If you’ve been running an Amazon business for a while, you know that managing multiple products and keeping everything organized can become cumbersome after a while. Every so often I get questions about which tool I’d recommend, so with my Cash Cow Pro review, I’ll be detailing the one that’s been working well for me.
Cash Cow Pro is essentially an analytics tool that really helps you understand the profitability of your Amazon business, although it has a couple of operational features as well, so split this review into two sections. I apologize in advance that this is going to be a long post as I try to describe everything as accurately as possible.
Cash Cow Pro Review – Amazon Business Analytics
General bookkeeping tools can help with high level management of your business, but they often aren’t very useful when it comes to analyzing the performance of specific products. This detail is critical as the Amazon marketplace becomes more and more competitive because success with an Amazon business is about being able to scale. If a product isn’t providing a good return on time and/or money, you either need to work on improving it or putting those resources towards something else. Either way, the first step is accessing the right information.
Between fulfillment fees, storage, advertising, shipping, returns, etc., margins can quickly shrink, making it tough to really know how profitable a product is. A good analytics tool will help you see exactly what’s happening at the SKU level, so you can make educated decisions.
At the end of the day, you want to know two things:
- How profitable is my product?
- Is there room for improvement?
Of course, these questions can be answered in a few different ways, but it’s important that you look at both. With that in mind, let’s break things down a bit further by analyzing each question separately:
How profitable is my product?
Cash Cow Pro provides you with the following info to answer this question:
- Net Profit (%)
- Net Profit ($)
- Return on Investment
In addition to analyzing returns of your existing products, you can also view the same information for potential products, helping you decide if a market is worth entering. Below is a screenshot that shows the inputs and outputs of the ROI analysis.
There’s other information as well, but these are the primary metrics I like to keep my eye on to see if the results are meeting my expectations. You’re able to also view this information in chart format so it’s easy to see how a product has been trending over time.
Is there room for improvement?
While the answers to the first question are important, they don’t tell you if your product has reached it’s potential, so you can’t really make a decision on that information alone. You first need to know whether there’s room for improvement before deciding what to do with a product. This is where an Amazon analytics tool can really help manage your business.
While there are a lot of metrics available for you to look at, I mostly focus on the following:
- Page View and Session Data – This tells me how much visibility my product is getting. While it’s not always easy to interpret an absolute number, I like to see how the data is trending over time.
- Conversions – This is probably one of the most important things I look at since it’s a key factor in your Amazon search ranking, so you want to pay close attention to this metric.
- Sales – The tool shows your average daily sales vs. the average of your top 5 competitors, so you can see how you compare.
- Keyword Tracking – You can see how your ranking changes over time for specific keyword searches.
- They also have a Buy Box % metric that’s useful if you don’t follow the private label business model.
Again, there’s other information you can look at, but this is the data that helps me really understand what’s going on with a product and if there’s anything I need to fix. If competitors are selling much more than I am, then I’ve got to find out if I have a problem with visibility (Sessions) or conversions. If conversions are high, but sessions are low, it means I’ve got to improve my keyword targeting. I’ll look at this in conjunction with the keyword tracking section to help pinpoint where there might be a problem.
If sessions are high, but conversions are low, I’ve got to improve the quality of my listing (assuming poor customer reviews aren’t the problem). If both visibility and conversions are poor, then I’ve got to think about completely redoing the entire listing from scratch.
In any case, having easily accessible data is necessary to make good decisions.
Cash Cow Pro Review – Operational Features
While having data is great, running an Amazon business requires more than just analyzing numbers. Cash Cow Pro has operational features that help in the following areas:
- Product Selection – there three elements to the product selection module: (1) a Chrome extension very similar to Jungle Scout; (2) a filter-based tool that allows you to set specific criteria; and (3) a tool that allows you track potential products and analyze the ROI
- Inventory Monitoring – you can easily see your average sales per day for a product, as well as when existing inventory is forecast to be exhausted
- Email Messaging – Similar to Feedback Genius, you’re able to send follow-up emails to customers who have ordered your product through Amazon
- A/B Split Testing – You can test different elements of your listing (Title, Bullets, Price, Images) to optimize profitability.
- Orders – this isn’t really an operational feature, but I wanted to specifically mention that they have filters so you can easily see only look at full price orders or discounted orders. You’re also able to easily view all repeat purchases.
Cash Cow Pro Review – Product Selection
I wanted to focus on the product selection features in a little more detail since there are three tools you can use and choosing the right product is extremely important. For the most part, you can always update your listing if you’ve made mistakes with copywriting, images or keyword selection, but it’s not easy to recover if you’ve chosen the wrong product.
