Amazon Account Audit: 10 Things Agencies Actually Check

An Amazon account audit is not a PPC audit with a different name. It's a review of the whole account: account health, inventory, compliance, catalog hygiene, and Buy Box eligibility, with advertising as just one of ten checks instead of the entire exercise. If your ad metrics look clean and sales are still sliding, the ads were never the problem.

We run a version of this audit before taking on any new managed account at AMZ Advisers, and across 52+ active accounts we keep running it on a schedule, not just at onboarding. Here are the 10 things we actually check, in the order we check them.

An Account Audit Is Not an Ads Audit

This distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. "Amazon account audit" and "Amazon PPC audit" get used interchangeably online, and most of what ranks for "account audit" is actually ads content with a broader title bolted on.

They're not the same review. A PPC audit opens the Search Term Report and the Placement Report and stops there. An account audit opens Seller Central's Account Health dashboard first, because a policy violation or a suppressed listing will tank your sales faster than any amount of ad waste, and ad spend can't fix either one.

What's checked	Account Audit	PPC Audit
Account Health Rating & violations	Yes, checked first
No	Order Defect Rate & Buy Box eligibility	Yes
No, out of scope	Inventory health (IPI, stranded stock)	Yes
No	Listing & keyword compliance	Yes
No	Catalog hygiene (duplicates, suppressed ASINs)	Yes
No	Ad spend & campaign structure	Yes, one of ten checks
Yes, the whole audit

If you came here looking for the ads-only version, we have it: the Amazon PPC audit checklist is the nine-point template for search terms, ACOS, and placements, free to copy into a spreadsheet. This post is the audit that wraps around it.

The 10-Point Amazon Account Audit Checklist

1. Account Health Rating and open policy violations

Start here, every time. Your Account Health Rating (AHR) runs 0 to 1,000. Healthy is 200 and above. Below 200 you're At Risk. Below 100 you're Unhealthy and risk deactivation. Amazon rolled out the AHR dashboard specifically because sellers had no single number to watch, and it's still the fastest way to catch a problem before it becomes a suspension. Open Performance, then Account Health, and check for any violation sitting unresolved. Each one is a ticking clock, not a formality.

2. Order Defect Rate and the metrics that drive the Buy Box

ODR measures the percentage of orders that generate an A-to-Z claim, a chargeback, or negative feedback, on a rolling 60-day window. Keep it below 1%. Above that, Amazon can suspend selling privileges, not just flag the account. Pull the ODR breakdown and check which ASINs are driving it. One product with a bad return rate can be dragging the whole account's standing down.

3. Inventory Performance Index, stranded stock, and excess inventory

A low Inventory Performance Index caps your storage limits and your Buy Box eligibility. Check for stranded listings (inventory sitting in a fulfillment center with no active listing attached to sell it), excess inventory racking up long-term storage fees, and restock timing against both your sales velocity and Amazon's FBA inbound cut-off dates, which move every year and are the one input you cannot fix after the fact. We've had accounts where products that were ad-ready and converting well simply couldn't sell because they'd quietly gone out of stock. No amount of bidding fixes a product that isn't buyable.

4. Listing compliance: restricted keywords and flagged content

Amazon's automated systems scan titles, bullets, descriptions, and backend search terms for prohibited words. Performance claims ("100% safe," "guaranteed"), health claims, and comparative claims to named competitors are the most common triggers, and a flag can suppress a listing overnight with no warning. We wrote the full 2026 prohibited words breakdown by category if you want to check your own catalog against it.

5. Catalog hygiene: duplicates, variation errors, suppressed ASINs

Run through the catalog looking for duplicate listings competing against each other, broken variation families (a parent ASIN with child variations that don't match, or missing swatches), and any ASIN sitting in Inactive or Detail Page Removed status that nobody's tracking. A suppressed ASIN that's been dark for three months and nobody noticed is a more common finding than you'd expect, especially on catalogs over 50 SKUs.

