Seven areas: listing quality, primary image click-through rate, conversion rate, ad performance, traffic channel activation, pricing, and return rate. It ends with a scale, fix, or kill recommendation on every product, and it contains at least one number specific to your account that you could not have found yourself.
The short version
- Seven diagnostic areas, not a general review of your listings.
- A verdict per product: scale, fix, or kill. Not a list of observations.
- At least one number you did not know. Otherwise it is a sales deck.
- Prioritized by impact on cost of customer acquisition, not by ease of execution.
- Ours is free and returns in writing within 48 hours.
The seven areas
I run Flapen with 50 operators managing about 70 brands. This is the audit we run before touching anything in a new account, and it is deliberately ordered so the cheapest fixes with the biggest effect surface first.
| # | Area | What it answers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Listing quality | Is the listing capable of converting the traffic it gets? |
| 2 | Primary image click-through rate | Are you losing buyers before the page loads? |
| 3 | Conversion rate | Is the problem traffic, or what happens after it arrives? |
| 4 | Ad performance | Is spend efficient at this product's stage? |
| 5 | Traffic channel activation | How many of the 5 channels are actually running? |
| 6 | Pricing | Is there margin room, and where does it sit against the market? |
| 7 | Return rate | Is a product quietly destroying its own economics? |
Why the order matters
Most audits start at ads because ads are where the dashboard is loudest. That is backwards.
If your conversion rate is low, no amount of ad spend fixes it. Primary image click-through rate caps the traffic that reaches your page, and conversion caps what that traffic is worth. Auditing bids before those two means optimizing around a ceiling you have not identified.
Traffic channel activation
The area almost nobody audits. There are five ways to capture traffic on Amazon: organic, paid, promotions, influencer and creator, and off-channel. Most sellers run two.
A good audit counts how many you are running and estimates what the missing ones are worth for your specific product. When a brand plateaus, the ceiling is usually not the market. It is the traffic strategy, and this is the section that proves it.
Return rate
The quiet one. A product with a high return rate can look profitable in the sales report and be losing money after returns, replacement shipping, and the rating damage that follows. It is also a leading indicator that a sourcing or quality problem exists that no amount of advertising will fix.
What the audit should conclude with
Not observations. A decision.
Every product should come out of the audit as scale, fix, or kill. Scale means the signals support more spend. Fix means specific signals are off but addressable, with the exact problem named. Kill means the criteria are not met and the honest answer is to stop, based on rating trend, return rate, conversion rate, and cost of customer acquisition trajectory.
An audit that names no kill candidates across a whole catalog is either analyzing an unusually good account or avoiding the uncomfortable half of its job.
How long should an audit take
Ours returns a written report with prioritized fixes within 48 hours, at no charge and with no commitment.
Two things about the format. It arrives in writing, so you can act on it without us, and it is prioritized rather than exhaustive. A 40-page document listing every possible improvement is not an audit, it is an inventory. The value is in the ranking.
How to tell a real audit from a sales deck
- Does it contain a number specific to your account? Something you could not have pulled in five minutes.
- Does it name a product to kill or deprioritise?
- Is it prioritized by impact, or ordered by section?
- Can you act on it without hiring them?
- Does it say what it could not assess? Honest audits have gaps.
Point four is the strongest test. A real audit is useful whether or not you hire the people who wrote it, which is exactly why most agencies do not give one away.
What most agencies will not tell you
The free audit is the most common sales entry point in this industry, and most of them are a template with your brand name inserted.
The pattern is easy to spot once you know it: your listing needs work, your images could convert better, your campaigns are inefficient, and your keyword coverage has gaps. All of that is true of nearly every account on Amazon, which is why it can be written before anyone looks at yours.
The other thing nobody volunteers: an audit cannot assess your margin unless you provide landed cost. Any audit that makes profitability claims without asking for your cost per unit is estimating, and it should say so.
Related answers
- How to spot shady Amazon audit offers
- How to audit current Amazon agency performance
- Onboarding timeline with an Amazon agency
- Must-ask questions for Amazon seller consultants
- Hiring an Amazon agency: the complete guide
Our audit is free, written, and useful even if you never hire us. Request it at Flapen.
