Live $/day burning on ASINs that can’t convert. The pause-now alert.
At a glance
Live ad spend, last 7 days, that landed on ASINs which were either out of stock or suppressed at the time of the click. Money paid to Amazon for traffic that could not convert. The “pause now” alert.
| What it counts | SUM(amazon_ads.click_cost) WHERE clicked_ASIN was OOS or SUPPRESSED at click timestamp, computed per click by joining the Sponsored Ads click stream against the per-ASIN inventory and listing state at that moment. |
| API endpoint + report | Amazon Ads API GET /v2/sp/keywords/report for spend per click, plus SP-API Pricing API + Listings Items API for the per-ASIN state, joined in our Vortex IQ Nerve Centre cross-channel index. |
| ASIN vs account scope | Per-ASIN with $/day rollup. The drill-down lists each wasted-spend ASIN with its 7-day spend, current state (OOS / suppressed), and trailing organic conversion rate. |
| Buy Box impact | Indirect. Ads can also burn on non-Buy-Box ASINs (the click sends the shopper to a product page where the Buy Box winner takes the order); some implementations of this card optionally include non-Buy-Box ASINs as a third “wasted” condition. |
| FBA vs FBM | Both. FBA OOS is the most common driver (FBA inventory dipped, the ASIN went unfulfillable). FBM OOS happens when the seller’s stock-on-hand feed reports zero. |
| Fees / commission | The card reports raw ad spend (Amazon Ads charges, not commission). The Amazon referral fee on any orders that would have happened is not factored in (recovery is forward-looking). |
| Refunds | Not applicable. |
| Cancellations | Not applicable. |
| Currency | Reported in the Amazon Ads account currency (typically the marketplace currency: GBP for amazon.co.uk, EUR for amazon.de, USD for amazon.com). Aggregated to settlement currency for the headline. |
| Marketplace dynamics | The longer an ASIN sits OOS or suppressed with active campaigns, the worse the waste. Sponsored Ads campaigns do NOT auto-pause when an ASIN goes OOS unless the seller has explicitly enabled the “pause on OOS” setting (off by default). |
| Return-window vs refund-window | Not applicable. |
| Time window | 7D (rolling 7-day spend; long enough to be material, short enough that a fix has visible impact within days). |
| Alert trigger | >$0, the card is designed to be quiet at zero. Any non-zero reading is recoverable spend. |
| Sentiment key | zero_conversion_spend. |
| Roles | owner, marketing, finance. |
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Amazon (Selling Partner) data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A US FBA-only seller running a 95-ASIN pet supplies book on amazon.com. Amazon Ads spend roughly 842 wasted in last 7 days**. Drilling into the per-ASIN drill:| ASIN | Product | State at click | 7D wasted spend | 7D wasted clicks | Cause |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| B07PET0001 | Cat litter (12kg) | OOS at FBA since 14 Apr 26 | $384 | 124 | Replenishment shipment delayed at port |
| B07PET0002 | Dog harness (M) | OOS at FBA since 18 Apr 26 | $221 | 78 | Stock-out during demand spike |
| B07PET0003 | Cat scratcher | Suppressed (image policy) | $148 | 51 | New main image flagged 16 Apr 26 |
| B07PET0004 | Dog treats (variety) | Buy Box loss to reseller | $89 | 32 | Optional condition, off by default |
| Total wasted | $842 | 285 |
- Sponsored Ads do NOT auto-pause when an ASIN goes OOS. Amazon Ads will happily keep spending on an ASIN that has been zero-stock for days, the campaign-level setting “pause on OOS” is OFF by default. Most sellers don’t know this. The fix is to enable that setting in every campaign, plus monitor this card. The single biggest source of wasted Amazon Ads spend across the SMB seller base is this exact mechanism.
- Buy Box loss = sales loss, instantly, but ad waste is delayed. When B07PET0001 went OOS on 14 Apr 26, organic sales dropped to zero same day. Ad spend continued for 7 days at roughly $55/day until this card flagged it on 21 Apr 26. Speed of detection matters; the wasted-spend clock is constant until you see the alert and act.
- Commission erodes 12 to 15% of headline, but ad waste is 100% loss. Fees are charged on revenue you make. Wasted ad spend on OOS ASINs is charged on revenue you don’t make. Net-net, every 1 of pure margin loss; a 0.85 of margin. Wasted ad spend is 6 to 7x worse per dollar than fees on the same order.
