Finding Underperforming Amazon Products for Promotion or Removal

Every seller has that story of an Amazon product that they thought would be their next big top seller. 

Only that it doesn’t. 

Soon, you’ll end up with underperforming stock that bleeds money off your Amazon business in the long run. Before that happens, it’s a good idea to start finding those products and decide whether or not they should be gone for good from your listings.

Identifying Underperforming Amazon Products

It’s often easy to spot badly performing products when you consider only sales. You simply need to check your inventory on your Amazon listings that have been really slow moving. These are the products that you’ve pretty much lost hope on, even after you’ve bled money and time to promote them.

You can run an inventory check on underperforming products manually or with the help of an amazon analytics tool like SellerLegend. SellerLegend has a complete screen for Inventory that shows data such as, but not limited to Inventory Tied Cost, Total Retail Value, Estimated Profit, Age Level, Velocity, and Restock Date and Quantity for every product. These details can help you make important decisions, such as removing products, or aggressively promoting them so they can get sold faster. 

Deciding to Remove Badly Performing Products

It’s a no-brainer to decide the removal of Amazon products that don’t sell. In this case, it’s often better to cut the losses early on by completely removing the listing.

So which products do you remove? There are 2 factors you should consider:

• Sales Velocity, and
• Inventory Age

SellerLegend can help you look for these two factors that may be helpful in making the decision. Go to SellerLegend’s inventory screen, select a time period to calculate the velocity for. Velocity is basically the average daily sales over the selected time period. Then, click on the Velocity column title to sort the items by velocity. This will give you the list of products sorted by how much each product sells daily. Try changing the time period to see different patterns. You want to narrow down to products which have really low sales velocity.

Next, take a look at the age level. This can help you decide whether or not to actually remove the product completely. If the velocity is quite low over a large time period and the age level is towards red, then you should definitely consider removing. 

The main reason for removing aging products is to avoid the Long Term Storage Fee (or even normal storage fee) Amazon charges you for keeping products in their warehouse for longer periods of time. This can have a significant effect on your profit figures. More so if you already have a big stock and low sales velocity. 

Promoting an Underperforming Amazon Product

What about products that don’t meet all of the 2 factors mentioned previously?

If the product has a relatively young inventory age but suffers from low sales velocity – and you’re quite sure that the product might not sell all that much, then you can consider running a promotion to move inventory of the underperforming Amazon product. 

At first, you can provide just enough discount that you make at least a little bit of profit. If that works, well enough. If not, you may use a discount percentage where you reach breakeven. The last resort would be to sell at a loss. 

Once you have exhausted this possibility, you should consider placing a removal order to have the product removed from Amazon shelves. Then you can look for other sellers who are willing to buy the products in bulk or consider liquidating the inventory in other channels by yourself.

Underperforming products are just one of the realities you have to confront as an Amazon seller. Getting rid of non-performing inventory is just one of the ways you can avoid unnecessary business costs and ensure the financial health of your Amazon business. You can also check out our tips on Amazon FBA inventory management.