win Amazon buy box

An Ultimate Guide To Win Amazon Buy Box in 2021

In this article, it’s our aim to teach you some of the best ways we know of how to win Amazon Buy Box.

But first, you might need to understand what Amazon Buy Box is and why it could be important for the sales you make on your Amazon selling business.

What is Amazon Buy Box?

The Amazon Buy Box appears on product detail pages where customers start the buying process for an item by adding it to their cart.

In the image above, you’ll be able to clearly spot the Amazon Buy Box on the right-hand side, with the “Add to Cart” button.

The Amazon Buy Box pops up on these pages at the top, right-hand side of the page, and its job is to showcase items that have significant offers attached to them, while making them more visible to Amazon’s millions of shoppers.

The Amazon Buy Box is quite attention-grabbing due to its placement, and the price of the product, so if you’re an Amazon seller looking to promote your items, knowing how to win Amazon Buy Box places is vital to increasing sales for your Amazon Business.

When an Amazon customer adds an item to their basket from here, the seller selling at that price has won the Buy Box sale.

The Amazon Buy Box is the easiest way for an Amazon seller to make a quick sale and beat out their competition.

But first, you need to know how to win Amazon Buy Box. Keep reading!

The Importance of Amazon Buy Box


Over 80% of Amazon’s product sales are sold through the Amazon Buy Box.

A key feature of Amazon is that multiple sellers can offer the same product in their stores, and if more than one seller eligible for the Buy Box offers the same product, they can compete for the Amazon Buy Box as long as all sellers can ship to the customer’s shipping address.

Amazon reported that over 70% of its customers shopped via mobile worldwide during the holiday period.

On mobile devices, the Amazon Buy Box becomes even more important, because unlike desktop browsers, the mobile version of Amazon’s site features the Amazon Buy Box directly underneath the product image.

So, how to know if you have the Buy Box or not?

Method one: you can check the status through your Amazon seller central. On the Manage Inventory page, click the Preferences button at the top right side and select the Buy Box column to see if you are currently eligible or not.

Method two: Use Amazon’s third-party monitoring tools to see clearly whether your products have access to shopping carts or not.

The Requirements of Amazon Buy Box


If you want to become the seller on the Amazon Buy Box, there’s some eligibility criteria:

  • You need to have a professional Amazon seller account.
  • You need to have been selling on Amazon for 2-6 months.
  • You need to have a consistent seller history with high-performance levels.
  • You can win the Buy Box much easier if you use the Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA) service.

To have a successful selling history, you need to have fulfilled a large number of Amazon orders and be regarded as a trustworthy seller with good reviews, who offers a high-quality service to their customers.

You also need to have excellent customer service. Canceling orders, shipping late, or shipping low-quality products will negatively affect your ratings.

You should be able to show Amazon that you have good Customer Metrics. Customer Metrics on Amazon are based on a number of things, including:

  • Perfect Order Performance (perfectly processed and fulfilled orders)
  • Order Defect Rate (negative feedback)
  • Pre-Fulfillment Cancellation Rate (stock levels for products)
  • Last Ship Rate (shipping on-time)
  • Percent of Orders Refunded (refunds due to stock or product faults)
  • Customer Response Time (how quickly you respond to your customers)
  • Tracked Delivery Rate (the updates of your delivery tracking)
  • Feedback count (how much feedback you have in total)
  • Cancellation Rate (cancellations of product orders)

What is Buy Box Suppression?

Sometimes, Buy Box does not appear on the product detail page at all. Even if there are multiple sellers provide the product. This is called Buy Box Suppression.

The suppressed Buy Box can be easily identified, usually, there will be a button labeled “See All Buying Options” on the listing instead of the buttons of “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now”. Buyers can click this button to view all the selling options of the product.

But, with the Buy Box Suppression, buyers will subconsciously think that the item is not available for purchasing and will turn to another alternative product. Thus, sellers will lose sales.

Amazon may decide whether to suppress it or not for the following reasons:

  1. No seller is eligible to win the Buy Box
  2. Sales volume is too low
  3. The product price is too high
  4. Price increases too sharply, possibly flagged as unfair pricing or price fraud.