- ACOS is the wrong number to watch for this. A wasted-spend ASIN often shows infinite ACOS (clicks > 0, attributed sales = 0) which can be hidden in the keyword-level ACOS view if the campaign also has performing ASINs. The card joins click stream against per-ASIN inventory state at click time, which is more reliable than ACOS-based detection.
- Out-of-stock punishes you for weeks even after the spend is paused. Pausing the campaign stops the bleed but doesn’t recover the lost organic rank from the OOS period. B07PET0001 took 19 days post-replenishment to recover its organic search rank to pre-OOS levels, even with this card’s intervention. The card prevents future waste; it does not undo past damage.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
This card is inherently cross-channel, joining Amazon Ads spend against SP-API ASIN state. Pair with these to act:| Card | Why pair it with Ad Spend on OOS ASINs |
|---|---|
| Suppressed Listings | The suppression-side input. Pause ads on every entry here. |
| Days of Cover | The OOS-side input. Pause ads on any ASIN below 7 days of cover before it actually hits zero. |
| Buy Box Trend | If Buy Box loss is a wasted-spend driver in your config, watch this for the leading indicator. |
| Amazon Ads ACOS | The macro view of ad efficiency. Wasted-spend reductions show up as ACOS improvements. |
| Amazon Ads Spend | Total Amazon Ads spend; this card is the wasted subset. |
| New Suppressions (24h) | Burst detection for suppressions. Combine with this card for same-day campaign pause. |
| Buy Box Loss Burst | Burst detection for Buy Box loss. Same idea, different driver. |
| Total Revenue | The headline this card protects. Reducing wasted spend doesn’t lift Total Revenue directly, but reduces the margin leak. |
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Amazon Seller Central: There is no native Seller Central or Amazon Ads view that shows “ad spend on OOS or suppressed ASINs”. The closest workflow is:- Amazon Ads → Sponsored Products → Advertised Products shows per-ASIN ad performance. ASINs with high spend and zero attributed sales are candidates; the page does not tell you why (OOS / suppressed / non-Buy-Box).
- Inventory → Manage Inventory cross-references the live OOS / suppressed list. Reconcile the two views manually.
- Performance → Inventory Health shows OOS ASINs and stock-on-hand levels.
_xc_) card and not native to either Amazon Ads or SP-API alone.
Why our number may legitimately differ from anything you’d build manually:
| Reason | Direction | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Time zone | Boundary days | Amazon Ads reports in PST/PDT regardless of seller location; SP-API stamps in UTC at the API layer. The 7-day rolling window for this card is computed on UTC, so a manual rebuild against the Amazon Ads dashboard’s “last 7 days” view will boundary-shift by 7 to 8 hours. |
| Settlement-period lag | Not applicable | Ads are billed separately from order settlement on a different cycle. |
| API rate limits | Ours can lag by 4 to 24 hours | The Amazon Ads Reports API is async; reports take 30 minutes to 4 hours to generate. The card uses the most recent successful pull, so today’s wasted spend is up to 4 hours stale. |
| Reports API generation latency | Ours is the bottleneck | Both the Ads Reports API and SP-API Reports API are async; the card uses the join of the two, with the slower of the two governing freshness. |
| State-at-click attribution | Ours is best-effort | Amazon does not expose the ASIN’s inventory state at the moment of the click; we approximate using the closest sample (within the 30 to 60 minute polling window). Brief in-stock windows during a mostly-OOS day can cause minor under-counting. |
| Card | Expected relationship | What causes legitimate divergence |
|---|---|---|
amazon_ads.aads_spend | Wasted spend is a subset of total spend, typically 1 to 5% of total in healthy accounts | Healthy accounts run <1% wasted; problem accounts run 5 to 15% wasted, sometimes higher during severe OOS events. |
amazon_ads.aads_acos | Inverse: reducing wasted spend lowers ACOS | Wasted spend is roughly the “infinite-ACOS” portion of the keyword-level data; pulling it out improves ACOS without touching anything else. |
shopify.total_revenue | No relationship. | Shopify-side ad spend (Google, Meta) is on a different connector and a different concept; this card is Amazon-internal. |
shipbob.fulfilment_rate | Indirect for FBM | Slow ShipBob fulfilment can cause OOS-flagged listings (when stock-on-hand reports zero between fulfilments). Doesn’t apply to FBA. |
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
