Amazon Outages Can Cause Data When it Comes to Your Data as an Amazon Seller

When Amazon experiences an outage in either their reporting tools or on the actual E Commerce platform, it can cause a lot of chaos for your data and your reporting because there are going to be gaps. Gaps are going to vary depending on the data source and your ability to correct that is going to depend on how much prep work you've done in advance. For example, on the seller central interface, a super common need that folks have is the customer returns report. That report is only available as a snapshot for those two days that Amazon goes down. You just won't have customer return data and you might not necessarily have a way to backfill it. It's important to have a good sense of where those gaps are. Be aware of how there might be inconsistencies in historical data because some data sets can be backfilled and others can't. If you're relying on that customer returns report in order to actually calculate your return rate by reason code, then you might see week over week changes due to an outage without seeing week over week changes in the sales data because that history is still.