Repricing Methods to Win Amazon Buy Box

amazon feedback tools


One of the easiest ways of figuring out how to win Amazon Buy Box is to stay ahead of your competitors with your repricing.

Repricing is when a seller changes the price of one of their products to compete with other sellers that are selling the same product at similar or lower prices.

If a seller wants to compete with other sellers, they would lower their product prices to try and entice Amazon shoppers into buying their product over another seller’s product, even when the product is the same.

If a seller is looking to increase their profits, however, they may increase the price of their product.

Though this typically only happens when the seller is high-ranking, and currently winning the Amazon Buy Box.

There is little point in raising the prices of your product when you aren’t the seller on the Buy Box, as this could affect your product sales negatively.

To be competitive, you need to constantly review and update your product prices. This will increase the likelihood of you winning the Amazon Buy Box, and therefore, gaining more product sales for your Amazon seller account.

Read also: Best 10 Amazon Pricing Strategies That Sellers Should Know

When you manually update your prices, you have to do so for each individual product by editing each listing.

This is ideal for sellers who don’t have a large range of products or sell bespoke products. It is, of course, inefficient for sellers who have a large number of items or are quite competitive in their product sales.

You can use rule-based repricing to examine the prices of your product competition and reprice your products according to those numbers, according to a set of predefined rules.

Though this method of repricing is easier than manually repricing all of your products, it is limited in its capabilities, and what it can offer you as a repricing method.

Rule-based repricing is time-consuming and requires a lot of management, which could waste time that you could be spending on targeting your sales to your customer audience.

It also has a tendency to create price wars between sellers, so, overall, rule-based repricing is not a great method to use.

There’s also algorithmic repricing, which is the most expensive method of repricing available.

This method takes a range of variables into account and calculates how likely you are to win Amazon Buy Box based on those variables (like current prices, sales, etc.). This method is more suited for sellers who make a higher profit.

Tools You Can Use to Win Amazon Buy Box


There are several external repricing tools that you can use to help you on your journey of figuring out how to win Amazon Buy Box.

We’ve listed our favorite ones below:

Appeagle/Informed.co

Appeagle has switched over to Informed.co, but it’s still one of the best repricers available for Amazon business sellers.

Not only does Informed.co reprice your products for you, it also shows you analytics that gives you enough insight to stay ahead of your competitors.

Their basic plan is $100 a month for up to 250 product listings.

Xsellco

Xsellco lets you reprice your products in real-time to keep you ahead of your competitors.

It uses its Amazon repricer with Amazon Web Services to ensure that you’re repricing your products as quickly as possible.

The moment that another seller’s product goes out of stock, or they reprice it, Xsellco will react to help you win the Amazon Buy Box at the best product price. Xsellco basic is only £45 a month.

Feed Visor

Feed Visor is an algorithmic repricing solution. Using the algorithms, Feed Visor can help you sell your products at the best price every sale you make.

Feed Visor decisions are made using multiple variables decided in real-time, to give you the best chance at winning the Buy Box. Request a demo directly from their site.

AMZDiscover

AMZDiscover is a great tool for marketing your products. It enables you to be able to find trusted and qualified Amazon reviewers to review your products for you.

You’ll only find genuine buyers when you search with AMZDiscover, meaning that all of your reviews will come from organic sources.

AMZFinder

AMZFinder is a powerful review tool for Amazon that can help you monitor your product reviews.

Using AMZFinder, you can even directly contact buyers who leave negative reviews and ask that they remove them from your product listing.

This will help you optimize your listing and promote the sales of your product. Their review management system combines with the feedback request system which will help you increase reviews and better monitor them.

The starter plan is $49.00 which covers both features in all marketplaces and suitable for smaller Amazon businesses.

Tips to Win Amazon Buy Box


In this final section of our guide, you’ll find a few more tips to help you on your journey of recognizing how to win Amazon Buy Box.  

1. Lowest landed price

The “landed” price of a product is the first price that you place on your product, plus its delivery cost.

This is an important part of the algorithm that decides who wins the Buy Box, so you should make sure that your item is priced competitively, that your delivery price isn’t too high, and that you have optimized your product listing.

