AMAZON QUICK REFERENCE

The first encounter with the selling process on Amazon can be intimidating – you are bombarded by unfamiliar-sounding phrases, abbreviations and terms.

The following glossary is designed to help those new to Amazon navigate the abbreviations, as well as more experienced sellers and vendors, in need of a little memory refresher! It’s not an exhaustive list, but should provide you with enough information to get started.

ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) – a unique identifier assigned by Amazon to every product when a listing is created. It is a combination of 10 characters, both numbers and letters.

SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) – a code assigned to a product by the retailer to facilitate navigation through the stock. It is worth remembering that if you do not provide a SKU when creating the listing, the system will generate it randomly.

GTIN (Global Trade Item Number) – a product identifier consisting of numbers that you can find below the product barcode.

EAN (European Article Number) – a barcode used to identify products, regulated by the GS1 organisation.

UPC (Universal Product Code) – a bar code used for product identification, the American equivalent and prototype of the EAN code.

FNSKU (Fulfilment Network Stock Keeping Unit) – a unique internal number generated by Amazon and given to retailers using the FBA model. It’s assigned to products in Amazon’s warehouses and used to identify them. 

FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) – a sales model in which Amazon handles shipping to the customer. The seller is responsible for replenishing the stock, i.e. to send appropriately labelled products from their own warehouses.

FBM (Fulfilled by Merchant) – a sales model where the sellers handle all aspects of shipping the product to the customer, send it directly from their warehouses.

MFN (Merchant Fulfilled Network) – a method of shipping products from the seller’s warehouse. Synonymous term for FBM.

BP (Bullet Point) – a short description of one of the product’s characteristic features, no longer than 500 characters. There are usually 5 of these on a product page and can be found under the title.

DP (Detail Page)- the product page of a particular ASIN, i.e. what an Amazon customer sees when they click on an offer. The DP mainly displays the title, description, price and images of the product being sold.

BB (Buy Box) – this is the section of the product page that displays in the top right corner of the listing. It includes an ‘add to cart’ button and a ‘buy now’ button. Winning the Buy Box is an extremely important sales factor on Amazon, as it displays your listing as the main one. It is is responsible for the visibility and effectiveness of your enabled advertising campaigns and allows the customer to conveniently purchase your product. Factors influencing winning the BB include sales model, price competitiveness, availability and delivery time, but the specific way in which a particular offer is positioned among other offers of the same ASIN is a closely guarded Amazon secret. It’s worth remembering that it usually takes around 90 days to enable the BB for new offers sold in the FBM model.

MP (Marketplace) – an abbreviation usually preceded by the name of a country, refers to a specific sales market e.g. DE MP stands for German marketplace.

FC (Fulfillment Center) – Amazon’s warehouse that receives and stores goods from sellers and then packs and ships to customers.

PO (Purchase Order) – a term appearing mainly in the Vendor account topic, refers to an order placed by Amazon, which the seller, upon accepting the order, is obliged to send to Amazon’s warehouse in a specified quantity and time.

B2R (Born to Run) – a programme for Vendors, enabling them to generate an order themselves and thus ‘oblige’ Amazon to accept a certain quantity of goods into its warehouse. From the moment the order is positively verified, the seller has 90 days to sell the entire order, otherwise Amazon will charge a penalty. This programme is used to train the algorithm and get it to generate future orders for the merchandise.

PPC (Pay per Click) – an advertising model in which the seller incurs a cost when a potential customer clicks on a sponsored offer. The seller, on the other hand, does not pay for the mere fact that his ad is displayed. To find out more about this, click here.

ACOS (Advertising Cost of Sales) – an indicator that measures the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, expressed as a percentage. It is calculated by dividing the money spent on advertising by the advertising revenue.

TACOS (Total Advertising Cost of Sales) – this is an indicator that is not visible in the advertising dashboard, but relates advertising spend to total revenue, both from advertising and organic product sales.

ROAS (Return On Ads Spend) – measures the effectiveness of advertising, expressed numerically and is calculated as the inverse of ACOS, i.e. revenue is divided by money spent on advertising.

CPC (Cost per Click) – the average cost per click. The term is related to advertising, which we have a dedicated post on here.

CTR (Click-Through Rate) – an indicator calculated by dividing the number of ad impressions by the number of clicks generated.

CR (Conversion Rate) – the percentage of clicks that have translated into sales for a product.

BSR (Best Seller Ranking) – a ranking of the best-selling products, an indicator of the popularity of a particular listing on Amazon within a specific product category.

MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity) – in the seller world, the minimum number of units of a given product that can be ordered by a customer. For vendors, this signifies the minimum quantity of units per SKU which Amazon can order from the vendor.

SOV (Share of Voice) – a percentage figure showing how much of the market your brand occupies in relation to the competition.

Need some help?

If you feel you need some help navigating your way around the Amazon Seller or Vendor world, then contact the specialist team at Boomd!

You can trust Boomd to take a comprehensive look at your Amazon account, and all aspects of your content, from images, written content, A+ and Brand Store. Contact us for help now!