The Amazon Account Audit Checklist We Run Before Quoting a Brand
Most account audits are a sales document wearing a diagnostic costume. You get a score out of a hundred, forty generic recommendations, and a proposal stapled to the back. The useful version answers one question: of everything wrong with this account, which problem is costing the most money this month?
That question is worth asking yourself before you hire anyone. If you'd rather have it run against your own data, our Amazon account audit is free to start and covers everything below. The rest of this post is the checklist, in the order we work it, so you can get most of the way there on your own.
The order matters more than the list does. The early checks are the ones where one finding invalidates everything downstream, and we've watched brands spend a quarter optimizing bids on ASINs that were never buyable in the first place.
Why the answer is rarely the thing you called about
Across our client portfolio, the constraint is usually not the symptom. One brand came to us about climbing ACOS and a profitability problem that wouldn't move. The advertising was competent. What was actually suppressing the account was a set of outdated negative reviews describing a product defect the brand had already fixed, which held conversion down and made every ad dollar work harder than it needed to. Updating the content to match the current product lifted conversion 5.2% and improved ACOS 12% without a dollar of additional ad spend. That write-up is on our review recovery results page.
An audit that had started with campaign structure would have found nothing. That's the argument for the sequence below.
The Amazon account audit checklist, in priority order
| # | Area | The question it answers | Can you check it yourself? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Account health and compliance | Is anything about to be taken away from us? | Yes |
| 2 | Catalog integrity | Can a shopper actually buy every ASIN we think is live? | Yes |
| 3 | Buy Box and offer control | Are we winning sales on our own listings? | Yes |
| 4 | Conversion by ASIN | Which detail pages are turning traffic away? | Partly |
| 5 | Advertising structure | Is spend going where incremental revenue is? | Partly |
| 6 | Inventory and fee drag | What is the catalog costing us to hold and ship? | Partly |
| 7 | Money already owed | What has Amazon lost or damaged and not paid for? | Partly |
| 8 | Account control | If the agency relationship ended tomorrow, what happens? | Yes |
1. Account health and compliance
Start here because everything else is conditional on the account existing next month. Pull your Account Health dashboard and read the policy compliance section, not just the performance metrics. Look for open policy violations, restricted or inactive ASINs, and anything flagged for documentation you never sent. Then check whether your tax, bank and business details are current, because a stale verification is a quiet way to lose disbursements at the worst possible moment.
Write down anything with a deadline on it. Those items jump the queue regardless of what the rest of the audit finds.
2. Catalog integrity
Export your full active listing report and reconcile it against what you believe you sell. You're looking for three things: listings that are suppressed, listings that are active but have no buyable offer, and variation families that have broken apart so child ASINs are orphaned from the parent.
This is the check that most often produces a number nobody expected. A suppressed ASIN keeps its ad campaigns, keeps spending where it still serves, and sells nothing. We've found revenue-driving products suppressed for weeks inside accounts that had a weekly advertising meeting and no catalog meeting at all.
3. Buy Box and offer control
Open three or four of your highest-revenue listings and count the offers. Then pull the Buy Box percentage data in Brand Analytics and sort ascending. If you don't own the Buy Box on your own branded listing most of the time, nothing downstream in this audit will fix the revenue problem, because you're paying to send traffic to a page where someone else collects the sale.
Note who the other sellers are and whether you authorized them. If the answer is no, that's a distribution problem rather than a pricing one, and it's the one area on this list where running it yourself has a real ceiling. We wrote up the process in finding and removing unauthorized sellers, and the enforcement cadence itself is what our unauthorized seller removal service covers.
4. Conversion by ASIN
In your Business Reports, pull unit session percentage by child ASIN for the last 90 days and sort ascending on your top traffic pages. A product getting real sessions and converting well below the rest of your catalog is telling you something specific: the traffic is fine and the page is losing the sale.
Read those pages like a shopper who has never heard of you. Check the main image against the category's current convention, read the first two bullets, and look at the most recent reviews rather than the average star rating. Averages hide the thing that changed in March.
5. Advertising structure
Only now does the ad account become worth auditing, and the first question isn't ACOS. It's whether the structure lets you tell paid from incremental. Check how much of your ad spend is on branded search terms you'd likely win organically, whether any campaign has a budget cap it hits daily, how much spend sits on ASINs that fail checks 2 through 4, and whether there's any targeting beyond keywords.
Then look at spend against profit per SKU rather than revenue. An efficient ACOS on a product with a thin contribution margin after fees, returns and the promotional discount is still a losing campaign. Most brands have at least one.
6. Inventory and fee drag
Check your inventory age, your storage utilization, and your capacity limits against what you plan to ship for the next peak. Then pull the fee preview and look for dimensional changes you weren't told about, since a reclassified package size moves the fulfillment fee on every unit without changing anything you can see on the listing.
Stockouts belong in this section too, and they're worth more attention than they usually get. A stockout on a ranking ASIN costs the rank, and getting the rank back costs more than the inventory would have.
7. Money already owed
Amazon loses and damages inventory at scale, and the reimbursements you're entitled to expire. Reconcile your inventory ledger against your reimbursement reports, and treat this as time-sensitive rather than housekeeping: Amazon has shortened its claim windows more than once, and the windows differ by claim type. Read the current deadlines in Seller Central before you file anything, because a claim that was in-window last year may not be now. The mechanics are in our FBA reimbursements walkthrough, and reimbursement recovery is a service for brands whose catalog is too large to reconcile by hand.
8. Account control
Last, and it has nothing to do with performance. Confirm that the primary account owner is someone at your company, that Brand Registry's sensitive roles sit with your people rather than a vendor's, and that no agency holds credentials instead of delegated user permissions. We've inherited accounts where the brand couldn't revoke its previous agency's access without opening a case, and that's a bad position to negotiate from.
The four checks you can't run from outside the account
Being honest about this is the whole reason the checklist above is free to give away. Four of these eight need something a brand owner usually doesn't have, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you a template.
- Incrementality on advertising. Separating paid sales from sales you'd have made anyway needs campaign-level history, a controlled change, and a comparison period. One account's reports can show you efficiency. They can't show you incrementality.
- Conversion benchmarks. A 9% unit session percentage is excellent in one category and poor in another. Knowing which requires a set of comparable accounts, and it's the single most common place a self-run audit draws the wrong conclusion.
- Fee and reimbursement reconciliation at scale. Doable by hand for 30 ASINs. Not doable by hand for 900, which is where most of the recoverable money actually sits.
- Distribution tracing. Finding who leaked your inventory means test buys, lot code records and the willingness to cut off a paying wholesale account. That's an operational decision with a cost, not a spreadsheet exercise.
The other four are genuinely yours to run, and running them before you talk to anyone changes the conversation. A brand that walks into a call knowing it has 11 suppressed ASINs and a Buy Box problem gets a useful first call. A brand that walks in asking what we think gets a worse one.
What to do with what you find
Rank the findings by money, not by how annoying they are. Then take the one at the top. The point of a sequence is that it stops you from doing the fifth thing first, which is what happens when the audit arrives as an undifferentiated list.
If you get through checks 1 through 3 and find problems you can't fix in a week, that's the moment to get someone else looking at it. Book a call and bring your findings; we'll run the four you couldn't and tell you which one is actually costing the most.
Run checks 1, 2 and 3 this week. The brands that are hardest to audit are the ones that have never looked.
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