E-commerce Pilot
One clear view of your Amazon sales, profit, stock and ads. Ready-made strategies find wasted ad spend, suggest better bids, pick out your best keywords and help you research new products, and nothing changes on Amazon until you, or a rule you switched on, say so.
Overview
Seller Central and the advertising console hold all the numbers, spread over dozens of reports. E-commerce Pilot brings them together and does the reading for you:
- Shows sales, orders, profit and stock per product, day by day.
- Works out your real profit after Amazon fees, refunds, promotions, ad spend and what each product costs you.
- Warns you before a product runs out of stock, and suggests when and how many to reorder.
- Runs seven strategies over your advertising and finds the campaigns and keywords losing you money.
- Suggests bid, budget and negative keyword changes, and sends them to Amazon only when you apply them.
- Finds stock Amazon lost or damaged that it may owe you for.
It works from Amazon's own data and nothing else. There are no paid third-party data tools behind it, so every number can be traced back to one of your reports.
Coming soon: early access
E-commerce Pilot is coming soon. SoftSolz is completing Amazon's developer approval, which is needed before stores can be connected for everyone. Until then it is opened to selected workspaces for early access, and in the Marketplace you will see its card marked Coming soon until it is opened for yours.
To ask for early access, use Contact us at the bottom of the app, or email info@softsolz.uk with the name of your workspace and the Amazon marketplaces you sell in. Once it is opened for your workspace, the card becomes installable and your sandbox workspace gets it too.
It is included in every plan. There is nothing extra to buy, only the limits below.
The words to know
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| ASIN / SKU | Amazon's number for a product, and your own code for it. |
| ACOS | Advertising cost of sales: ad spend divided by the sales those ads brought in. £20 spent for £100 of sales is an ACOS of 20%. Lower is better. |
| Target ACOS | The ACOS you are happy to pay. You set it in Settings, and every strategy measures against it. |
| Break-even ACOS | The ACOS at which an ad sale makes no profit at all: your price minus Amazon fees minus what the product costs you, as a share of the price. |
| CPC / CVR | Cost per click, and conversion rate (the share of clicks that became an order). |
| Organic sales | Orders that did not come from an ad: your total orders minus the orders your ads are credited with. |
Connect Amazon
Go to E-commerce Pilot → Settings → Stores and choose Connect Amazon. There are two connections, and you can make either or both:
- Seller account, for sales, orders, fees, stock, listings and payments.
- Ads account, for campaigns, keywords, search terms and bids. After connecting, pick the Advertising profile to use if you have more than one.
Pick your main marketplace first. Your region is chosen from it, and you can sell in more countries in the same region. Every Amazon marketplace is listed, with the USA (amazon.com) first:
- North America: USA, Canada, Mexico, Brazil.
- Europe and Middle East: United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Sweden, Poland, Belgium, Ireland, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, India.
- Far East: Japan, Australia, Singapore.
Choose Continue to Amazon, sign in and approve access, and you are brought back. We never see your Amazon password. The first sync runs in the background, each store card shows when each kind of data last updated, and Sync now starts another one. A store that already works from uploaded reports can be connected later with Connect Seller account or Connect Ads account on its card.
If Amazon stops accepting the connection, the store shows Reconnect required, you get an alert and an email, and a Reconnect banner appears on every tab. Only that store pauses, and the data you already have is kept.
If your brand is in Amazon Brand Registry, switch on Brand Registry on the store card. It unlocks search query data.
Or upload your reports
You do not have to connect anything. Choose Use uploaded reports instead to add a store, then upload the standard reports you already download from Amazon. Sales, profit, stock, advertising and most strategies work from them. This is also how you try the service before connecting.
Go to E-commerce Pilot → Settings → Uploads, pick the store, and drop the files in. Upload the CSV or TXT files exactly as Amazon downloads them. The kind of report is detected automatically from its columns, or you can pick it yourself, and you can set the period it covers. A file we do not recognise is refused with a note saying why.
