How to Improve Amazon Sales: A Diagnostic Guide When Revenue Is Flat or Declining (2026)

If your Amazon sales have plateaued or started declining, the worst thing you can do is panic and change everything at once. I've seen sellers simultaneously cut prices, double ad spend, rewrite their listing, and launch a coupon — then have no idea what worked or what made things worse. That's not strategy. That's flailing.

Improving Amazon sales starts with diagnosis. Something changed — maybe the market shifted, maybe your listing degraded, maybe a competitor showed up, maybe Amazon's algorithm moved. Until you know what's actually wrong, every "fix" is a guess. After managing 50+ brands with $205M+ in total Amazon sales, here's the diagnostic framework we run every time a brand's numbers aren't where they should be.

Step 1: Is It You or the Market?

Before diagnosing your product, figure out whether the entire category is down.

How to Check

• Brand Analytics (if Brand Registered): Look at your category's top search terms. Is search volume declining for your core keywords? If the whole category is down 15%, your sales being down 15% isn't a product problem — it's a market problem.

• Search Query Performance Report: Check your impression share. If your impression share is stable but total impressions are down, the market shrank. If total impressions are stable but your share dropped, you lost position.

• Google Trends: Check if consumer interest in your product category is declining or seasonal. Some categories have obvious seasonality that sellers forget about.

• Keepa / competitor BSR trends: If your top 5 competitors' BSR is also increasing (meaning their sales are also declining), it's a market-wide issue.

If It's the Market

You can't fix macro demand. But you can:

• Reduce ad spend during known low-demand periods (don't bleed money maintaining position on keywords nobody is searching)

• Focus on conversion rate optimization so you capture a larger share of reduced demand

• Diversify into adjacent keywords or categories

• Plan for the upswing — use low-demand periods to test listing changes with lower risk

If It's You

Move to Step 2.

Step 2: Diagnose Your Conversion Rate

The most common reason for declining sales on a stable listing is a conversion rate drop. Something is making shoppers click less or buy less.

Pull Your Conversion Data

Go to Business Reports → Detail Page Sales and Traffic. Look at:

• Unit Session Percentage (Amazon's version of conversion rate)

• Page Views (are fewer people seeing your listing?)

• Sessions (are fewer people clicking into your listing from search?)

Compare the last 30 days to the previous 30 days, and to the same period last year.

Conversion Rate Dropped — Why?

Reviews changed. A flood of negative reviews tanks conversion. Check your recent reviews. A drop from 4.5 to 4.2 stars can cause a 20-30% conversion decline. One viral 1-star review with photos can do outsized damage. Price competitiveness shifted. If a competitor dropped their price by 20% or a new entrant launched at a lower price point, shoppers are comparison shopping differently. Check what the page 1 competitive landscape looks like today versus a month ago. Main image degraded (or competitors improved). You may not have changed your main image, but if 3 competitors upgraded theirs, your listing looks worse by comparison. Relative quality matters. Lost the Buy Box. If you're not winning the Buy Box, your conversion rate effectively goes to zero. Check your Buy Box percentage in Business Reports. If it dropped, investigate — unauthorized sellers, pricing issues, or fulfillment changes can cause this. Seasonal shift. Some products convert differently in different seasons without total demand dropping. A heating pad converts great in November but poorly in June, even if people are still browsing. A+ Content or listing changes. Did you or your team change anything on the listing recently? Even "improvements" can hurt conversion. We've run 10,000+ A/B tests — changes that seem obviously better often perform worse. If you made a change and conversions dropped, revert it and test properly through Manage Your Experiments.

Step 3: Diagnose Your Traffic

If conversion rate is stable but sales are down, you have a traffic problem. Fewer people are seeing your listing.

Organic Traffic Declining

Check your keyword rankings. Use Helium 10 or your preferred rank tracker. If you've dropped from page 1 to page 2 on your main keywords, that explains the traffic loss. Page 2 gets roughly 10% of the clicks that page 1 does. Why organic rank drops:

• Decreased sales velocity (creates a negative spiral — less sales = worse rank = less traffic = less sales)

• New competitors entered with aggressive PPC, pushing you down

• Algorithm update or category restructuring

• Listing suppression or policy violation (check Account Health in Seller Central)

• Stockout — even a few days out of stock can crater your rank for weeks

Paid Traffic Declining

Check your PPC performance:

• Impressions down? Your bids may no longer be competitive, or new competitors are taking impression share.

• Clicks down with stable impressions? Your CTR dropped — your main image or title is losing the visual competition on the search results page.