The card says I wasted $1,200 last week. Why didn’t Amazon Ads pause my campaigns automatically? Because Sponsored Ads campaigns have an opt-in “pause on OOS” setting (also known as “automatic targeting paused when out of stock”), and it is OFF by default. Most sellers never enable it. The fix: enable it on every campaign. Do this once and the bleed shrinks dramatically. If your category sees frequent OOS events, also set up a same-day Slack or email alert from this card so you can pause campaigns before they accumulate spend. How does this card differ from looking at Amazon Ads ACOS? ACOS hides this. A campaign with 5 ASINs, where 1 is OOS and burning spend with zero attributed sales while the other 4 perform normally, will still show a “reasonable” campaign-level ACOS because the performing ASINs mask the wasted ASIN. The card joins click-by-click ad spend against per-ASIN inventory state, surfacing the wasted slice that ACOS averages over. Use Amazon Ads ACOS for campaign-level efficiency; use this card to find the specific ASINs to pause. ACOS vs ROAS terminology, which is right? ACOS (Ad Cost of Sale) =ad spend ÷ ad-attributed sales, the inverse of ROAS. A 25% ACOS = 4x ROAS. Amazon writes ACOS because lower-is-better fits how the Sponsored Ads console presents data; Google and Meta write ROAS because higher-is-better fits theirs. They’re the same arithmetic, different framing. For a wasted-spend ASIN, ACOS is infinite (zero sales attributed); ROAS is zero. This card sidesteps both and reports raw wasted dollars, which is harder to misread.
Commission, FBA fees, do they enter this card?
No. This card reports raw Amazon Ads spend, not net economics. Net wasted economics would be: wasted ad spend minus the (negative) referral fee and FBA fee that you didn’t pay because there was no order. But since you didn’t get the order at all, the fees question is moot; the wasted ad spend is a pure margin loss. Pair with Net Revenue when reasoning about overall margin impact.
FBA vs FBM, does the card distinguish?
The card distinguishes the cause of wasted spend (OOS, suppression, optionally non-Buy-Box) but not the fulfilment channel directly. You can filter by FulfillmentChannel in the drill-down. FBA OOS is the most common driver because FBA inventory drops are slower to detect than FBM (you can’t physically see your FBA shelves). FBM OOS happens when stock-on-hand feed reports zero, which is faster to detect on your side.
Multi-marketplace, does the card aggregate UK + DE + FR + IT + ES?
Yes, but converting to settlement currency for the headline. The drill-down splits by marketplace because Amazon Ads accounts are per-marketplace (you have separate ad accounts for amazon.co.uk and amazon.de, each with its own currency and budget). When OOS is per-marketplace (common with replenishment lag in one country only), the card flags the affected marketplace cleanly.
Settlement timing, does this card affect cash flow?
Indirectly. Wasted ad spend is debited on Amazon Ads’ billing cycle (typically monthly or weekly), separately from order settlement. Pausing wasted-spend campaigns reduces the next ad invoice but doesn’t accelerate any pending order settlements. Pair with Pending Settlement for cash-flow planning; this card for ad-budget planning.
Return-window confusion, do return-window issues show up here?
No. This card looks at the ASIN state at click time (OOS / suppressed / optionally non-Buy-Box). Returns happen post-click, post-purchase; they don’t affect this card. If a high return rate triggers Amazon to flag and suppress the ASIN under “customer-reported defect”, that flag will then show up in this card via the suppression path. So return-window issues are an upstream cause of suppression, which then causes wasted spend, but they don’t directly enter the calculation here.
Why isn’t the Shopify-Amazon channel app a useful tool here?
Because Shopify has no concept of Amazon Ads. The channel app pushes Shopify product data to Amazon catalogue listings; it does not interact with Amazon Sponsored Ads campaigns. The cross-channel join required for this card is between Amazon Ads and Amazon SP-API, both Amazon-internal. Shopify is irrelevant to this calculation.
Why does today’s number sometimes show zero even when I know I have OOS ASINs with active campaigns?
Two reasons. (1) The Amazon Ads Reports API is async with up to 4-hour latency; today’s spend may not be available yet for joining against today’s inventory state. (2) The card requires both data inputs to be fresh; if either side is mid-rate-limit-backoff, the card displays the last-known value, which may be zero if the prior poll cycle was clean. If you suspect under-reporting, wait 4 to 6 hours and re-check; persistent zero with known OOS plus active campaigns is worth raising as a connector data-freshness issue.