You can't fix what you can't see, and Amazon is very good at hiding the things that matter most.
Your 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. An audit is the process of dragging all of that into the light.
Here's how to audit an Amazon storefront properly, across the four places leaks hide.
Leak zone 1: visibility the listings nobody finds
The first leak is invisibility. If a listing doesn't rank for the terms buyers search, it earns nothing, and you may not even realise it exists in that broken state.
Audit your visibility by checking whether your listings are actually optimised for search. Titles should lead with the primary keyword and the specifics buyers type, not marketing language. Backend search terms the hidden keyword slots should be filled completely, because most sellers half-use them and leave free ranking on the table. Bullets and images should be complete, since Amazon rewards fully built listings.
Then check your ranking reality: search the terms you should rank for and see where you actually land. A listing sitting on page three for its main keyword is a visibility leak, and no amount of conversion optimisation matters until it's found.
Leak zone 2: conversion the buyers who leave
The second leak is traffic that arrives and doesn't buy. Amazon watches your conversion rate and shows well-converting listings more, so a conversion leak is also a visibility leak in disguise.
Audit your main images first they carry the most conversion weight, and dim supplier photos are one of the most common leaks. Audit your bullets: do they answer objections or just list specs? Audit your reviews and rating, because they're often the single biggest conversion factor, and a listing with weak reviews leaks buyers to better-reviewed competitors. For brand-registered sellers, check whether you're using A+ Content and a proper Brand Store, both of which measurably lift conversion.
The tell for a conversion leak: decent traffic, poor sales. That gap is money you're being shown but not closing.
Leak zone 3: profit the sales that lose money
Here's the leak zone Amazon's dashboard will never show you, and it's the one that sinks the most sellers.
You can rank well and convert well and still be running a business that barely profits because Amazon's fees are larger and more scattered than sellers grasp. Referral fees, FBA fulfilment, storage, long-term storage penalties, returns, and PPC all stack up across settlement reports and bank statements. The true margin after all of it is frequently a fraction of what the product price implied, and a "bestseller" can be your worst product on a per-order basis.
This is the leak Cashowa was built to find. Export your Amazon settlement report and your bank statement no bank login, any bank in any country, just the files your accounts already produce and upload them. Cashowa separates real revenue from the full fee stack, FBA costs, PPC, returns, and cost of goods, and shows the actual margin left underneath, ranked by what's eating the most. Because every figure is computed from your real transactions, you click any number and see exactly how it got there. For most sellers, this single upload finds the biggest leak of all: the listings they've been proudly scaling that quietly lose money on every order.
Leak zone 4: the recommendation that happens before Amazon
The fourth leak sits entirely outside Amazon, which is why almost nobody audits it.
A buyer wants a product and asks an AI assistant which one to get. It answers with three or four specific brands. Then they go to Amazon and search for a name they were just given. If that name wasn't yours, you didn't lose on the search results page you lost before the search happened, and your Seller Central dashboard has no way to represent that. It looks identical to simply not being wanted.
This matters more on Amazon than most sellers assume, because Amazon is where a branded search gets converted. Winning the recommendation upstream is what fills the branded search downstream.
Audit it the way a customer would: ask the questions and read the answers. Cashowa's AI visibility check writes five buying-intent questions grounded in your category never "is my brand any good," since a question containing your name proves nothing 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 websites are the map. If the same review site or "best of" roundup keeps supplying the answer, then getting your product into it is a concrete piece of work with a deadline, rather than the permanently deferrable "build brand awareness." It checks one assistant, not every one on the market, and most sellers score zero the first time which is the honest starting line, not a reason to stop looking.
Running the full audit in one place
The four leak zones are connected, and Cashowa's business analyst audits them together. Feed it your business context and your storefront URL and it produces a structured report: the financial leaks with dollar amounts attached, the acquisition channels that are working versus leaking, and a website-style audit of the storefront across findability, conversion, and trust all prioritised, with specific fixes rather than vague advice.
The storefront half checks things that have a definite answer rather than a feeling. It follows your links and reports which ones come back 404, with the status code. It counts how many of your images carry alt text and how many don't. It flags titles and descriptions that are thin or duplicated across listings near-identical titles make your own products compete with each other in Amazon search instead of with your rivals, which is a leak most sellers never notice.
