Buy Box On your own listing

Hi Ben,

First of all, be aware that no listing is your own. Once a listing is created it becomes property of Amazon (as does your soul), so just because you created a listing it has no bearing as to who wins the buy box.

Unfortunately it is very difficult to work out reasons for winning the buy box pricing is just one of many factors. Others include feedback, return rates, delivery speed, FBA vs FBM vs FBP, and whatever else Amazon decides basically. The secret algorithm remains elusive to us mere peasants.

I should add that people will see different results for searches on the Amazon platform based on their Situation. So if they are a Prime customer then the buy box will likely feature Prime results, also location and shopping habits will have an impact, plus other unknown factors.

If you are searching on your own Amazon account to see who wins the box then you may see something different to potential customers and just to make it even harder for you to track, the box can rotate between sellers when fairly evenly matched.

The buy box win rate thingy that the selling platform uses seems pretty useless so I don’t use it much.

My main advice would be to not keep lowering price. In my opinion this is the quickest way to small margins and price wars where nobody wins. Keep your metrics high and price competitive but don’t go silly. Eventually it gets to the point where no sellers are making decent money, if the prices are kept reasonable then all sellers can profit. Even if the buy box is shared then you both stand to make more than a price war where you keep going lower by a pence each time until the margin is squeezed like a flaccid lemon.

I find many listings where there is also a happy medium between FBM sellers and FBA sellers so the FRM take non prime customers with a slightly lower price point and the FBA sellers take the prime customers who are happy to pay a tiny bit more to get the item quicker.

Obviously lots of this depends on what you are selling but generally the theory stands. If you want more advice perhaps point us toward one of the listings you appear on.

Good luck and happy selling on Amazon