Amazon Winning Buy Box (even when their price is much higher)

Hi all,

I’m just curious as to whether or not anyone else has seen Amazon winning buy boxes on listings where they are selling their own item, more often than not for much more than other sellers.

We’ve been on certain listings for years and Amazon have all of a sudden jumped on them selling the same product, but much more expensive in some cases - yet they are still winning the buy box.

From a seller standpoint i’m a little miffed, as we are still paying our listing fees etc, yet not winning the buy box, even when we are 20%+ cheaper than them.

I raised this point with SS and they have come back with the below:

"I would like to inform you that Amazon prices the item in a competitive way and seller support cannot influence this in any way. Please know that when Amazon has an offer on an ASIN then only Amazon wins the buy box and no third party sellers can win the buy box even when sellers price is less than Amazon.

I can absolutely understand the desire for such a feature, and the more requests we get for features such as this means the more time our Business Team will devote to determining such feature abilities. With information such as this, we also get a better idea of how to improve our selling platform and the desires of our sellers. Our leadership team will decide on the request and try to incorporate this feature in the near future and update you accordingly in your Seller Central Account."

My first reaction to this was “What? How? What?” - it seems to me that they are saying that where Amazon choose to sell on a listing (no matter who the owner of that listing is), that they will ALWAYS win the buy box, regardless of who is the cheapest.

I wanted to get thoughts on this as it sounds to me like a situation whereby there has to be some law preventing monopolisation of Amazon as a whole?

Any insights would be most welcome.

LiveMoor.