Manage by exception using recommendations

Modified on Fri, 22 Aug at 2:13 AM

Overview

Recommendations are built to reduce the need for constant issue hunting.

In ecommerce, brands are overwhelmed by decision fatigue. With thousands of decisions to make every day, a significant amount of time is spent building and reviewing reports just to identify outliers.

CommerceIQ simplifies this process with a suite of tailored recommendations designed for specific business cases. These exception-based alerts surface only the most critical areas that need your attention. They're fully filterable and can be easily subscribed to, ensuring you're always focused on what matters most.

In this article we will review a few of the most commonly used recommendation types.

Unavailable SKUs
Lost Buy Box
Sales Drop
Change in Variants
Predicted Out of Stock

Unavailable SKUs

Ensuring product availability is a key aspect of ecommerce. Doing this at scale can be difficult and time consuming. The Unavailable SKUs recommendation helps you save time by flagging all currently suppressed products. This report can be paired with our our unavailable SKUs automation, which will automatically file a ticket to identify root cause and reverse erroneous suppressions.

To get a list of all products that are active, but currently suppressed (do not have an active buy box or an active amazon offer):

Navigate to CommerceIQ -> Recommendations -> Unavailable SKUs
Use filters to drill into specific segments of your portfolio (active products, top 80% revenue drivers, Prime Day assortment, etc.)
Use the report to check important factors (inventory, pricing, ordering history, etc.) to triage the issue
If the automated workflow is turned on, you can use the report to follow up on open tickets

In the example below, we can take a look at two different instances of unavailability.

In the first example, there is low PO fill rate (18%) on the product, which is leading to low weeks of cover (0.65). This is most likely a legitimate vendor out of stock. Sending more inventory to Amazon will help this product become available.

In the second scenario, PO fill rate is 100% and weeks of cover is 4.39. Since inventory is high, there must being something else (profitability, compliance, erroneous issues) that is driving this suppression. In this scenario, you will need to cut a support ticket in Amazon Vendor Central, or enable the Unavailable SKUs automation and we will do it on your behalf.

Lost Buy Box

The Lost Buy Box (LBB) recommendations identifies SKUs where Amazon is one of the sellers but BuyBox is won by a 3rd Party (3P) seller. In this report you can view the current buy box winner, their price, and the current 1P offer price.

To identify and analyze your LBB issues:

Navigate to CommerceIQ -> Recommendations -> Lost Buy Box
Use filters to drill into specific segments of your portfolio (active products, top 80% revenue drivers, Prime Day assortment, etc.)
Use the report to check products where you are currently losing the buy box
Determine your next steps (price adjustments, promotion, legal action, etc.)

Sales Drop

The Sales Drop report helps you focus on meaningful changes in sales by filtering out normal fluctuations.

This report flags statistically significant drops in sales, based on the following logic:

If a product’s sales typically fluctuate within ±5%, it will only be flagged if the drop exceeds 5%.
This ensures you're alerted to abnormal declines, rather than day-to-day variability.

The report compares the trailing 7 days to the prior 7-day period.

By highlighting only the most relevant changes, the Sales Drop report allows you to spend your time on products that need attention.

To identify and analyze your high value sales drops:

Navigate to CommerceIQ -> Recommendations -> Sales Drop
Use filters to drill into specific segments of your portfolio (active products, top 80% revenue drivers, Prime Day assortment, etc.)
Use the "reason code" attribute to help you triage reason that sales have dropped
Click the product title to navigate to the SKU deep dive page for more analysis

Change in Variants

Managing variation groups can often feel like a game of whack-a-mole—time-consuming and difficult to stay on top of. The Change in Variants report simplifies this process by flagging changes to your product variations on a daily basis.

Daily monitoring: Get a snapshot of how Amazon's live variation groups are changing day-to-day.
Source of truth comparison: If you have an internal source of truth for variation groupings, we can ingest it using a standard template to compare against Amazon's current state.
Automated resolution: Pair this report with an automated workflow to automatically file tickets and fix incorrect variation groups—no manual work required.

With this report and automation in place, you can proactively maintain clean, accurate variation groups with minimal effort.

Use the Change in Variants report to monitor recent changes to your product variation groups and spot discrepancies.

Navigate to CommerceIQ → Recommendations → Change in Variants.
Use filters to drill into specific segments of your portfolio (e.g., active products, top 80% revenue drivers, Prime Day assortment).
If you’ve uploaded a source of truth file, filter on "Matches with internal source of truth?" = "No" to surface mismatches.

This helps you quickly detect and resolve incorrect variation groupings.

Predicted Out of Stock (OOS)

The Predicted OOS (Out of Stock) recommendation flags SKUs that are likely to go out of stock within the fulfillment window. It uses current inventory levels and expected sales velocity, while ignoring temporary sales spikes, to provide a more accurate prediction.

How to use the Predicted OOS report:

Navigate to CommerceIQ → Recommendations → Predicted OOS
Use filters to focus on specific segments of your portfolio (e.g., active products, top 80% revenue drivers, Prime Day assortment)
Review key data points like weeks of cover, current inventory, and open PO values
Use the "Recommended Restock" quantity to upload Direct Fulfillment inventory or submit a Vendor-Initiated Order to bring products back to 4 weeks of cover

This recommendation helps you stay ahead of potential out-of-stocks and protect your sales.