Amazon's Buy Box is the featured section on a product detail page where customers can click-to-add directly into their shopping carts. Needless to say, winning the Buy Box can be a boon to sales. But because multiple sellers can sell the same product, it's not uncommon to find your products "competing" with other listings to win the Buy Box.
To the novice seller, this might all seem arbitrary -- maybe even lucky. But Amazon's product search takes multiple variables into consideration to decide what listing to show in the Buy Box.
Its variables are some combination of Landed Price, fulfillment method, shipping time, customer service metrics and the POP score. Of these, the Landed Price and the fulfillment method appear to carry the most weight and seem influence Buy Box ownership most often, which makes them our key targets for optimization.
The Landed Price
Product price must be competitive. Your prices should be somewhere in the same ballpark as your competitors' prices for the same product. If your prices are too high, you’ll miss out on sales. Too low and you may sell more but lose out on profit margins.
Some really advanced sellers use product repricers, and with good reason. Repricing software automatically changes the price of your products based on a variety of competitive metrics. It can increase listing prices and bring them down, and you can set both upper and lower limits to avoid excessive changes. But keep in mind this isn't an autopilot scenario; repricers should be managed closely to avoid costly changes.
Fulfillment
Fast, efficient delivery is a must if you intend on winning the Buy Box. Customers will almost certainly choose the listing that offers the fastest, cheapest delivery. If you can offer free shipping, do so. If you can offer 2-day shipping, do that too. In other words, Amazon Prime is the way to go.
If you sell through other channels besides Amazon, keep an eye on inventory levels and always make sure Amazon has the most up-to-date availability for each product. The last thing you want is for a customer to order a product that's no longer available. You can do this manually by updating the Available field in your Amazon inventory dashboard or use an order sync software to automatically update inventory levels.
Additional Factors
Other factors that influence Buy Box ownership include your customer feedback metric and refund and return rates.
The higher your feedback and seller rating, the more likely customers are to choose you over another seller. The inverse is true for refund and return rates; you'll want to keep these as low as possible.
