Ads can’t create demand that isn’t there, so look at new searches, new products or other channels.
• Search volume held, but your share of purchases fell. You lost ground to someone. Look at who now sits above you on those searches, and what they offer that you don’t: price, pack size, delivery date, images or reviews.
• Your share of clicks held, but your share of purchases fell. Shoppers still pick you in search and then don’t buy. That is a listing or price problem, which takes you back to check 5.

Amazon doesn’t say on its help page how far back this report’s history goes, so check in your own account before you plan a year-on-year comparison on it. Our Brand Analytics guide shows how to read it.

Check 7: Only now, ads

By this point you know whether traffic is really the problem. If it is, and conversion, stock and price are healthy, more ad spend is a reasonable answer. Before adding budget, check what changed in your advertising since last year:

• Did a campaign stop? End dates, budget caps reached by mid-morning and failed payments all look like a sales drop.
• Did organic sales fall, or ad sales? If ad-attributed sales held and total sales fell, the problem is organic rank, and the checks above matter more than the ad budget.
• What is your TACoS? Advertising as a share of all sales shows whether ads are adding sales or just claiming them. Our TACoS guide shows how to set a ceiling.

Write it down on one page

When you have run the checks, the answer fits on one page. This is the format we use.

If you would rather we ran these checks with you, they are where every Profit Audit starts. The audit then looks deeper at each listing, and our How we measure page sets out those listing checks and how we work out every £.