Amazon business metrics 101: order session percentage

In this series, we’ll be talking about the most important metrics found in your Amazon BusinessAmazon Business is Amazon’s wholesale … More Reports and how to use them. Today we’re talking about Order Session Percentage, one of the most underused pieces of data available to Amazon sellers.

What is Order Session Percentage? Do you use it to help you make smart pricing decisions?

Keep reading to find out more about what Order Session Percentage is and how it can be the key to selling more products on Amazon.

Order Session Percentage Defined

The number of orders that were generated divided by the number of customers who viewed the products.

It’s that simple. When we’re talking about Order Session Percentage, we’re talking about the ratio of actual orders by customers to products viewed by customers.

For example, imagine you’re selling a video game. Over the past two weeks, you make 10 sales. But your item has been viewed by 1000 customers. That’s an Order Session Percentage (OSP) of 1%.

Source: Amazon.com Help Business Reports Glossary

Finding Order Session Percentage

In case you’ve never looked at your Amazon Seller CentralAmazon Seller Central is a portal or a h… More Business Reports before, now’s a great time to get started.

Just sign in to Seller Central, hover over Reports and click on Business Reports.

Now, you can choose how you want to see data, by date or by ASIN. For making pricing decisions using  Order Session Percentage, you want to look at each individual ASIN, rather than all of your ASINs for a given day. Your screen will look something like this:

From here, you can review Order Session Percentage for any or all of your items over any date range. Now let’s talk about how to make decisions based on this information.
<21>Using Order Session Percentage</21>
Start by looking at your best-selling items. What sort of Order Session Percentage are you seeing?

Now look at items with the lowest Order Session Percentages. Do any of those items have a very large number of sessions? What we’re looking for are items that aren’t selling well, but that are being viewed by a lot of customers. 

Why aren’t these potential customers buying the items they’re looking at? The most important factor to consider is price. If potential customers are making it to your product page, but just aren’t buying, you need to consider lowering your price.

If you do this, however, remember that your goal isn’t to raise the Order Session Percentage. You should be trying to increase your overall profit. This may mean taking a small loss on an item that just isn’t selling to minimize a loss, but in most cases you should make sure that whatever price you set is still profitable.

On the flip side, let’s look at how we can use OSP to tell us when to raise prices.

Look for items where you have a high Order Session Percentage. If you’re converting a high percentage of views into orders, you must be on the right track. You’ve got a product that customers are excited about buying! That’s fantastic.

Consider raising prices on these items to see if you can increase your overall profit. You may miss out on a few sales, but hopefully your overall profit will be higher.

Always Be Flexible

No matter what changes you make to an item’s price, always be flexible. Continue adjusting prices to find the sweet spot that maximizes your profit.

This isn’t easy to do if you’re repricing all of your items manually. But using automated repricingIt’s the practice of controlling and c… More software, like Sellery, can make this easier. With simple rules you can continually adjust your price depending on any number of factors including your competitions’ prices, the number of items sold, your items’ sales ranks and much more.

Give Sellery a try, free for 2-weeks. We’ll give you all the help you need to get everything up and running.