Your product doesn’t need to be the cheapest one available, but it should be one of the lowest that is on offer.

Check out your competition beforehand and then set your price accordingly.

Remember to reprice when necessary and always keep an eye on other sellers who are selling the same products as you.

2. New products

To win the Amazon Buy Box, you have to be selling new products rather than used ones.

Amazon needs to know that the quality of your products cannot be called into question and that they are helping you promote brand new items.

3. Seller Feedback

To have a chance at winning the Amazon Buy Box, you must have good seller feedback. Amazon pride themselves on putting their customers first, so bad feedback is a pretty big deal.

If most of your customers are leaving good feedback on your items, Amazon is more likely to be happy to give you a shot at winning the Buy Box.

You can reduce your negative feedback by using tools like AMZFinder to help you contact your customers who felt that they didn’t receive a great service, and request that they remove the negative feedback from your product listing. Negative feedback does not promote sales.

Remember to contact your sellers in a smart way so that they don’t try to report you to Amazon for bothering them. Try offering to fix the issue, or offer them a discount.

Invite top reviewers to review your products with positive reviews. You can use tools like AMZDiscover to reach some potential buyers and get some good organic reviews on your products.

4. Stock

If you win the Buy Box, Amazon will want to make sure that you can handle the sudden demand that you will experience for that particular product.

You will need to make sure you have plenty of stock to have a chance at winning because Amazon can see how much stock of a product you’ve said you have.

5. Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA)

Fulfilled By Amazon is one of the easiest ways to win the Buy Box, and by far the biggest influencer on the decisions that are made for Buy Box.

By letting Amazon handle the shipping of your products as well as customer service, you’re giving your customers an Amazon experience, which is undoubtedly the best experience they’ll have on the site.

Although FBA doesn’t guarantee that you’ll win the Buy Box, it does have a large number of positive benefits that help sellers become more competitive.

6. Shipping Time

The final point to note is shipping time. With Amazon, the best shipping time means shipping in 2 days or less.

The faster you ship (especially if you’re shipping this quickly across all of your sales), the more likely Amazon is to notice.

Shipping has a huge impact on the metric system that decides the winner of the Amazon Buy Box, but you should remember that certain product categories, like perishable goods or birthday items, have a higher impact than other, less time-sensitive, products that you might be selling.

7. Order Volume

If a product has more sales, Amazon will intent to give a good evaluation of the product. More sales mean higher rankings, and all the good indicators are also conducive to the Buy Box preemption.

8. Offer Prime Service

Given that Amazon has 63 million Prime users, which have exceeded the non-prime users. When consumers choose to block the “Non-Prime” products, all products that do not provide Prime services will have no chance to get exposure. So, providing prime services will help you get more traffic and sales.

9. Seller’s Response Time

The response time of replying to buyers’ messages is also an important factor that affects the Buy Box rate. Sellers who have a high response rate above 90% will get the opportunity to obtain the Buy Box.

Reasons for Losing Buy Box

As an Amazon seller, you may wonder: Why is my Buy Box rate not 100%? Were my listings hijacked by someone?

Regarding the percentage of Buy Box, there is no need to worry too much. If your sales and the BSR ranking are stable, it is normal that the Buy Box ratio drops occasionally.

There are some reasons that will cause your Buy Box rate to drop or lose it completely:

  • A listing has just been newly launched and it usually does not have a chance to win the Buy Box.
  • A listing has not got any sales for a long time so it may be flagged as inactive by Amazon, and lost the shopping cart option.
  • A listing suddenly receives multiple bad reviews, resulting in a significant drop in the weight of the listing and the loss of the Buy Box rate.
  • During the selling period, if the product price increase too frequently or sharply in a short time. It will lose the Buy Box.
  • A listing was hijacked so the shopping cart option was snatched away by other sellers at a certain time.

These are some of the reasons that you may lose your Buy Box so make sure you learn how to better deal with your listings and earn more sales.

We’ve come to the end of our guide.

We hope that with all of the hints and tips here, you’ll have a better chance at winning the Amazon Buy Box, and that we’ve helped you figure out how the Buy Box works, and how to win the Amazon Buy Box from your competitors.

Best Amazon feedback request sofeware-AMZFinder