| Report | Where to download it | What it powers |
|---|---|---|
| Business Report, Detail Page Sales and Traffic by Child Item | Seller Central → Reports → Business Reports → By ASIN → Detail Page Sales and Traffic by Child Item. Choose the dates, then Download (CSV). | Sales, sessions, organic vs paid, Buy Box share |
| Search Term report (Sponsored Products) | Advertising console → Measurement & Reporting → Sponsored ads reports → Create report. Ad product Sponsored Products, report type Search term. | Keywords, wasted spend, negatives |
| Targeting report | Same place, report type Targeting. | Bid suggestions per keyword or target |
| Campaign report | Same place, report type Campaign. | Budgets, auto vs manual campaigns |
| All Orders report | Seller Central → Reports → Fulfillment → All Orders (under Sales). Choose the dates, then Request download. | Best sale times by hour and day |
| Date Range Transaction report | Seller Central → Reports → Payments → Date Range Reports → Generate Report, report type Transaction. | Profit, fees, refunds |
| FBA Inventory report | Seller Central → Reports → Fulfillment → Inventory → Manage FBA Inventory. Request download. | Stock, days left, reorder dates |
| Search Query Performance (Brand Analytics) | Seller Central → Brands → Brand Analytics → Search Query Performance. Pick a week, then Download as CSV. Brand Registry only. | Search queries |
| Inventory Ledger or Inventory Adjustments report | Seller Central → Reports → Fulfillment → Inventory → Inventory Ledger → Detailed View (or Inventory Adjustments). Pick the dates, then download. | Reimbursements |
| Reimbursements report | Seller Central → Reports → Fulfillment → Payments → Reimbursements. Pick the dates, then download. | Reimbursements (what Amazon has already paid back) |
Uploading the same period again is safe: rows are refreshed, never counted twice. Order files can contain buyer details; those columns are dropped as the file is read and are never stored.
Some things need a connected Amazon account and do not work on a store that only uses uploaded reports: product hunting, competitor watch, Amazon's own keyword suggestions, review requests, sending listing updates, and sending ad changes to Amazon (see Approving changes).
The tabs
| Tab | What you do there |
|---|---|
| Overview | Sales, orders, profit, ad spend and the problems worth your attention, compared with the period before. Pick the store and a range of 7, 14, 30, 60 or 90 days at the top. |
| Profit | Net profit, margin and return per product and per day. If some products have no cost yet, a banner takes you to Settings to add them. |
| Inventory | Stock on hand, days of stock left, the date to reorder by and a suggested quantity. |
| Advertising | Suggestions to apply, your Campaigns, Keywords and Search terms, the Changes you have made (with Undo), automatic Rules, and a Best times heatmap of the hours and days you sell best. |
| Keywords | The Keyword lab gives ideas from your own search terms, Amazon's suggestions and brand analytics. Brainstorm with AI adds more ideas and uses AI credits. Save the ones you like to keyword lists. |
| Listings | Each listing with a health score, problems first: suppressed listings, a low Buy Box share and content issues. Open one to edit it side by side, write an AI draft (uses AI credits), check it and submit it to Amazon. You can also ask Amazon to send its review request for an order, once per order. |
| Research | Product hunting, Competitor watch (products you track, checked once a day) and Deep research (an AI report on a product niche from public sources, which uses AI credits). |
| Strategies | The seven strategies below. Each shows Ready or Needs reports, and opens to a chart, a table and a CSV download. |
| Reimbursements | Lost or damaged stock and refunds without a return that Amazon may owe you for. Copy the claim text into a Seller Central case, then mark the case claimed or paid. |
| Alerts | Stock running low or out, price moves on products you track, new reimbursement cases, a store that needs reconnecting and automatic rules that failed. |
| Settings | Stores, targets and guardrails, product costs and uploads. See below. |
| Developer | API keys and links for developers who want to use E-commerce Pilot from their own code. |
Settings
Settings has four tabs:
- Stores: connect Amazon or add a store that uses uploaded reports, sync, reconnect, switch on Brand Registry, choose the advertising profile, disconnect or delete a store. Shopify, eBay and TikTok Shop show here as Coming soon.
- Targets and guardrails: your target ACOS (leave it empty to use 70% of your break-even ACOS), Let rules apply changes automatically, Email me a daily summary, the guardrails, Changes from AI apps and API keys, and When to flag a problem (the thresholds the strategies use, such as how much no-sale spend to flag and how many days stock takes to arrive).
- Product costs: what each unit costs you, including shipping to Amazon, with the date the cost starts. Used for profit and break-even ACOS.
- Uploads: upload a report and see your upload history.
Email me a daily summary is off until you switch it on. It then emails you yesterday's sales, ad spend, profit and what needs attention, for each connected store.
The seven strategies
Each strategy runs again after every upload or sync, and each one says which reports it needs if something is missing.
1. Daily Parsing Report
Tidies the raw numbers into one table per campaign and per keyword: clicks, impressions, orders, spend, sales, ACOS, CPC and conversion rate. It also splits each product's orders into organic and paid, and shows the hours and days you sell best (this part needs the All Orders report or a connected seller account).
