The Complete A-Z Guide of Amazon Terminology
We know that sometimes it can seem like Amazon speaks a language of its own. Whether you’re gearing up for your first product launch on Amazon, or just brushing up on your knowledge, our complete A-Z Guide of Amazon terminology has you covered.
Easily search this glossary on a desktop computer by using the find feature: ⌘+F (Mac) or Ctrl+F (Windows).
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3P: Third Party. Amazon, for example, is a third party marketplace that allows third party sellers to sell on their platform.
7-Day Deal: A time-bound, promotional offer where an item is featured for a limited number of days on the Amazon Deals page.
A
A9 Algorithm: The ranking system that Amazon uses to decided how products are ranked in search results.
A/B Test: Running A/B Test experiments lets you compare the performance of two versions of content against each other such as your main image, A+ content, or brand store. Each version is randomly shown to different shoppers. At the end of an A/B test, you can compare the result of a particular action such as clicks or conversion to see if content A or content B performs better. For example, you could test which version had more unit sales and see estimates of the annualized impact of publishing the winning content.
Account Health: In Seller Central, on the Account Health page Amazon provides you with an overview of your Seller Account’s adherence to the performance targets and policies required to sell on Amazon. The Account Health Rating (AHR) is a system that Amazon uses to grade your behavior as a seller on their platform. Here’s how to monitor your account health.
Ad Daily Budget: The amount an Amazon advertiser allocates for ad campaign spend per day.
Ad Impressions: The amount of times that someone has seen your ad.
A+ Content: Formerly EBC or Enhanced Brand Content. A+ Content enables Brands to upgrade their product descriptions into rich content that features enhanced images and text. A+ Content has been proven to result in higher conversion rates, increased traffic and sales when used effectively. This feature is only available to sellers with brand registry.
ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sales): Ad spend divided by ad sales.
Amazon Advertising: Amazon’s advertising platform. A list of their services can be found here.
Amazon API: Amazon’s Application Programming Interface.
Amazon Follow: A social-mediaesque feature that enables shoppers to stay up to date with people, brands and interests that they care about on Amazon. Learn how Amazon Follow can help you engage with your customers.
Amazon Live: An interactive livestreaming service where influencers share their favorite products and deals that are instantly shoppable via the live stream. See Amazon Live in action.
Amazon Prime: Amazon’s membership program that gives access to 2-day shipping and more.
Amazon Referral Fee: The commission that Amazon takes from your profits, based on category.
ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number): This is a 10-character identifier that Amazon assigns to products. Here’s how to create an ASIN.
Average Sales Rank: A metric that explains the relationship among products within the same category based on their sales performance.
Average Reviews: The average star rating of a product based on the reviews.
A-Z Guarantee: The A-to-z Guarantee protects you when you buy items sold and fulfilled by a third-party seller. It covers both the timely delivery and condition of your items.
B
Bid: The bid represents the maximum amount that an advertiser is willing to put toward a keyword. Amazon Advertising uses a bidding system.
BOL (Bill of Lading): A document issued by a carrier to acknowledge receipt of goods being carried.
Brand Analytics: a variety of reports available to approved members of Amazon Brand Registry. Brand Analytics provides brand owners with valuable insights into customer behavior, popular search terms, and advertising campaigns.
Brand Registry: Amazon Brand Registry is a program that unlocks a powerful set of tools that allow brands to perform at a high level in the Amazon universe and beyond. Once your brand is enrolled in the program, you’ll have the ability to build stores, gain a following, seriously increase your marketing, and track sales. Additionally, being enrolled in the program will provide your brand with certain automatic protections against violations to your brand.
Brand Store: Amazon allows sellers that are members of the Brand Registry to create a branded online storefront.
Buy Box: The Buy Box is a section on the right side of an Amazon product detail page where customers can add a product to their cart or “buy now.” Winning the Amazon buy box means that you were chosen for buy box placement based on a variety of factors such as offering competitive pricing, having strong inventory levels and maintaining positive seller feedback.
