Amazon access tokens expire. A connection that has worked for months will eventually stop, and when it does **there is no error message** — the screens simply stop gaining new data.

That is what makes this one worth knowing before it happens. The symptom looks like a bad week of trading.

[Watch the reconnection walkthrough](https://kb.trackiq.com/kb-assets/kbvideo-conn-expired-explainer-37579428.mp4)

*Prefer to watch? Sixty-three seconds on spotting a stale connection before you blame trading.*

## **The symptom**

A stale connection presents as numbers that look wrong rather than missing:

- The last few days of every chart trend towards zero.
- A dashboard tile shows a dramatic drop against the previous period.
- One section is stale while the rest of the product is fine — because each source expires independently.

The instinct is to go looking for what went wrong with the business. **Check the connection first.** It takes ten seconds and rules out the boring explanation.

## **The check that answers it**

**Settings → Connections.**

![Each connected source shows when it last synced](/kb-assets/shot-conn-detail-c876cc.png)

Every source carries a **last-synced time**. That timestamp is the whole diagnosis:

| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| Recent, and advancing day to day | working |
| Stopped several days ago | **expired — reauthorise** |
| Never | authorised but never completed a first sync |
| Recent, but the screen is still empty | not a connection problem — see [**My Dashboard Is Empty**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/my-dashboard-is-empty) |

Note the date the timestamp stopped. It usually lines up exactly with the day your charts started falling — which confirms the diagnosis before you change anything.

## **Fixing it**

![The Connections screen, one entry per source](/kb-assets/shot-conn-intro-56b322.png)

Reauthorise the source that has gone stale. You sign in to Amazon, approve access, and land back in TrackIQ.

**You need to be an admin on the Amazon account.** If you are not, the failure happens at Amazon's end and the person holding that access has to complete the step.

**Nothing is lost.** Data resumes from where it stopped, and the gap backfills as Amazon delivers it. You do not have to reconnect anything else, and you do not lose history.

**Fix only the stale source.** Seller, Advertising, DSP and AMC are four separate connections. Reauthorising all four when one expired just costs you time.

## **Why it expires at all**

Amazon issues time-limited access rather than a permanent key, and revokes it early in a few situations:

- **Time.** Tokens have a finite life by design.
- **A password change** on the Amazon account.
- **A permissions change** — the user who authorised TrackIQ losing admin, or being removed.
- **Explicit revocation** in Seller Central or the Advertising console.

Three of those four are things somebody on your team did deliberately. If a connection dies the same week someone left the company or rotated a password, that is your answer.

## **Catching it before it costs you**

Two habits, neither of which takes long.

**Glance at Connections when a number surprises you.** Make it the first check rather than the last. A stale connection and a genuinely bad week look identical on a chart, and only one of them is worth a meeting.

**Be careful about acting on the tail of a range.** Even a healthy connection lags — the last day or two of any period is still filling in. A drop that only exists in the most recent few days is more often reporting than reality. See [**Why Do My Numbers Not Match Seller Central?**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/why-dont-my-numbers-match-seller-central)

## **The one that is not a connection problem**

If the last-synced time is current and the screen is still empty, stop looking at Connections. Check these instead:

- **The brand selector** in the top bar — every screen is scoped to one brand.
- **The date range** — a range before you connected has nothing in it.
- **The publishing cadence** — Search Query Performance arrives **weekly** and AMC **monthly**. A blank AMC dashboard is normal until the next delivery, no matter how healthy the connection is.

See [**My Dashboard Is Empty**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/my-dashboard-is-empty) for the full checklist.

## **Related**

- [**Managing Your Connected Accounts**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/managing-your-connected-accounts-sp-ads-dsp-amc) — the four grants, separately.
- [**Turning Brand Sync On and Off**](https://kb.trackiq.com/hc/knowledge-base/articles/turning-brand-sync-on-and-off) — the other reason data stops.