2. Workflow
The problem finder. After every upload or sync it looks for money leaks and suggests a fix for each:
- High ACOS: keywords costing more than your target. Suggestion: lower the bid.
- Spend with no orders: search terms that took clicks and money but never an order. Suggestion: add as a negative keyword.
- Out of budget: campaigns that hit their daily budget on most days, so they stop showing later in the day. Suggestion: raise the budget if the campaign is profitable.
- Stock running out: products that will sell out before new stock can arrive.
Keywords doing well but barely shown get the opposite suggestion: raise the bid. You can apply, dismiss or snooze each suggestion on Advertising → Suggestions.
3. High-Volume Keyword Optimization
Takes your busiest keywords and sorts them into winners (orders at or under your target ACOS), losers (spend with no orders, or more than twice your target ACOS) and the middle. A chart shows where each one sits, so the keywords burning money stand out at a glance.
4. PPC Suggestion
Works out your break-even ACOS from your price, Amazon's fees and your product cost, and suggests a target (70% of break-even unless you set your own). It then recommends a daily budget per campaign, compares your automatic and manual campaigns, and suggests a bid for each keyword from how often its clicks turn into orders. A keyword needs enough clicks before it gets a suggestion (10 unless you change it), and no suggestion moves a bid further than your largest bid change guardrail (30% unless you change it).
5. Product Hunting
Type a keyword or category and see the matching products on Amazon with their price, sales rank, number of sellers and the fees Amazon would charge, so you can estimate a margin. Each result gets an opportunity score from demand, competition and margin. Monthly sales are an estimate worked out from sales rank and checked against your own products, and they are always labelled as one. Choose Track to add a result to Competitor watch. Product hunting needs a connected Amazon seller account and does not use AI credits; each search counts as one research run.
6. Query Search
For brands in Amazon Brand Registry: the searches that lead shoppers to your brand, how many people make them, and your share of the impressions, clicks and purchases. It flags searches with lots of shoppers but little of your visibility (an ad or keyword opportunity), searches where you get the clicks but not the sales (usually a listing, price or image problem), and searches that are growing. Without Brand Registry you get a simpler version built from your own search term report.
7. Seller Board
Per day and per product: sales, units, refunds, promotions, each Amazon fee, ad spend, product cost, then net profit, margin and return on investment, alongside days of stock left and the date to reorder by.
Approving changes
Suggestions never reach Amazon on their own. On a suggestion, choose Apply and confirm the value now and after.
- Changes you make yourself in the dashboard go to Amazon straight away, unless the change goes further in one step than a guardrail allows (a bid change or a budget rise bigger than your limit). Then it waits in AI Review for someone with permission to manage ads to approve it.
- Changes from AI apps and API keys wait in AI Review by default. You choose this in Settings → Targets and guardrails → Changes from AI apps and API keys: Send to AI Review (recommended) or Apply directly. Guardrails still hold either way, so a change over a limit still waits for review.
- Hard limits are never crossed. A bid below your lowest bid or above your highest bid, a budget above your highest daily budget, or a change after the store has reached its changes-per-day limit is refused, whoever asks for it.
- Undo. Every applied change keeps what was there before. Undo it from Advertising → Changes within 30 days. If the item has been changed again since, undo is refused rather than overwriting the newer change. An undo asked for by an AI app or API key goes to AI Review while that setting is on Send to AI Review.
- Stores added by upload. A store you only upload reports for is not connected to Amazon, so nothing can be sent. An applied change is saved as a to-do for Seller Central, for you to make in Seller Central or the advertising console.
The guardrails, all in Settings → Targets and guardrails: the largest bid change, the lowest and highest bid, changes per day per store, the largest budget rise per day, the highest daily budget, and the clicks needed before a bid change. Listing edits are checked against Amazon's rules before they are sent, so a mistake is shown to you rather than rejected later.
Automatic rules
On Advertising → Rules you can add rules that make changes on their own. There are four kinds: Bid optimizer (moves keyword bids toward your target ACOS), Pause keywords with no sales, Add negative keywords (blocks search terms that cost money and never sell) and Best times (lowers bids in hours that rarely sell).
- A rule only runs when you switch it on, and only while Let rules apply changes automatically is on in Settings. Switching that off stops every rule in the workspace at once.
- Rules only change connected stores, and a rule never goes past a guardrail: a change that would is not made, and is not sent for review either.
- Preview shows what a rule would change right now, without changing anything.