Chrome Extension
Below is a screenshot of the results for searching “garlic press”. As noted above, functionality of the Chrome extension is similar to Jungle Scout, so you get an estimate of BSR, sales, reviews, etc. It also has a nice feature that tells you if a product is a “Great Market” or if it’s “Out of Range”, which should be helpful for people just getting started, but ideally you should be able to determine whether a market is worthwhile just by looking at the results.
Once you’ve identified a specific product that looks like it has potential, you can optionally save it to your account for future reference.
Filter-Based Tool
This tool helps you narrow down your options by only showing products that fit your specific criteria. As an example, it would be very easy to focus in on products in the Sports & Outdoor category that sell more than $10,000 per month.
ROI Analysis Tool
This is the same feature I mentioned when discussing the How Profitable Is My Product question, but it’s just as helpful during the product selection process. Below is the same screenshot I shared earlier, but by entering a few assumptions regarding sales, production/shipping and PPC spend, you can get a clear sense of your projected return.
In my opinion, this is absolutely essential for new sellers as they often focus more on “profit” than on cash flow. Long lead times mean that you have to invest more capital into a product, which effects the amount of money you’ve got tied up.
In addition to the projected Breakeven Date, the tool also estimates your cash flow going forward, so you can get a sense of how your cash position will grow and when you can start investing in new products, or distributing money to yourself. The cash flow forecast is a little crude in the sense that it doesn’t incorporate a growth rate, but it’s still a great tool for when you’re comparing different markets.
Cash Cow Pro Review – Pricing
Right now, the cost is $49.97 per month (or $497 annually). I’ve negotiated with the company to offer a lower price to my readers, so by following any of the links in this review, you’ll get a 10% discount:
This is a fair price for all the analytics you get, but you really start to see the value when looking at the operational side since it can “replace” a few other tools that I personally like to have in my business.
Even though this is a Cash Cow Pro review, I thought it would be helpful to compare the tool to other feature-specific options it can replace:
Product Selection – Jungle Scout is my tool of choice when it comes to Chrome extensions, but Cash Cow Pro has the additional filter-based tool and ROI analysis tool, that are extremely helpful. While the Jungle Scout extension has some features that Cash Cow Pro doesn’t have, it comes at a one-cost of $197 for the Pro version and Cash Cow Pro is is certainly robust enough to get the job done.
Inventory Monitoring – I still use Amazon’s reporting and my own spreadsheets, so Cash Cow Pro doesn’t actually save me money here, but it does help me be more efficient. I have friends who use Forcastly, which costs $49 per month.
Email Messaging – I use Feedback Genius, which starts at $20 per month if you need to send more than 100 emails per month. Cash Cow Pro’s email system doesn’t appear to have as many features as some of the others, but similar to Jungle Scout, it looks like it’ll get the job done. I haven’t actually used their system and will probably stick with Feedback Genius (or possibly switch to ZonMaster). This system would probably be fine if you’re a small seller who wants to keep their costs down, but you might want to consider switching to a dedicated service as you grow. The nice thing is that it’s good enough.
Split Testing – The leader in Amazon split testing right now is probably Splitly, which starts at $47 per month. I’m just running my first campaigns with Cash Cow Pro and it seems to be working just fine. It’s too soon for me to highlight any specific results, but I am pleased with the features and interface.
An inventory monitoring tool is the only one that I’d say is optional. The others are pretty important in my opinion, and would cost $197 up front for Jungle Scout, plus at least $67 per month if you subscribed to the different services (at the lowest subscription levels). I certainly understand the benefits of using services that focus on one specific thing. A company offers all these different features can’t easily compete in terms of quality with companies that spend all their time on something specific. However, when running a business, you’ve got to weigh the cost and benefits of different options and I see the Cash Cow Pro suite of tools as a great way to get access to all these features when cost is a primary concern.
As your business grows, you can start thinking about subscribing to some of these other services and relying less on Cash Cow Pro as an “all-in-one” solution. As an example, and as noted above, I continue to use Feedback Genius because I like the additional features it provides. However, if I were just starting out, I’d certainly want to eliminate that cost.
I hope you found this Cash Cow Pro review helpful, but don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.
James, while I do receive affiliate commissions with purchase, I have tried the software. It’s not perfect, but it’s good for the price point.
Yes, the price is good, but if nothing works properly it is totally irrelevant. Price is immaterial if the software does not work and does not perform. In my experience not one single element of the software works properly. It has potential, but that is all it has. Support was also terrible.