What is Keep Rate, and why is it the only Amazon number that matters?

Keep Rate is contribution profit divided by gross revenue, expressed as a percentage. It includes everything Amazon takes out of a sale and everything the unit costs you to land: referral fees, fulfilment fees, storage, returns and refund handling, advertising spend, and cost of goods including freight and duty. It excludes overhead that does not scale with a unit sold, so no salaries, no rent, no software, no agency fee. A Keep Rate of 29.5% means that for every $100 of gross revenue, $29.50 is left to cover overhead and profit.

That one number is the only figure we plan against, because it survives every trick the other numbers play.

Why do revenue and ACoS both mislead you?

Revenue is a vanity number on Amazon because it is trivially easy to buy. Cut price by 12%, raise bids, run a heavy coupon, and revenue climbs while the account quietly loses money on every unit. Growth charts look excellent for two quarters and the bank balance does not move.

ACoS fails in the other direction. It measures ad spend against ad attributed revenue only, so it never sees fees, returns or cost of goods, and it never sees the organic sales your ads cannibalised. We wrote about that failure in detail in why a good ACoS can sit next to bad profit. Both numbers describe a slice. Keep Rate describes the whole unit.

What does the waterfall from $100 to $29.50 look like?

Here is a real shape from a supplements account, normalised to $100 of gross revenue. The figures are the average across a quarter, not a single order.

Read the waterfall top to bottom and the leverage points are obvious. Advertising and returns are the two lines that move fastest with operator attention. Fees move with catalogue and packaging work. Cost of goods moves slowly and only with your supplier.

Why include cost of goods but exclude overhead?

Cost of goods is caused by the sale. Sell one more unit and you pay for one more unit. Leave it out and every product looks profitable, which is exactly the mistake that lets a brand scale a losing SKU with a straight face.

Overhead is not caused by the sale. Your warehouse manager costs the same whether you sell 4,000 units this month or 6,000. Mixing overhead into a per unit number makes the number move for reasons that have nothing to do with the decision you are trying to make. Keep it out, then judge overhead separately against total contribution.

If a cost changes when you sell one more unit, it belongs in Keep Rate. If it does not, it does not.

What is the difference between Amazon Keep Rate and True Keep Rate?

Amazon Keep Rate is what you can compute from the Amazon APIs alone: revenue, fees, refunds, advertising, reimbursements. It is accurate, it is available daily, and it is incomplete, because Amazon does not know what your product costs you.

True Keep Rate adds landed cost per unit, meaning the factory price plus freight, duty, inbound shipping, prep and any per unit packaging. The gap between the two is usually 25 to 35 points, and it is the difference between a number that looks fine and a number you can run a business on. Any operator who reports profitability without landed cost is reporting Amazon Keep Rate and calling it profit.

Get landed cost right once, per SKU, per shipment, and revisit it whenever freight rates or factory pricing change. Averaging one number across a whole catalogue defeats the point.

Why does blended Keep Rate hide your worst product?

Blended Keep Rate is an average weighted by revenue, so your biggest earner drowns out everything else. An account at a healthy 29.5% blended can easily contain products at minus 6%, and the negative ones are usually the newest, the most heavily advertised, or the ones with a returns problem nobody has looked at.

The fix is not clever. Compute Keep Rate per ASIN, sort ascending, and start at the bottom. Negative products get repriced, repackaged, renegotiated or retired, in that order of preference.

How do you work out your Keep Rate this week without software?

You can do this in a spreadsheet in an afternoon. Pick a full calendar month that has already settled, so the refunds have caught up.

1. 01Pull the Payments date range summary in Seller Central for the month. That gives gross product sales, refunds, referral fees, FBA fees and storage.
2. 02Pull total advertising spend for the same dates from the advertising console, all campaign types, not just Sponsored Products.
3. 03Pull units sold per ASIN from the Business Reports detail page.
4. 04Build a landed cost per unit for each ASIN: factory price, freight, duty, inbound, prep. One row per SKU.
5. 05Multiply units by landed cost to get cost of goods for the month.
6. 06Add back any reimbursements Amazon actually paid you in the period.
7. 07Contribution equals sales minus refunds minus fees minus ad spend minus cost of goods plus reimbursements. Divide by gross sales. That is your Keep Rate.

Then repeat the calculation for your top ten ASINs individually. That second pass is where the money is, because the blended number tells you how you are doing and the per ASIN numbers tell you what to do on Monday.

Once you have the number, the work splits into three lanes: advertising waste, listing conversion, and supply cost. Listing work is the one most often done for the wrong reasons, which is why we separated the listing changes that move profit from the ones that only move traffic. Doing all three continuously rather than monthly is the whole argument for running an account with a system behind it.