How to stand out on Amazon thanks to the buy box
Amazon, the marketplace with more than one million employees, listing more than 120 million products in all categories, is today the best known in the world. With an average of 6.6 million unique visitors per day in 2020, selling on the marketplace can be a big business. But how do you stand out where the competition is raging? To help you, Amazon has launched its famous “buy box” to reward a particular seller. What is the Amazon buy box? Why win it? How do you win it?
Our article explains the special features of the buy box for you.
What is the buy box?
The Amazon buy box is the “add to basket” button on a product page.
But it is actually much more than that. Most of the time an item is sold on the platform by many competitors.
However, a buyer will only see, without necessarily realising it, the product from one seller, the one who won the buy box. The other sellers are harmed in terms of visibility and will only appear if the client makes the effort to scroll through the other available offers.
Why is it so important?
The key word for whoever wins the buy box: visibility, and visibility means potentially more sales. 85% of purchases are made from the buy
box, so winning it is a real challenge for those who want to see their sales increase on the marketplace.
On mobile phones, the buy box is presented directly under the product, which offers even more visibility to the seller who wins it, since today, 63% of 25-34 year olds, for example, make their purchases from their phone.
The seller who wins the buy box will then see his revenue increase very quickly.
How to win the buy box?
Are you a professional seller on Amazon and would like to win the buy box? The platform’s algorithm is programmed to choose the seller who will offer the best buying experience to its customers. This experience will be determined according to the following criteria:
- The price of the item and delivery costs
- Quality of service: sellers must have a 95% perfect order rate to hope to win the buy box.
- Have less than 1% of orders defective including stock errors and negative evaluations, with the most recent evaluations weighing more heavily in the balance.
- Have a late delivery rate of less than 4% and a repayment rate of less than 2.5%.
- Delivery times must be less than 14 days (FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) users are preferred).
- Answers to customers must be given in 90% of cases within 24 hours.
- The availability of the articles and the quantity of articles in stock
- Seniority: a seller who has been on the platform for less than 3 months will not be taken into account.
Obtaining the buy box is not final. The algorithm can also rotate the winners by assigning, for example, a certain amount of buy box attendance time to seller X and then a certain amount of time to seller Y.
Repricing to obtain the buy box
Developing a repricing strategy will be essential for you to win the buy box. Thanks to myPricing, you optimise your chances of winning it. Our solution allows you to set up a repricing strategy while securing your margins. As soon as a competitor adjusts to your Amazon offers, myPricing is notified in real time, carries out a repricing according to your own strategies and pushes the price back to Amazon.
Using this technology allows myPricing to be one of the fastest repricers on the market, adjusting your prices in less than 2 minutes on the online retail giant.
Is the buy box specific to Amazon?
In 2020, the buy box, although well known on Amazon, is no longer specific to the marketplace. Indeed, Cdiscount, Darty, Fnac have set up a buy box system and use a system similar to Amazon’s in order to assign the buy box to a seller. Other marketplaces such as La Redoute, for example, assign the buy box to the cheapest seller.
It is difficult but not impossible to stand out on the giant marketplaces if you follow the rules outlined above. In order to get the buy box and gain visibility, you will certainly need an automatic repricer such as myPricing, which will greatly increase your chances of winning the buy box and allow you to get your sales off the ground in no time at all.
Implement dynamic pricing strategies.
Win buy boxes, make profits and lose no margins.
