Can I build my own Sellerboard-style profit dashboard with the Amazon API?

What Sellerboard does

Sellerboard shows Amazon sellers their sales, orders, refunds, ad costs, Amazon fees, cost of goods and net profit, by product and by order. It says it counts more than 100 Amazon fee types, and it adds inventory tools, review requests and ad tools on top. As of November 2026 its plans run from $19 a month billed monthly ($15 a month billed yearly) for up to 3,000 orders a month, up to $79 a month ($63 yearly) for up to 50,000 orders. Check sellerboard.com for current prices.

That is the benchmark. If you build something, it should beat paying roughly $15 to $63 a month for the plan that fits you, or do something Sellerboard does not.

What the Amazon API gives you

The Selling Partner API is a web interface that lets software ask Amazon for your data. Amazon's documentation says it helps sellers access data on orders, shipments, payments, inventory and other business information, and that it can automate retrieving financial transactions, tax information and invoices.

For a profit dashboard, three parts matter:

• Finances API. The current version, v2024-06-19, returns financial transactions for an order or a date range, without waiting for a statement period to close. It needs the Finance and Accounting role. The older version 0 is on Amazon's deprecation list: marked deprecated July 21, 2025, with removal on August 27, 2027. Build on the new one.
• Settlement reports. Amazon schedules these automatically, and you find them through the Reports API. The current flat file lists each charge with an amount type, a description and an amount.
• Orders and inventory data for units sold and stock on hand.

What it does not give you: your product cost. Cost of goods comes from your invoices, so you enter it or import it. Ad spend is also separate, from the Amazon Ads side.

The work involved

1. Register as a developer. Amazon's onboarding has you create a Solution Provider Portal account and a developer profile, then register an application. A private application is for one organization's own use and does not need to be listed in the Selling Partner Appstore.
2. Self-authorize. For a private app you authorize it yourself in the developer console, which produces a refresh token (a long-lived key the app uses to ask for access). Treat that token like a password.
3. Pull the data on a schedule. Each operation has rate limits, based on a token bucket: your app gets tokens at a set rate, each call spends one, and when the bucket is empty calls are throttled. Your code must wait and retry.
4. Store it. A small database, or a Google Sheet or Airtable for a small catalog. Sheets and Airtable are fine for hundreds of products, and awkward at thousands of orders.
5. Add your costs. A table of product cost by SKU that you keep current.
6. Match the numbers. Join fees to orders to products and compute profit. This is the hard part, because fee types are many and new ones appear. As of November 2026, Amazon says most 2027 US fee changes start on 15 January 2027 and that from 1 February 2027 one age-based monthly storage fee replaces the current monthly storage fee, storage utilization surcharge and aged inventory surcharge, so storage rows from before and after that date will not look alike.
7. Build the screens. A page showing profit by product, by day and by order.
8. Check it against Amazon. Compare your totals to the payouts every month.

My own estimate: a developer who knows the API can get a first working version in a few weeks. The long tail of fee types, refunds, reimbursements and edge cases takes longer. The work does not end, because the API changes. Amazon's own deprecation page shows how a version you build on today gets retired.

Build or buy?

Situation	What I would do
Amazon only, under 3,000 orders a month	Buy. A plan at $15 to $19 a month is cheaper than any build.
Amazon plus Shopify (an online store platform) and others, need one number	Check whether the tool covers your channels in one view. If not, build or commission.
You want custom reports, your own rules, or data in your other systems	Build or commission.
You have a developer and enjoy the work	Build, but budget for upkeep.

Spreadsheet versions (Google Sheets, Airtable)

You can skip the app and load exported settlement files into Google Sheets (free online spreadsheets) or Airtable (a spreadsheet-style database). That is not a live dashboard, and it needs a person to do it each month. It is a good first step, and it teaches you which numbers you care about before you spend on anything. My spreadsheet to dashboard guide covers the next step up.

How I build this for Amazon and Shopify

Shopify is an online store platform. If you sell on Amazon and a Shopify store, your profit lives in two places and no single report shows it. I build profit dashboards that pull from both, using their official connections, and add your product costs and ad spend so you see profit per product in one view. They are owned by you, so there is no per-seat fee or lock-in. This falls under internal tools, and the design follows the same ideas as a KPI dashboard: few numbers, shown clearly, updated by themselves.

How I'd approach this

Do not start with code. Start by writing down the five numbers you want to see each morning. Profit by product, profit by channel, stock cover, ad cost per unit, and returns are a common five.

Then try a ready-made tool for its free trial. Sellerboard lists a one-month free trial with no credit card. If it shows your five numbers, you are done and have saved weeks. If it cannot show them, or cannot join your channels, you now have a clear list of what a custom build must do. That list is what makes a build quote realistic. If you want to talk it through, I am happy to look at your setup.