Amazon Vendor Economics · Glossary

Amazon Retail Analytics (ARA)

Updated October 25, 2026

Amazon Retail Analytics (ARA) is Vendor Central's reporting surface for first-party (1P) vendors, found under Reports, then Retail Analytics. It holds seven report families in one place: Sales, Real-time Sales, Inventory, Traffic, Forecasting, Net PPM and Catalogue. It replaced the older split between ARA Basic and ARA Premium; Premium, formerly a paid tier, was deprecated in a 2022 consolidation.

Its headline profitability number is an Amazon-side estimate, so Retail Analytics is a planning tool, not the record a vendor reconciles money against. Net PPM (Net Pure Product Margin), Amazon's product-level profitability metric, sits under Reports, then Retail Analytics, then Net PPM. The contra-COGS inside it, the vendor-funded allowances that offset Amazon's cost of goods sold (COGS), is an estimate booked at the time of sale, so the dashboard number should never be reconciled to the vendor's books. Deduction, chargeback and shortage detail is not in Retail Analytics at all; it shows only in the Vendor Central interface.

Which Retail Analytics view should a vendor read?

It depends on the question: one view covers what Amazon bought from the vendor, the other covers the whole brand. Confirm which views your own account shows.

• Sourcing View reports what Amazon procured from this vendor code, the supplier number Amazon assigns a 1P vendor.
• Manufacturing View reports every product under the brand, and it is the only view that carries traffic and forecasting.

Around May 2025, Vendor Central stopped showing Sales Discount and contra-COGS as separate lines in Net PPM. One specialist blames an interface bug and, as of January 2026, points to the Sales report's Sourcing distributor view as the only place those columns still appear.

Amazon also exposes vendor analytics through its application programming interface (API). Its vendor analytics dataset states the Net PPM formula: shipped revenue minus shipped COGS (the cost Amazon paid the vendor for the units it shipped), plus contra-COGS, minus sales discounts, divided by shipped revenue. Three vendor-only rapid reports, for inventory, traffic and sales, run at hourly granularity. Deduction detail is missing from the API too.

For contra-COGS and co-op recovery, audit deductions to the remittance and the co-op backup report, never to Net PPM.