A question worth asking about your catalogue, which most reporting will never an
By michael-erickson-facchin · September 17, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
A question worth asking about your catalogue, which most reporting will never answer for you.
Which of your products is paying for the others?
Most sellers assume they know. There is the hero product that gets the budget, and there are the products that tick along on their own. That picture is built from top level reports, and top level reports are not wrong exactly. They are just answering a narrower question than the one you think you asked.
Here is the shape of the problem.
Product A does most of the advertising. Product B appears to sell steadily without any spend attached to it. In every summary view, product B's sales look organic.
They may not be organic at all. If shoppers are clicking an ad for product A and buying product B, those are cross sales. Advertising influenced that purchase. It is just that the influence and the sale landed on different rows of your spreadsheet.
The consequences run in both directions and both are expensive.
Product B looks profitable, because it appears to generate revenue for free. Product A looks expensive, because it carries all the spend and gets credited with only part of the return. Every contribution margin calculation built on that foundation is wrong, and so is every decision made from it.
The sharpest version of the risk: cut product A's budget because its ACoS looks bad, and watch product B's mysteriously excellent organic sales go with it. At which point you have two underperforming products and no obvious explanation.
The fix is not a tool. It is separating the ASIN you advertised from the ASIN that was actually purchased, which the newer Amazon reporting does support, and then doing the unglamorous work of reading it properly.
Most sellers have never looked at this split. The ones who do are usually surprised by which product turns out to be doing the real work.