How exactly do Business Reports work in Daton?

Changes to Business Reports released on 2022-10-10.

What are Business Reports?

Business Reports give sales and traffic data by ASINs and by date at a glance. These reports can be accessed by going to Reports -> Business Reports on Seller Central. Daton offers three business reports - SalesAndTrafficReportByChildASIN, SalesAndTrafficReportByDate, SalesAndTrafficReportByParentASIN (deprecated). In case you are adding Business Reports after you have created an integration, you will have to re-authenticate the integration to approve another set of permissions required to access Business Reports. We recommend adding only SalesAndTrafficReportByChildASIN since it is the most granular of all. The features described in this article only pertain to SalesAndTrafficReportByChildASIN.

I've added SalesAndTrafficReportByChildASIN, now what?

Daton starts pulling your data starting from the set replication date in the integration. Business Reports fetch a maximum of 2 years of historical data from the current date. So even if you set an earlier replication start date in the table/integration, the reports will only fetch the last two years' worth of data. If your selected replication date is within the two year window, the reports will start fetching data from the selected replication date.

Historical data processing

Each job processes five days of data and runs every half hour which means that more than 7 months worth of data is fetched in 24 hours. Previously, Daton was able to fetch less than 4 months of data in 24 hours. You can monitor the progress of the data fetch in the integration details page in the 'Replicated Up To' field.

Incremental data processing

Incremental data fetch starts after historical data is processed (7 days before current day). Previously, Daton used to fetch data for T-7 to T-2 once every 24 hours. This resulted in data quality issues as it was observed that data had changed at the source even after 30 days from the date.

To address the issue, Daton now pulls additional dates apart from T-7 to T-2. Incremental data processing will include data from T-35, T-28, T-21, T-14, T-7, T-6, T-5, T-4, T-3, T-2 and T-1 (11 dates). Since each job processes only five days of data, These dates will be spread out over three jobs. These three jobs will be consecutively processed only once in 24 hours.

For example, an incremental data fetch happening on 2022-10-07 will fetch data for 2022-09-02, 2022-09-09, 2022-09-16, 2022-09-23, 2022-09-30, 2022-10-01, 2022-10-02, 2022-10-03, 2022-10-04, 2022-10-05 and 2022-10-06. Five of these dates will be fetched in each job.

Sometimes, T-1 data is not available when we call for it, which is why in such a case, we keep trying every 30 minutes for the next 24 hours or until it is available. After 24 hours, we stop trying for T-1 specifically as it comes under T-2 in the 11 dates mentioned above.

There are cases when reports get a 'FATAL' or 'CANCELLED' response. This usually happens when the API parameters are not as expected or when there is no data in a requested report. In case of any of the 11 incremental dates returning a 'FATAL' or 'CANCELLED' status, Daton will re-try fetching data for those dates for seven days after the first 'FATAL'/'CANCELLED' response. If the response is the same after seven days, Daton will not re-try those dates anymore.

Some caveats

1) Since there are more dates fetched everyday for business reports than previously, this might impact your billing amount depending on the plan you are subscribed to and the number of integrations containing SalesAndTrafficReport.

2) API calls are made more frequently than before and we might run into rate limit errors in the case of a single brand having the same business reports running in multiple integrations. Therefore, it is imperative that business reports run only in one integration per seller/marketplace combination.

3) We have re-added SalesAndTrafficReportByDate due to columns that are not available in SalesAndTrafficReportByChildASIN (averageOffercount, averageUnits, averageSales, averageSellingPrice etc). This report does not have an ASIN granularity but has these additional columns of data. If these columns are not relevant to you, it is highly recommended that you don't add this table to your integration as you will be getting more granular data from SalesAndTrafficReportByChildASIN than SalesAndTrafficReportByDate.