6. Buy Box health and pricing compliance

83% of Amazon sales flow through the Buy Box, so losing it on a core SKU is a direct revenue hit. Check current Buy Box win rate by ASIN, verify pricing sits within the Marketplace Fair Pricing Policy (selling cheaper elsewhere can get a listing suppressed), and confirm fulfillment method isn't quietly working against you. The full Buy Box breakdown covers what actually wins it in 2026 if this is where the audit turns something up.

7. Review profile and manipulation risk

Check review velocity against order volume (a sudden spike in reviews relative to sales is a red flag Amazon's systems also watch for), scan for review solicitation that violates Amazon's terms, and confirm there's no pattern that looks like incentivized or manipulated reviews. This one gets skipped most often because it rarely causes an obvious problem, right up until it does.

8. Brand Registry status and enforcement tools

If you're brand registered, confirm it's actually active and that you're using the tools that come with it: Transparency for serialization if counterfeiting is a risk, Brand Registry's reporting dashboard for IP violations, and A+ Content eligibility. A lot of brands register once and never touch the enforcement side again, which means hijackers get a longer runway than they should.

9. Seller Central user permissions and reauthorization status

Check who has access to the account, whether permissions match current roles (a former employee or agency with standing access is a real risk, not a theoretical one), and whether the account's reauthorization status is current. Amazon has tightened Seller Central reauthorization requirements, and an account that falls out of compliance here can lose access to tools or get flagged for review.

10. Revenue opportunity scan

Last, after the account's been confirmed clean and compliant: look for what's not being used. Untapped product variations, bundle opportunities, international marketplace expansion, and pricing gaps against comparable listings. This is the one check that's about growth instead of risk, and it only makes sense to run it once the first nine confirm there's nothing actively bleeding the account.

Signal	What it usually means	Risk
AHR dropped into At Risk (100-199)	An unresolved violation is actively suppressing performance	High
ODR above 1% for two straight weeks	One or more ASINs are generating claims or chargebacks	High
Sales flat or down with ad metrics unchanged	The problem is inventory, compliance, or catalog, not ads	Medium
A listing hasn't been checked in 12+ months	Prohibited word or policy drift is more likely than it looks	Medium
Nobody's reviewed Seller Central permissions in a year	Stale access is a compliance gap waiting to be found	Low

Why We Run This Before Touching a Single Campaign

A tools and hardware brand came into managed Amazon service with a 42.08% ACOS and an efficiency mandate already flagged. The fix wasn't new campaigns. A prior audit had already found the waste: weak placements and duplicated search terms burning spend with nothing to show for it. Executing that existing diagnosis, not writing a new one, took ACOS to 22.93% in the first month while ad sales still grew 7.6%. The lesson wasn't about advertising skill. It was that an audit nobody executes isn't a fix, it's a document.

A home decor brand hit a different wall. Sales were stuck and the instinct was to push harder on ads. The actual constraint was on the shelf: key products had gone out of stock, which caps revenue regardless of how the ad budget is allocated. Once inventory came back, total sales rose 32.8% over a matched 17-day window, with no added ad spend. The audit step that would have caught it is check 3 on this list, not anything in a PPC report.

Both accounts had an advertising team looking at advertising data and missing the actual constraint, because it wasn't an advertising problem. That's the case for running all 10 checks, not just the ones with a dashboard everyone already watches.

When You Need One Now, Not on Schedule

Run the full checklist quarterly if the account's healthy. Run it immediately if any of these are true: sales have dropped and your ad metrics haven't moved, you've had any policy violation notice in the last 30 days, a key ASIN has gone in and out of stock more than once this quarter, or nobody on your team can tell you your current AHR score off the top of their head. That last one specifically is the most common gap we find: not a crisis, just nobody looking.

Get the Audit Run For You

Running these 10 checks yourself costs nothing but time, and for most accounts under 50 SKUs, a careful afternoon is enough to get through them. Past that size, or if you want a second set of eyes before something turns into a suspension, we run this exact audit free, across all six review areas, with a written report back in 5 business days. No obligation either way.

Frequently asked questions