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Business· Thomas Cuccittini 10 min read
The five-second version: Amazon's eight biggest seller headaches from the Buy Box to a fee structure that quietly eats your margin are mostly solvable once you stop guessing. The one that kills the most sellers isn't competition. It's not knowing what's actually left after Amazon takes its cut.
Let's Fix Your Amazon Storefront
Get StartedYour seller dashboard shows you sales and traffic. What it doesn't show not clearly, not in one place is where you're leaking money and visibility: the listings buyers never find, the ones they find but don't buy, and the ones they buy that lose you money after Amazon takes its referral fee, its FBA fee, its storage fee, and its cut of everything else.
Aug 12, 2026
Aug 12, 2026
It's a search engine with a storefront bolted on, and search engines reward the sellers who speak their language. The good news is that the language is learnable, and most of your competitors never bothered. So let's get you visible.
Aug 12, 2026
Selling on Amazon feels, at first, like the easiest thing in the world. The traffic is already there millions of buyers, ready to purchase, no need to drive anyone to your store. And then you actually start, and you discover Amazon is less a marketplace than a complex machine with its own rules, its own fees, and its own ways of quietly deciding whether you win or lose.
The challenges are real, but they're also well-worn the same eight problems trip up sellers again and again, which means the solutions are known. Here they are, with the fixes that actually work, plus one newer problem that hasn't made it onto most lists yet.
More than 80% of Amazon sales go through the Buy Box the "Add to Cart" button that defaults to one seller when several offer the same product. If you're not winning it, you're nearly invisible even when you're listed.
Amazon decides the Buy Box on a blend of price, fulfilment method, seller performance metrics, and stock reliability. Lowest price doesn't automatically win, but competitive pricing combined with strong performance and reliable fulfilment usually does.
The solution: price competitively without racing to the bottom, keep your seller metrics healthy (on-time shipping, low defect rate, fast response), and stay in stock. If you can use Fulfilment by Amazon, it materially improves your Buy Box odds. But and this matters "price competitively" only works if you know your real margin, because winning the Buy Box on a price that loses you money is a trap, not a victory.
Amazon's fees are a maze: referral fees, FBA fulfilment fees, storage fees, long-term storage penalties, return processing, and more. Sellers routinely underestimate the total, price as if the fees are smaller than they are, and end up with far less margin than they thought sometimes none.
The solution: account for every fee before you price, and then verify against reality. This is genuinely hard to do by hand because the fees are scattered and some (like storage) vary over time. Cashowa is built for exactly this upload your Amazon settlement report and your bank statement (no bank login, any bank, any country) and it separates true revenue from the full stack of fees, FBA costs, and cost of goods, showing the margin that's actually left. Sellers regularly discover the real number is a fraction of what the product price implied.
On Amazon, competitors can undercut you instantly, and a price war to the bottom destroys everyone's margin. Racing to be cheapest is a fight you win by going broke.
The solution: compete on things other than raw price where you can better listings, better images, more reviews, bundles that aren't directly comparable, superior fulfilment. And critically, know the floor below which a sale actually loses you money, so you never chase the Buy Box past the point of profit. That floor is your true landed-plus-fees cost, which you can only defend if you actually know it.
Reviews drive conversion and ranking, but Amazon's rules on soliciting them are strict, and the shortcuts (incentivised or fake reviews) can get you suspended. New sellers with few reviews struggle to convert against established listings.
The solution: use Amazon's legitimate tools the "Request a Review" button, enrolment in programs like Vine for eligible products and focus on the fundamentals that earn organic reviews: a product that matches its listing, fast fulfilment, and good service. Slow, legitimate review growth beats a fast suspension.
Run out of stock and you lose the Buy Box, your ranking momentum, and the sales velocity that's expensive to rebuild. Overstock and you bleed storage fees, especially Amazon's punishing long-term storage charges. Getting inventory right is a constant balancing act.
The solution: forecast demand from your actual sales history rather than guessing, and watch your cash flow so you can afford to restock winners at the right moment. Cashowa's cash flow forecast projects your position forward from real trading history, so you can see whether you'll have the cash to reorder before the stockout, not after.
Amazon can suspend an account for performance metrics slipping, policy violations, or intellectual property complaints and a suspension can freeze your entire income overnight with a slow, opaque appeals process.
The solution: protect your metrics obsessively (order defect rate, late shipment rate, policy compliance), respond fast to any warning, and never risk shortcuts that violate policy. Diversifying beyond Amazon your own store, other marketplaces also reduces the existential risk of a single platform holding your whole business.
Let's Fix Your Amazon Storefront
Get StartedA new listing with no sales history and no reviews starts near the bottom, and Amazon's ranking rewards sales velocity you don't yet have. Breaking in is genuinely hard.