Bundle: Multiple single items that can be identified by a unique ASIN/UPC that are sold together as a single offering. Read more about offering bundles on Amazon.
C
Category: Amazon organizes its products by grouping them into categories and sub-categories. Each category may have different requirements and regulations.
Child Listing: Child listings, or Child ASINS, are the products that live under a Parent Listing or Parent ASIN in the form of a variation. For example, a parent listing may be a toothbrush. Three child listings could be red, yellow, and blue variations of the same exact toothbrush. All of the variations will show on the same PDP (Product Detail Page).
CTR (Click-Through Rate): Clicks divided by number of impressions.
Conversion Rate: % of visitors who complete the action of purchasing the product.
CPC (Cost Per Click): Ad spend divided by number of clicks.
D
Deals of the Day: A single item or small set of related items discounted for one day only.
DSP: Amazon DSP is a Demand-Side Platform that allows you to programmatically buy ads to reach new and existing audiences on and off Amazon. The managed-service option typically requires a minimum spend of $35,000 USD in advertising per year.
Display Ads: Visual advertisements that serve both on and off Amazon through DSP.
Drop Shipping: A business model where a third-party fulfills customer orders on your behalf.
E
Early Reviewer Program: The Early Reviewer Program encourages customers who have already purchased a product to share their authentic experience about that product, regardless of whether it is a 1-star or 5-star review.
(EBC) Enhanced Brand Content: Another (former) name for A+ Content.
F
File Feed: A way to create multiple new listings or update multiple listings in bulk, using a flat file, through Seller Central. See how to upload your inventory file.
FC (Fulfillment Center): where Amazon stores and fulfills your Fulfilled by Amazon orders.
FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon): With Fulfillment by Amazon, you store your products in Amazon's fulfillment centers, and they pick, pack, ship, and provide customer service for these products. FBA can help you scale your business and reach more customers. Learn more about the features of FBA.
FBM (Fulfillment by Merchant): A fulfillment model where the seller is responsible for fulfilling their own orders.
FBA Fulfillment Fees: Amazon’s per-unit fees and rates for filling orders that are based on size, category and weight.
G
Granitsa: Your brand’s guide on the path to e-commerce growth.
I
Inventory: The amount of product that is currently available to ship out to customers.
Inventory Health: Inventory health can be achieved by having the ideal amount of stock available, factoring in any predicted influx in demand.
IPI (Inventory Performance Index): A metric that Amazon uses to gauge your inventory performance over time. Multiple factors can affect IPI score, here are some tips for how to maintain a high score.
IP Accelerator: Amazon IP Accelerator helps businesses more quickly obtain intellectual property (IP) rights and brand protection in Amazon’s stores. Using this service will help your brand be accepted into Amazon’s Brand Registry more quickly.
For a more detailed overview: What is Amazon IP Accelerator?
K
Keywords: Words and phrases relating to your product that help boost discoverability. These are the words that consumers are typing into the Amazon search bar when they’re shopping, and it’s important to include the right keywords in your listing.
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Launchpad: Amazon suggest that you Think of Amazon Launchpad as a supplemental program designed to jumpstart and accelerate your Amazon business. It’s mission is to support entrepreneurs by providing resources and expertise to help deliver innovative products to Amazon customers. It is primarily designed for startups, and you can find out more about the program here.
Lightening Deals: Amazon Lightning Deals are paid promotional offers through which sellers can offer great discounts on specific items for a short period of time. They are featured on the “Today’s Deals” page.
Live Deals: Deals that are only available during an Amazon Live stream.
Long Term Storage Fees: Amazon FBA conducts an inventory clean-up on the 15th of each month. On these dates, inventory that has been in fulfillment centers for longer than 365 days will begin to incur fees.
M
Manually Targeted Sponsored Product Ads: Sponsored product campaigns that are only eligible on keywords that you’ve manually added to your campaign.