Two things about how it judges you matter. It confines the crawl to your own storefront path rather than wandering into the rest of Amazon, so the report describes your business and not the marketplace. And it grades you as a storefront, not a website it won't dock you for having no sitemap, robots.txt or canonical tags, because those belong to Amazon and you couldn't change them if you wanted to. Plenty of generic SEO tools will, and their reports are worthless for exactly that reason.
Name a couple of competing sellers and it runs those same checks on them and puts the results beside yours, so you see precisely where they're ahead and the single most valuable thing to copy. Every re-run charts your three scores against every previous one, so you can prove a fix worked rather than assume it. And turn on the automatic quarterly review and Cashowa re-audits every 90 days and writes a plain-English comparison what improved, what slipped, what needs urgent attention so you build a longitudinal view instead of a one-off snapshot you forget.
One honest note: parts of Amazon are heavily script-rendered, so some storefront sections return less detail than a plain website would. You still get the findability, conversion and trust read on the pages it can see, and the financial audit from your settlement and bank data is unaffected it's the half that tells you which leaks are actually costing you money.
An Amazon audit isn't a chore it's the single highest-return afternoon you'll spend on the business. Every leak you find and close is profit you were already generating and giving away.
Frequently asked questions
What does an Amazon storefront audit actually check?
Four things: visibility (are your listings found for the right searches), conversion (do buyers who find them purchase), profit (does each sale make money after Amazon's fees), and AI visibility (does an assistant recommend your brand before the buyer opens Amazon at all). Most sellers only ever look at the first two. The profit audit separating real margin from the fee stack is usually where the biggest, most surprising leaks hide.
On the storefront itself, the checks are specific rather than atmospheric: links that answer 404 and the status code they returned, how many images are missing alt text, and titles or descriptions that are thin or duplicated across your listings. It grades you as a storefront rather than a website, so it won't mark you down for lacking a sitemap or canonical tags that belong to Amazon.
How do I audit my true Amazon profit?
Upload your Amazon settlement report and bank statement to Cashowa. It separates real revenue from referral fees, FBA, storage, PPC, returns, and cost of goods, showing the margin genuinely left per product. This is nearly impossible to do accurately by hand because the costs are spread across multiple reports which is exactly why so many sellers never see their real numbers.
How often should I audit my Amazon storefront?
After every significant change new pricing, new images, a new listing, a PPC push and on a regular cadence otherwise. Cashowa's automatic quarterly review handles the cadence, re-auditing every 90 days and comparing against last time, so you catch slow leaks (a creeping refund rate, a margin quietly compressing) while they're still small.
Can Cashowa really crawl an Amazon storefront?
Yes paste your storefront or listing URL and it reads the public pages, scoping the crawl to your own storefront path so the report is about your business rather than about Amazon. Some heavily script-rendered sections return less detail than a plain website would, but you get a real findability, conversion and trust read on what's there, plus the financial audit from your settlement data, which is unaffected and often the more important half.
Do AI assistants affect Amazon sellers?
Yes, and indirectly enough that it's easy to miss. Buyers increasingly ask an assistant which product to buy, get three or four brand names, and then search Amazon for one of those names. Being recommended upstream is what produces branded search downstream and if you're never named, nothing in Seller Central will ever tell you why the searches aren't coming. Cashowa's AI visibility check runs five real customer questions through an AI assistant with live web search and reports who gets named and which sources the answer used, so you know exactly which review sites and roundups are worth pursuing.
Will fixing these leaks actually increase my sales and visibility?
Fixing conversion leaks lifts both sales and visibility, since Amazon shows well-converting listings more. Fixing visibility leaks brings in traffic you were missing. And fixing profit leaks doesn't add sales but makes the sales you have actually worth having which is frequently the difference between a store that's busy and one that's genuinely profitable.
What does the audit cost?
Tracking and the margin dashboard are free forever with no card and no bank login. The full AI audit (with a website crawl) uses credits a small amount per run and free accounts start with enough credits to run one and see whether the report is worth it before spending anything.