The solution: optimise the listing fully (keyword-rich title, strong bullets, quality images, complete backend search terms), and consider Amazon PPC to buy early visibility and generate the initial sales that build organic rank. But run PPC only once you know your margin ad spend on a thin-margin product pushes it underwater, and plenty of sellers "grow" their way into losses this way.
The challenge underneath all the others: most Amazon sellers can't tell you their true profit by product, because the costs fees, FBA, PPC, returns, cost of goods are spread across settlement reports and bank statements no one fully assembles. They run on revenue and gut feel, and they scale the wrong products.
The solution: get the real picture in one place. Cashowa reads your Amazon settlement CSV and bank statement and shows real margin after every fee and cost, ranks what's eating the most, and forecasts your cash. Ask its business analyst to audit the business and it surfaces profit leaks with dollar amounts and quick wins for the week. Every number is computed from your data and clickable, so you can verify it rather than trust it. Turn on the automatic quarterly review and it re-audits every 90 days and tells you what changed since last time.
Paste your Amazon storefront URL and it audits that too links returning 404 with their status codes, images missing alt text, titles and descriptions that are thin or duplicated across listings scoped to your own storefront rather than the whole of Amazon, and scored on findability, conversion and trust. It grades you as a storefront rather than a website, so it won't dock you for a missing sitemap or canonical tags that belong to Amazon. Name two or three competing sellers and it runs the identical checks on them and puts the results beside yours, which is the fastest way to turn "they're outranking me" into a list of specific differences.
The eight above are the well-worn ones. Here's a ninth that's only recently become real, and it doesn't appear anywhere in Seller Central.
A buyer asks an AI assistant what to buy. It names three or four brands. They then search Amazon for one of those names. The recommendation that decided the sale happened before Amazon was ever opened so if you weren't named, there is no impression, no click, no data point anywhere in your account to explain the sale you didn't get.
The solution: measure it rather than assume it. Cashowa's AI visibility check writes five buying-intent questions in your category, runs each through an AI assistant with live web search, and reports whether you were named, which brands were named instead and in what order, and which websites the answer actually cited. Those cited sites are the useful part if the same review roundup keeps supplying the answer, getting into it is a specific, finishable job rather than vague "brand building." It checks one assistant rather than every one, and most sellers score zero at first, which is the honest place to start from.
Amazon rewards the seller who knows their numbers cold. The Buy Box, the pricing, the ad spend, the restocking every one of those decisions is only as good as your grip on what's actually profitable.
Let's Fix Your Amazon Storefront
Get StartedHow do I win the Buy Box without destroying my margin?
Win it on the combination Amazon actually rewards competitive (not lowest) price, strong seller metrics, reliable fulfilment, ideally FBA rather than on price alone. The key is knowing your true cost floor so you never chase the Buy Box below the point of profit. Cashowa's margin breakdown gives you that floor from your real settlement and bank data.
Why is my Amazon store making sales but barely any profit?
Almost always the fees. Between referral fees, FBA, storage, returns, and PPC, Amazon's cut is larger and more scattered than most sellers realise, so they price as if it's smaller. Upload your settlement report and bank statement to Cashowa and it shows the margin that's genuinely left after all of it which is frequently a shock.
Should I run Amazon PPC?
Only after you know your real margin, and mainly to build early visibility on new listings. PPC amplifies your existing economics profitable on a healthy-margin product, a fast way to lose money on a thin one. Work out the true numbers first so you're advertising products that can actually carry the ad cost.
How do I avoid stockouts without overspending on inventory?
Forecast from your actual sales history and keep an eye on cash flow so you can afford to reorder winners in time. Cashowa projects your cash forward from real trading data, so you can see whether the money to restock will be there before you hit the stockout that costs you the Buy Box.
What's the biggest risk of selling on Amazon?
Account suspension freezing your entire income, and over-reliance on a single platform. Protect your metrics, follow policy exactly, and diversify beyond Amazon over time your own store, other marketplaces so no single platform decision can end your business overnight.
How do I know whether AI assistants recommend my brand?
Run Cashowa's AI visibility check. It puts five buying-intent questions from your category through an AI assistant with live web search and reports whether you were named, which brands were named instead, and which websites the answer cited and that source list is your target list, since it's demonstrably what the assistant reads. It checks one assistant rather than all of them, and most sellers start at zero. It matters on Amazon because the recommendation is what produces the branded search, and branded search is the traffic you don't have to bid for.
Can I compare my storefront with a competitor's?
Yes. Name two or three competing sellers and the audit runs the same checks on their storefronts as on yours broken links, alt-text coverage, titles and descriptions, trust signals and reports them side by side on identical criteria, so the comparison is fair and the gaps are specific.
Does Cashowa work with Amazon's reports and my non-US bank?
Yes. It reads your Amazon settlement CSV and your bank statement (CSV or PDF) from any bank in any country no bank login, no aggregator required. Tracking and the margin dashboard are free forever with no card; only the AI audit and chat use credits, with free credits to start.