Understanding Buy Box Algorithm (MAP prices & FBA sellers)
I have products listed competing with other sellers. Products are MAP enforced, and we’re all at least at the minimum price. In many cases we get a 0% Buy Box for months, so I have been trying to understand why is this happening.
- We’re using FBA
- We have 97% positive on more than 500 ratings.
My best guess at the moment is what we refer to as “Big Players”. Sellers with a huge amount of transactions (from >5000 ratings to >50000), that has been active on Amazon for many years (I recently read that there is some sort of privilege for the first sellers on a listing).
On our side, we have had some issues this past 2 years avoiding stockouts because our suppliers have their supply chain delayed. That’s my other best guess, since we haven’t been able to assure a steady supply, we lose the buy box.
Do you have other theories (speculative or confirmed) that can help to understand this mistery?
Understanding Buy Box Algorithm (MAP prices & FBA sellers)
I have products listed competing with other sellers. Products are MAP enforced, and we’re all at least at the minimum price. In many cases we get a 0% Buy Box for months, so I have been trying to understand why is this happening.
- We’re using FBA
- We have 97% positive on more than 500 ratings.
My best guess at the moment is what we refer to as “Big Players”. Sellers with a huge amount of transactions (from >5000 ratings to >50000), that has been active on Amazon for many years (I recently read that there is some sort of privilege for the first sellers on a listing).
On our side, we have had some issues this past 2 years avoiding stockouts because our suppliers have their supply chain delayed. That’s my other best guess, since we haven’t been able to assure a steady supply, we lose the buy box.
Do you have other theories (speculative or confirmed) that can help to understand this mistery?
10 replies
Seller_mUAFSHRNpTAio
many times it is as simple as who sold the most of the item recently . BUY BOX is never guaranteed so you could have it 1 day and not the next
Seller_Qbd0RsfZFEZBY
I would agree with this but add that the “big player” doesn’t need to be first on the listing. I have found a huge benefit to:
FBA
&
Carrying 30 days or more inventory
&
higher volume listing (>500 units a month)
&
good metrics
=
you can BB at 20-30% above low price
Of course this takes alot of money and time to develop. Have $20 to 30K to try it? Not many do.
Seller_k2X0N9pfVvhdO
I found this thread by searching for “buy box algorithm”. Trying to figure out what happened with our sales too.
We are an FBA seller with 5-10 years of experience on Amazon and around 5K feedbacks (99.8-100%). Account Health is also good. Sorry, not giving the actual numbers for privacy reasons.
I noticed a sudden and dramatic drop in sales since about 2-2.5 months ago. This had never happened before on this scale and cannot be explained by a seasonal slowness - our Summer sales were okay in the past years.
For example, I see listings that have 5-20 sales per day and where we have 20-50 units in stock. Before May we had a few sales per month, now we have 0 sales in the past 1-3 months. These listing may have 10-20 FBA sellers all at the same MAP price and most sellers having less quantity than us. As far as I can see, nothing has changed on the listings, including the number of sellers, but our sales stopped. I check the Performance Page for each SKU and I see that in some cases we have 0% Buy Box in the last 30 days, sometimes less than 1%. This does not correspond with the number of sellers on the listing, their inventory quantity, feedbacks, etc. As I said, these numbers were more or less the same all these months/years we were selling these products.
This makes me believe that Amazon made some changes to their Buy Box algorithm and the “sprinkler” turned away.
If anyone has any suggestions on how to address this, please share.
Seller_tfRdXUyKvelBg
HI @af
We’ve seen similar behaviors on our listings. We have detected that when some specific sellers enter the competition, it’s game over for us. I don’t know why yet.
In our case, those sellers are much bigger than us and they appear to hold 100% of the buy box.