Match Type: Framework that can be applied to keywords to determine which searches will cause your ads to appear. There are four match types:
Broad Match: The broad match type keyword is matched to a user’s search term if all the keywords are present in it. It is least restrictive of all the match types
Phrase Match: The phrase match type keyword is matched to a user when they search for your exact keyword phrase.
Exact Match: The exact match type keyword is matched to user’s search terms if it is an exact match of the keyword. It is the most restrictive match type.
Negative Match: The negative match type prevents your ads from appearing on search queries unrelated to your brand.
Module: A module refers to a single row of Amazon’s preset content designs for your listing’s A+ Content. A module will always appear as a single row on a desktop computer, but may be displayed in a stack on mobile depending on the module type.
O
OOT Advertising: Streaming TV, also known as over-the-top (OTT) refers to any online service that provides video content over the internet without satellite or cable. Streaming TV ads are the video advertisements delivered to viewers within streaming content.
Check out Amazon’s complete guide to OOT.
P
Parent Listing (Parent ASIN): A listing that is used as an umbrella for multiple variations of a product.
Posts: Similar to a post on social media, shoppable posts can be published to show up in the Amazon feeds of those who follow your brand.
Product Detail Page (PDP): The landing page for any given product on Amazon, where shoppers can find product details, images, reviews, Q&A, and A+ Content.
Product Targeted Sponsored Product Ads: A targeting feature that makes it possible to specifically target Brands, ASINS, and categories.
R
Retail Ready: When an Amazon product is considered “retail ready,” it means that the product listing has all of the necessary information and details for the customer to fully understand the product they are purchasing.
Return Rate: Number of returns divided by number of units sold.
RoAS (Return on Ad Spend): Revenue divided by advertising cost.
S
SEO (Search Engine Optimization): The process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines.
Seller Central: Amazon’s online dashboard used by third-party sellers to manage and list products on Amazon’s marketplace.
Seller Fulfilled Prime: The Prime program that allows you to deliver directly to domestic Prime customers from your own warehouse. Join the waitlist to be notified when enrollment reopens.
Seller Support: Amazon’s support team that is responsible for providing support to merchants selling on the Amazon platform.
SKU: Stock Keeping Unit associated with a particular item to distinguish it from other item types.
Sponsored Brands: Sponsored Brands campaigns help Amazon customers discover and engage with your brand in prominent search placements, and generate awareness and consideration with customizable ads that link directly to a landing page or a Store.
Sponsored Brand Video Ads: Ad that uses video to showcase your brand or product and attract drive the customer to a specific product.
Sponsored Display Ads: A self-service display advertising solution that helps you grow your business and brand on Amazon by engaging shoppers across the purchase journey, on and off Amazon. They are different from Sponsored Products and Sponsored brands because the program is not keyword-centric, but instead, tracks customer behavior.
Sponsored Products: PPC (pay per click) ads that Amazon shows a customer when they search for a product. They look like real search results and intermingle with them.
Subscribe & Save: A subscription program that allows subscribers to save up to 15% on automatic deliveries.
T
Today’s Deals: A link at the top of Amazon.com that features a variety of deal types.
U
UPC: The Universal Product Code is a barcode symbology that is widely used worldwide for tracking trade items in stores. UPC consists of 12 numeric digits that are uniquely assigned to each trade item.
Unfulfillable: Unfulfillable inventory is inventory that has become damaged, expired, or for some other reasons cannot be sold.
V
Variations: Variations (also known as parent-child relationships) are sets of products that are related to one another in terms of Size, Color, Flavor, etc.
Verified Review: A label that Amazon puts on reviews that have been verified by Amazon to ensure that the reviewer received the product from Amazon.
Vine: Vine is a customer review program that enables Amazon selling partners to put their products in the hands of Amazon reviewers that Amazon invited to participate in Vine.