- Creating, editing or switching on a rule needs both the Settings and the Manage ads permission.
- While changes from AI apps and API keys go to AI Review, an AI app or API key cannot switch a rule on, change a rule that is on, or change your targets while a rule is on. It can add rules switched off and preview them, and a person switches them on in the dashboard.
Use it from Claude or ChatGPT
If you use Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or another AI assistant, you can connect it to your workspace and use E-commerce Pilot from it. This is the same Connected AI apps connection every SoftSolz service uses; there is no separate setting for it inside E-commerce Pilot. The assistant can read your numbers and findings, explain them, keep keyword lists and tracked products, run product hunting, save listing drafts and research it wrote, and propose changes. The analysis it writes is saved against the finding with a Written by badge showing the assistant's name.
- Open Developers in SoftSolz and copy the address from the Connected AI apps card.
- Add it to your assistant as a connector, sign in, pick the workspace and tick the E-commerce Pilot permissions you want it to have.
- Ask in plain words: "Which keywords wasted the most money last month?", "Lower the bids on anything above my target ACOS", "Which products run out of stock in the next three weeks?"
By default, changes an assistant asks for wait in AI Review (see Approving changes). Some settings can only be changed in the dashboard, never from an assistant or an API key: the guardrails, the Changes from AI apps and API keys choice, Let rules apply changes automatically and the daily summary email. Brainstorm with AI, AI listing drafts and Deep research use SoftSolz AI credits, so they are only in the dashboard. The full walkthrough, including how to disconnect, is in Connect an AI assistant.
Limits on each plan
| Limit | Free | Basic | Growth | Business |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stores | 1 | 2 | 5 | 15 |
| Tracked products | 10 | 50 | 200 | 1,000 |
| Research runs per month | 5 | 30 | 150 | 500 |
Stores count whether they are connected or use uploaded reports. Stores and tracked products free up the moment you remove one. Research runs are product hunting searches and Deep research reports; they reset each month, and research written by your own AI assistant does not count. Brainstorm with AI, AI listing drafts and Deep research also use AI credits from your plan like every other service. See Billing and plans.
What it cannot do
Some things other seller tools advertise need data Amazon does not share, or data bought from third parties. We would rather tell you than guess:
- No price or sales rank history from before you started tracking. A product's history begins the day you add it.
- No reverse ASIN lookup and no organic ranking position for a keyword. Both would mean scraping Amazon, which its rules forbid.
- No competitor reviews. Amazon only shares review insights for your own products.
- Sales figures for other sellers' products are estimates. They are worked out from sales rank and always labelled as estimates.
- Search query data needs Brand Registry.
- Reimbursement claims are not filed for you. Amazon has no way for software to file them, so you get the list and the text to paste.
Other sales channels
Amazon is the first channel. Shopify, eBay and TikTok Shop are coming soon and appear in Settings → Stores as greyed-out cards until they are ready.
Your data and privacy
- No buyer personal data. We never ask Amazon for buyer names, addresses, emails or phone numbers, and any that appear in an uploaded file are dropped before it is saved.
- Your workspace only. Your data is used for your workspace and nothing else. It is never combined with other sellers' data or used to build market insights for anyone.
- Kept for up to 25 months. Order, payment and advertising data older than 25 months is deleted automatically. You can shorten this to as little as 3 months in Settings → Targets and guardrails → Data kept.
- Disconnect any time. Disconnect on a store card stops syncing and removes our access to your Amazon account straight away; data already imported stays until you delete the store. If you remove our access from Seller Central instead, the store shows Reconnect required and stops syncing.
- Every change is recorded in your workspace audit log, with who made it and whether it came from the app, an AI assistant or the API.
Who can do what
| Permission | What it allows |
|---|---|
| View | See sales, profit, stock, ads, strategies, keywords, listings, research, reimbursements and alerts. |
| Upload reports | Upload Amazon report files for a store. |
| Sync stores | Start a sync from a connected store. |
| Settings | Add, connect, disconnect and delete stores, set targets, guardrails and product costs, and update reimbursement cases. |
| Manage ads | Apply, dismiss and snooze suggestions, make and undo bid, budget, negative keyword and campaign changes, and approve them in AI Review. |
| Manage listings | Save listing drafts, submit listing updates and send review requests. |
| Research | Product hunting, tracked products, keyword lists and research reports. |
| Export | Download data as CSV. |
Automatic rules need both Settings and Manage ads. Set these per role under Members & Access → Roles. See Account and access.