The Amazon data problem
An Amazon FBA brand at £3m of annual revenue produces something in the order of sixteen distinct data sources that need to be reconciled to produce a true P&L: the settlement report, FBA fee preview, FBA storage fees, long-term storage fees, removal and disposal fees, inbound transport, returns, refund administration, advertising, brand registry, vendor central if applicable, and the marketplace-collected VAT lines, repeated across every marketplace. No native dashboard reconciles them. The first job of a CFO is to build the reconciliation.
SKU-level decisions, not catalogue-level averages
Most Amazon brands manage at the catalogue level because that is what the platform shows them. SKU-level decisions require allocating every fee, every return, and every PPC pound to its ASIN. Once that is done, the typical catalogue splits into three roughly equal tiers: ASINs that print money, ASINs that break even, and ASINs that are quietly losing money. The middle and bottom tiers are usually funded by the top tier, often without the founder realising. The decision to cull, reprice, or re-position the bottom tier is one of the highest-ROI decisions a CFO can take an Amazon brand through.
PPC tied to contribution, not ACoS
ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sales) is the industry default metric. It is also a vanity number unless you tie it to contribution margin per ASIN. A 25% ACoS on an ASIN with 40% contribution margin is profitable; the same ACoS on an ASIN with 22% contribution margin is loss-making. The CFO version of the PPC review is one tab per ASIN, with incremental contribution as the only column that matters.