Why Are My Organic Sales Negative?
There are a few things why you may encounter negative organic sales. To be able to investigate this situation we need to check it on two different levels: Store-level and product-level.
1. Store-Level Organic Sales
This might be caused mainly by two reasons: Amazon advertising attribution delays and returned orders.
Let’s check out how Advertising Attribution and Returned Orders affect this with a few examples to have better insights.
1.1. Advertising Attribution
Let’s examine with a scenario: Consider you had no sales last week and made a total of $100 in sales (2 orders) this week. For simplicity, let’s assume you have only one product. Amazon reports that your customer clicked your advertisements last week and completed the purchase this week.
Result: If you looked at your total sales and advertising sales report last week, you would see no total sales and no advertising sales. Naturally, you would see corresponding clicks and ad spend values in related advertising reports.
The last week’s values viewed at the end of the last week:
When this week comes, Amazon reports some ad sales resulting from last week’s clicks. For example, 1 order comes from last week’s clicks and the other is organic sales. So, you would see total sales of $100 and advertising sales of $50 this week. As a result, the system calculates organic sales as $50 this week.
This week’s values viewed at the end of this week:
However, there is a tricky point in last week’s view when you look at today. You would see total sales of $0 (no change of course). On the contrary, Amazon attributes the sales resulting from last week’s clicks to last week’s ad sales. This means you would see $0 total sales and $50 ad sales, resulting in -$50 organic sales.
The last week’s values viewed at the end of this week:
1.2. Returned Orders, Refunds
Sometimes, Amazon processes the advertising impact of returned or refunded sales later. This means total sales are reduced immediately, but ad sales might not be adjusted in tandem, leading to a temporary negative organic sales figure.
2. Product-Level Organic Sales
As we discussed while examining store-level organic sales, factors like Advertising Attribution Delays and Returned Orders, Refunds can also contribute to negative organic sales at the product level. However, the most common cause of negative organic sales at the product level is attributed ad sales for other SKUs.
Let’s examine and investigate with a scenario: Let’s assume you have two SKUs (SKU-One priced at $15 and SKU-Two priced at $20). For simplicity, assume that SKU-One has an active sponsored product campaign (SP-Campaign-SKU-One), while SKU-Two does not have any campaign.
In the past week, SP-Campaign-SKU-One generated 1,000 impressions, 100 clicks, and 2 orders. One of the customers clicked on the SP-Campaign-SKU-One but ended up purchasing SKU-Two. As a result, SKU-One records one ad order for itself (same SKU sale) and one ad order for SKU-Two (attributed order).
Business Report on Seller Central:
Campaign Manager on Seller Central:
Result: If you reviewed your total sales and advertising sales report for the last week, you would see $35 in total sales, all of which are from ad sales. This means total organic sales would be zero. The key point here is to break down these sales at the SKU level. You would see total sales of $15 for SKU-One and $20 for SKU-Two. Amazon would report all these sales as total advertising sales for SKU-One because the campaign for SKU-One led to the sale of SKU-Two. The final table would look something like this:
