Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) SP-API Reports Demystified

When it comes to Amazon SP-API Report Types there is always a lot of confusion, since they are a lot, some of them are available only for some Amazon Regions, some seem similar… It’s a nightmare being able to choose the right one in order to perform a specific task.

When it comes to Amazon FBA Report Types, then, it’s even worse since in this category 35 report types are available. Since I had to dig deeply into these, I decided to create this guide in order to make your life — I hope — easier.

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Four main rules applied to all FBA Report Types

There are three main rules to remember when we are speaking about Amazon Reports in general and Amazon FBA Reports in particular. Let me explain them.

Rule #1 — No report — except one — is schedulable

Generally speaking Amazon reports can be requested and are generated after a valid request. Some of them, instead, can be scheduled and this means that Amazon will regularly generate them without an explicit request.

None of the available Amazon FBA Reports is schedulable, except for the Storage Fees Report.

Rule #2 — Almost all reports are available for all the regions

As you probably know, Amazon SP-API are available in three different selling regions: EU (Europe), NA (North America) and FE (Far East).

The good news is that every report we will see is available for every region. The only exception is the Amazon Fulfilled Shipments, which is available in two flavors: Tax, for the NA region, and Invoicing for the EU one.

Rule #3 — Be careful on the report data freshness

Let’s define a classification of the available rerport types:

• Near real-time reports: for this kind of report, you will be able to request it no more than once every 30 minutes.
• Daily reports: in this case, the frequency is no more than once every four hours.

So, in any case, remember to persist your report in order to get it back again, otherwise you will have to wait for that amount of time and, especially when you are experimenting, that may be frustrating.

If you request a report with a higher frequency, the report won’t be generated and a FATAL processing status is returned.

Rule #4 — Amazon Fulfillment Role

All of the available reports are requestable only if your Developer Profile is granted with the Amazon Fulfillment role. Amazon Fulfillment role is not a restricted one, so you won’t have access to PII. This means that is easier to be granted with it, since you won’t be able to read customers’ informations. Check Amazon Roles here.

The only report types that are not requestable using that role, is the well-known Amazon Fulfilled Shipments, both in the Tax and the Invoicing flavor. In this case you must have respectively the Tax Remittance or the Tax Invoicing role. Since these roles will grant you access to PII, Amazon will require you additional security and data processing checks and will probably regularly audit you with through an third-party like Deloitte or PwC.

Report Types Classification

Amazon is really clear on the classification of the available FBA Report Types. There are six report type categories, and I’ll sort them by the number of available report types in that category.

• FBA Inventory Reports: related to inventory and storage. Contains 14 report types
• FBA Sales Reports: mainly related to orders and shipments. Contains 11 report types.
• FBA Payments Report: related to costs and expenses. Contains 3 report types
• FBA Removals Reports: related to suggested and requested removals. Contains 3 report types
• FBA Concessions Reports: related to returns and replacements. Contains 2 report types
• FBA Subscribe and Save Reports: related to Subscribe and Save program. Contains 2 report types

Obviously the two top groups are related to Inventory and Sales.

In the next following story, I’ll dig deeper inside the Inventory Report Types. As soon as it is ready, I’ll put the link here.

Adv: FBA reports are implemented inside our SaaS MarketRock. We support all Amazon regions and also have a great set of APIs that will let you manage orders, push listings and create new products without having to dig into the complexity of Amazon SP-APIs. Feel free to contact me if interested in a demo!