• Budget running out earlier in the day? CPCs may have increased, exhausting your budget before peak shopping hours.

Pull the specific data before taking action. "My ads aren't working" is not a diagnosis. "My CPC on my top 10 keywords increased 30% over the last month, exhausting my daily budget by 2 PM" is a diagnosis with a clear fix.

Step 4: Diagnose Your Competitive Landscape

Sometimes nothing about your product or listing changed — but the competitive environment did.

What to Look For

New competitors. Search your main keywords. Is there a new product on page 1 that wasn't there last month? Check their reviews, price, and listing quality. If they launched with aggressive PPC and a compelling offer, they're stealing your share. Competitor price changes. If the category price leader dropped their price, it shifts the value equation for every other product. Use Keepa to track competitor pricing history. Competitor listing improvements. A competitor who upgraded to professional images, added video, and launched A+ Content just became a stronger alternative. Shoppers don't evaluate your listing in isolation — they compare. Competitor promotions. Lightning Deals, coupons, and Subscribe & Save offers all have a green badge that catches the eye on search results. If competitors are running promotions and you're not, you'll lose clicks.

How to Respond

Don't mirror competitors blindly. Dropping your price to match a competitor's race to the bottom is a losing strategy. Instead:

• Differentiate your listing. Better images, clearer value proposition, stronger social proof.

• Target their weaknesses. Read their negative reviews. If customers complain about durability and yours lasts longer, make that the lead of your listing.

• Defend your keywords. Increase PPC bids on your core converting keywords to maintain visibility. Losing page 1 organic position is expensive to recover.

• Consider product improvements. If the new competitor has a genuinely better product at a similar price, listing optimization has limits. Sometimes the right answer is product iteration.

Step 5: Fix What's Actually Broken

Now that you have a diagnosis, apply the right fix.

If Conversion Rate Is the Problem

• Test a new main image first — Highest leverage element. Run through Manage Your Experiments or PickFu for rapid directional testing.

• Review your price positioning — Are you priced appropriately for your perceived quality relative to competitors?

• Address review issues — If negative reviews are hurting you, respond professionally and address legitimate product issues in your listing or product itself.

• Optimize bullets for mobile — Only 3 bullets show on mobile. If your strongest selling points are in bullets 4-5, mobile shoppers never see them.

• Update A+ Content — Add comparison charts (highest-impact A+ module), refresh images, tighten copy.

If Traffic Is the Problem

• Increase PPC bids on your top-converting keywords — Reclaim impression share.

• Launch new keyword campaigns — Find terms you're not targeting that competitors are. Use reverse ASIN lookups.

• Audit your backend keywords — Are all 250 bytes used? Are there indexing opportunities you're missing?

• Run a promotion — A well-timed coupon or Lightning Deal can kick-start sales velocity, which feeds organic rank.

If Competition Is the Problem

• Double down on differentiation — Your listing should make it immediately clear why your product is worth the price.

• Launch Sponsored Display conquest campaigns — Put your product on competitor product pages.

• Invest in brand building — Amazon Posts, Brand Story, Storefront. The more branded touchpoints, the harder it is for competitors to steal your customers.

Step 6: Monitor and Iterate

After implementing fixes, give them time to take effect and monitor weekly.

Track these weekly:

• Unit session percentage (conversion rate)

• Sessions (traffic)

• Total sales

• TACoS (total ad spend as % of total revenue)

• Organic vs. paid sales ratio

Give changes 2-4 weeks before judging their impact. Amazon's algorithm doesn't respond instantly, and customer behavior shifts take time to appear in data. Making changes weekly based on 3 days of data leads to thrashing, not improving. Run one change at a time when possible. If you change price, main image, and PPC bids simultaneously and sales improve, you don't know what worked. Test sequentially so you learn what actually moves the needle for your specific product.

When Should You Get Outside Help?

Not every sales decline requires an agency. But there are clear signals that outside expertise would accelerate your recovery:

• You've been declining for 3+ months and your own fixes aren't working

• You're spending $10K+/month on PPC and don't have confidence it's optimized

• You know your listing needs work but don't have the skills in-house (images, copy, A+ Content)

• You're managing multiple products and can't give each one the attention it needs

• Your category is getting more competitive and you need an edge

Book a free strategy call — We'll run through this diagnostic framework on your specific brand, identify the root cause of your sales decline, and give you a prioritized fix list. No pitch — just diagnosis. If the fix is something you can do yourself, we'll tell you that.

Hunter Harris is the founder of GigaBrands, an AI-assisted Amazon growth agency managing 50+ brands with over $205M in total Amazon sales.