Decoding all of the reports that are available through our Amazon seller accounts can be a somewhat difficult task, so I wanted to share how to actually see what items are selling through your account via FBA before the item is shipped by Amazon.  It is easy to see what is selling for merchant fulfilled items, but FBA can be a little bit trickier.  So I will walk you through 7 screenshots that will show you how to view pending Amazon FBA orders so you can see what is actually selling through your account.  I have blocked out any information that would show my current numbers for the month (you’ll have to wait for the January results post), or any specific items that I am selling, but these screenshots should easily show how to view your pending Amazon FBA orders.  

How to View your Pending Orders on Amazon Central

First, start at your Amazon seller central home page: We’ll start by clicking the “View more of your sales statistics” that can be seen by the “1” in the screenshot.  We are then taken to this screen: From this screen we can see the total sales we have made and the number of items, but we are not able to see which specific items have sold via FBA.  I will admit that for my first few months selling on FBA this is the only way I knew how to view how many items I was selling per day, but I was left wondering how to see what the actual items were that sold before receiving the emails indicating the item that was shipped, or viewing my transaction history in the payments account.  So the next step is to return to your Amazon seller account home page, and click the “View your orders” link that can be seen by the “2” in the first screenshot, you will be taken here:  This shows the items that have actually shipped for the specified date range, but that’s not what we want, so we will click “advanced search” which is circled in red above, here’s the next step: This allows us to select a date range, and what type of orders we want to see.  It is important to leave the box by “include pending orders” checked in order to see which items are selling via FBA before they are shipped.  For this example I will leave the default settings, click search, and that brings me here: I am now able to see my pending FBA orders, as you can see from above.  The items listed as pending should add up to the total of your ordered product sales from the previous screenshots, unless items have shipped the same day they were ordered, and then this would no longer hold true.  You can also cross check this by following this step: 

Click on the “manage FBA inventory” then you are brought here:Now, you can see items that are in “reserved” status.  This is another way to cross check the items that have sold via FBA for a particular day, but it is not as reliable as viewing the pending orders method as shown in the first 5 screenshots, as items that are in reserved status have not necessarily sold.  They could be set aside for item verification, they could be being transferred to another warehouse, among other things, so if you want an accurate depiction of your pending orders, I recommend using the method shown in the first 5 screenshots.

As the title promised, I will also share 2 other tips that I find useful.

First, if you are sending in boxes to amazon multiple times a week using UPS, I recommend looking into signing up for the “UPS Smart Pickup.”  This allows you to have UPS pickup as many boxes as you have from your house or business as many times per week as you want for a fee of $10.30 per week.  You can get it free for the first year as well.  I started using this service in November of 2013, and it is great to not have to personally drive all of my boxes to a UPS Store or UPS drop off location.  I am not an affiliate and receive no compensation for this, it is simply a service that I use and find saves me a ton of time.  I did a blog post on all the details of how to sign up and take advantage of the free year promotion.  You can read the post HERE.

The other tip for today is for those of you who buy boxes from Home Depot to use for shipping items to Amazon warehouses.  Home Depot will match coupons and promotions from competitors, and you can use this to your advantage to get your boxes cheaper.  For example, the store Menards, often does an 11% rebate on everything in the store, and currently is doing a 14% off for anything you can fit in a paper grocery bag.  Home Depot will match these promotions if you simply ask them to while checking out.  I have done it many times, and the savings add up.  Home Depot will also match Lowe’s coupons if you have access to those.

Hopefully today’s post provides you with some useful information.  If you have any questions or comments, please leave them in the comments section below.