Most Amazon problems are not sudden. A product's conversion rate slips, its TACoS drifts up, its stock cover shortens — and none of it is alarming on the day it happens. Three months later it is a serious problem with no obvious cause.
The weekly meeting is the routine that catches those while they are still small. One hour, every Monday, across every product.
Prefer to watch? One hundred and twenty-one seconds on the five checks and why their order matters, how to scale your response to the market, and the ending that makes the whole thing work.
What it is for
Find problems and trends early, while they are cheap to fix.
Decide specific actions, and put time in the week to do them.
Build a feel for your products and markets, which is the benefit nobody expects and everybody values most. After six months of this you know what normal looks like for each listing, and anomalies announce themselves.
It is not a reporting exercise. The output is a task list with owners and dates, not a document.
The five checks, in order
The order matters, because each one changes how you read the next.
| # | Check | Question |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sales | which way is this product trending? |
| 2 | Stock against sales | will it run out? |
| 3 | TACoS | is total spend inside its range? |
| 4 | ACoS | is the advertising itself efficient? |
| 5 | CVR, sessions, rating | is anything drifting underneath? |
Work through products one at a time, best-selling first. Give each one attention in proportion to what it contributes. Your top product deserves ten minutes; your twentieth deserves thirty seconds.
1. Sales
Look at daily units and revenue, this week against previous weeks. You are establishing direction, not judging a single number.
Then, for leading products, look at the market. Check what competitors are doing.
This comparison decides how hard you act:
Your sales down, market down — not a problem. The category is soft; aggressive intervention would be spending into a downturn.
Your sales down, market flat or up — this is the one to act on decisively. You are losing share.
Your sales up — make lighter changes. Something is working, and the risk is breaking it.
2. Sales against stock
Which products are heading for a stockout, and how soon?
The answer sets your advertising decisions for the week, because a product about to run out should be slowing down, not scaling.
Scale your response to how close it is:
45 days out — ease off slightly.
14 days out — cut hard. Take TACoS down to near zero.
The levers, in order: stop deals, cancel or reduce outside traffic and promo codes, lower advertising spend, raise the price.
Act fast here. Every day at full velocity on a constrained product is a day of stock you needed later. See When You Are Going Out of Stock and Monitoring Inventory Against Sales.
3. TACoS against its range
Inside the range: nothing to do.
Above the range: work out which channel is responsible — advertising, outside traffic, deals, or promo codes — and reduce the worst performer rather than cutting everything.
Deals and promo codes are usually the quickest to pause. Outside traffic can be reduced or trimmed to its best campaigns. Advertising is the slowest to move and the most valuable, so cut it last.
Below the range: you are under-investing. Find ways to spend more — that is unused, budgeted growth.
And adjust the range itself when circumstances change. Low stock justifies a temporarily lower range; a holiday period may justify a higher one. See Setting Target TACoS per Product.
4. ACoS against target
Within about five points of target: fine.
Above target, and TACoS is also high — the advertising is both inefficient and too large. Cut waste aggressively; it fixes both at once.
Above target, but TACoS is normal — the spend level is right and the efficiency is not. This is an optimisation job rather than a budget one: review the portfolio, cut bids on poor targets, raise them on good ones, and test new targets.
Block one to three hours per portfolio rather than trying to fix it inside the meeting. The meeting identifies; the block resolves.
See Bid Optimisation: Six Rules and The Bleeder Reports.
Expect a lag. Fixing ACoS often raises TACoS for a week or two as you test. Watch it in the following meetings rather than reacting again immediately.
5. Conversion, sessions and rating
The slow-moving metrics, and the ones that reveal problems the others cannot.
Conversion rate — falling means the listing, price or competition changed.
Sessions — falling means rank or advertising changed.
Rating — a drop here explains a fall in both. See Why a Rating Drop Costs More Than It Looks.
You are comparing against the last few weeks, not against a target. A conversion rate of 9% is neither good nor bad; 9% when it was 13% a month ago is a problem.
Do not diagnose in the meeting. Write "investigate conversion drop on X", assign it, and book the time.
Ending the meeting properly
This is the part that makes it work, and the part most often skipped.
Every issue becomes a task with a named owner and a date. An observation with nobody's name on it does not get fixed.
Filter ruthlessly. A weekly review generates more ideas than you can act on. Keep only what serves this week's actual priority — the TACoS problem, the ACoS problem, the stock problem. Everything else is a distraction wearing the costume of productivity.
Block the time. "Optimise the portfolio" without a calendar entry does not happen.
The part that used to take longest
The traditional version of this meeting is mostly assembly: exporting profit data, exporting advertising data, pulling ACoS per portfolio by hand, fetching deal fees, adding outside traffic costs, and reconciling it all per parent ASIN in a spreadsheet before anyone can look at anything.
That is an hour of work to produce a view, before a single decision gets made — which is why the meeting is the first thing dropped in a busy week.
In TrackIQ the view already exists. Sales, advertising spend, ACoS, TACoS, conversion, sessions and stock sit together per product over a date range you set. See Understanding Business Reports, Understanding Your TrackIQ Dashboard and Weekly Business Reports and AI-Generated Insights.
The hour is then spent deciding rather than assembling, which is the only part that ever produced any value.
If you do not use this exact process
Whatever you run instead should cover three things:
Stock against sales, weekly, so no product runs out unnoticed.
TACoS, so you learn about overspending now rather than in a monthly profit report.
ACoS per product or portfolio, so advertising problems are caught before they damage the flywheel.
Related
- The Nine-Report PPC Routine — the advertising work this meeting schedules.
- Setting Target TACoS per Product — where the ranges come from.
- Monitoring Inventory Against Sales — the stock check, in detail.
- The Four Weekly Checks — the checks that make up the meeting, in order.