Most Amazon sellers check two numbers: sales and ACoS. Then one morning the account is suspended, or the Buy Box is gone, and the “sudden” problem turns out to have been visible for weeks — in metrics nobody was watching. Here are the seven numbers we check every week across the 40+ seller accounts we manage, and the thresholds that should trigger action.
1. Account Health Rating (AHR)
Your AHR is Amazon’s one-number verdict on your account. Green does not mean safe — it means safe today. Check the trend weekly: a drifting score means policy issues are accumulating. Anything below 250 deserves same-day attention.
2. Order Defect Rate (ODR)
Amazon’s hard limit is 1%. If your ODR crosses 0.5%, treat it as an emergency, not a warning — negative feedback, A-to-Z claims and chargebacks all feed this number, and it moves faster than most sellers expect.
3. Impression Share on Your Top Keywords
Sales can stay flat while your share of the market quietly shrinks — competitors take impressions you used to own, and by the time revenue drops the rank battle is already lost. Weekly impression share tracking is the earliest warning system that exists on Amazon.
4. Inventory Days of Supply
A stock-out costs three times: lost sales, lost Buy Box, lost organic rank that takes weeks to rebuild. Below 30 days of supply on a winning SKU, restock planning should already be in motion — including manufacturing and freight lead time, not just FBA check-in time.
5. Buy Box Percentage
If you are the brand owner and your Buy Box percentage is below ~90%, something is wrong: a hijacker on your listing, a pricing rule misfiring, or fulfillment issues. Weekly checks catch hijackers in days instead of months.
6. Search Query Performance (SQP) Share
Amazon’s most underrated report. SQP shows your share of impressions, clicks, cart adds and purchases for every real search query. If click share is growing but purchase share is not, your price or reviews are losing the comparison — a completely different fix than an advertising problem.
7. TACoS (Total Advertising Cost of Sales)
ACoS only judges your ads. TACoS — ad spend divided by total revenue — tells you whether advertising is actually building organic momentum. A healthy account shows TACoS trending down over time while sales grow. Flat sales with rising TACoS means you are renting revenue, not building rank.
Make It a Ritual
Fifteen minutes, once a week, same day every week. Or let someone else watch the dashboards: our marketplace management service includes weekly trackers for every metric above, with a monthly strategy call to act on them. Get a free account audit and we will show you where your numbers stand today.
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