What Amazon Tells You vs. What You Need to Know
Amazon's carrier portal gives you your performance score, your settlement statements, and your load history. What it doesn't give you is a clear picture of your own fleet's economics — which drivers are most productive, which lanes generate the best margin after fuel and driver pay, how your revenue trends week-over-week, or where your biggest operational gaps are. That analysis doesn't happen inside Amazon's platform; it happens in yours.
Carriers who treat the Relay portal as their primary business intelligence tool are missing most of what they need to make good decisions. The portal is Amazon's tool for managing its relationship with you. Your analytics are your tool for managing your business.
Revenue Per Mile Is the Core Metric
Total revenue tells you whether you're busy. Revenue per mile tells you whether you're profitable. A driver running 3,500 miles at $2.20/mile is generating $7,700 and probably making money. A driver running 4,200 miles at $1.65/mile is generating $6,930 and probably not, depending on your cost structure. Without tracking revenue per mile by driver and by lane, you can't tell the difference.
Calculate revenue per mile from your Relay settlement CSV (net amount) divided by the miles for each load from your load history export or ELD data. Build this calculation into your weekly reconciliation process. It takes an extra column in a spreadsheet — the insight it provides is worth far more than the time.
Lane Analysis: Where You're Making Money
Not all lanes on Relay are equally profitable. Amazon's posted rates reflect average economics across the lane, but your specific costs — fuel consumption on that route, driver pay for the hours required, tolls — determine your actual margin. A 500-mile run on flat interstate is a different cost profile than a 400-mile run with significant elevation change and urban congestion.
Track revenue per mile and estimated margin by origin-destination pair. After 60–90 days of data, you'll have a clear picture of which lanes your fleet should prioritize. Some carriers discover that lanes they'd assumed were good (long miles, solid rate) are actually marginal after costs, while shorter regional lanes have better economics than expected. Without lane-level data, you're running on intuition.
Driver Performance Tracking
Your carrier score on Amazon is aggregate — it doesn't tell you which drivers are driving down your on-time numbers or which are your highest performers. To manage your team effectively, you need driver-level performance data:
- On-time pickup rate by driver — identifies who's consistently late and why
- Loads completed per week by driver — measures utilization
- Revenue generated per driver per week — measures productivity
- Cancellation history by driver — flags reliability issues before they become score problems
Match load records to driver assignments in your dispatch system to build this data. It requires discipline to maintain accurate driver assignment records, but it's the only way to have an evidence-based conversation with a driver about performance rather than a subjective one.
Trend Analysis: Spotting Problems Early
Fleet analytics aren't just for understanding the past — they're for spotting trouble before it compounds. Revenue dropping week-over-week might mean lane availability is thinning, a driver left and coverage hasn't been replaced, or your performance score dropped and you're seeing fewer load options. Catching that trend at week two is much better than noticing it at week six.
Maintain a simple weekly dashboard: loads completed, total revenue, revenue per mile, on-time rate, and driver utilization. Five numbers, updated weekly. The trend line on each tells you more than any single week's data point.
Using Data for Block Strategy
Block allocation on Relay is partly driven by your carrier performance score. But which blocks to pursue — and which to avoid — should be driven by your lane economics data. A block opportunity on a lane that your data shows as low-margin isn't an opportunity; it's a commitment to unprofitable work for the block duration. A block on a lane that consistently generates strong revenue per mile at high volume is worth pursuing aggressively even if you have to rearrange driver schedules to cover it.
Without historical lane data, block decisions are guesses. With it, they're informed choices. The carriers who run Relay most profitably treat block selection as a deliberate strategic decision, not a matter of claiming whatever's available.
The Build-vs-Buy Decision
You can build your own analytics in Google Sheets or Excel using exported Relay data — it takes a few hours to set up and requires weekly manual effort to maintain. If you're running 5 or fewer trucks, this is probably sufficient. If you're running a larger fleet with multiple dispatchers and dozens of loads per week, the manual approach doesn't scale and you'll want software purpose-built for fleet analytics that can ingest Relay export data automatically. The right tool depends on your volume, but the need for analytics exists regardless of fleet size.