How to Win the Amazon Buy Box for Maximum Sales

We left off on the previous blog post with my top 6 points that you need to understand about how the Amazon buy box works. If you haven’t checked out that post, I highly recommend that you read it first before moving forward with how to win the buy box.

As a reminder, Amazon does not reveal their algorithm for how the buy box works, who will be eligible for it, who will win it, and for how long. But if you pay attention to certain factors when listing your inventory for sale on Amazon, you can increase your chances of winning the buy box and getting more sales – which means more profits!

Let’s jump right into my top strategies for winning the Amazon buy box:

1. Be a pro seller on Amazon.

You must be a pro seller on Amazon to win the buy box. This means you must pay the monthly $40 fee as a seller, rather than skipping the monthly fee to be an individual seller. Individual sellers are not eligible for the buy box. Now, at this point I typically get beginner sellers who complain to me that “I don’t have enough money as a newbie to pay the monthly fee.” And I get it. But the buy box is where 70-80% of the sales on Amazon happen, so it’s really up to you to decide – is it worth it to you to pay $40 and dramatically increase your sales? If you’re doing FBA as a business instead of a hobby, you really need to be a pro seller, get the buy box, and get those sales.

2. Be priced competitively.

Please note what I’m saying here in strategy #2 – and what I’m not saying. I did not say “be the lowest price.” I said “be priced competitively.” There is a difference. Rather than just setting your price to be the lowest, you need to check the current buy box price and make sure you are priced competitively. Sometimes that means matching the buy box price, and sometimes it means pricing somewhat higher than the current buy box (within 2-5% of the price). There’s not one tried and true formula, so it may take a little fiddling with your pricing to figure it out for each item.

3. Meet performance-based standards, such as feedback scores.

Amazon uses several performance-based criteria to determine who is eligible for the buy box (or eligible for a more significant amount of time). One of the most important factors considered in the buy box algorithm is your seller feedback score. Sellers with a lower percentage of positive feedback will receive a lower percentage of time in the buy box for items with sellers who have a higher positive score. The impact of feedback scores on my eligibility for the buy box is one of the main reasons I use the feedback service Feedback Genius to email my customers as a way of increasing my positive feedback and reducing my negative feedback. I have a full review of Feedback Genius in this blog post.

You also want to make sure you have a low order defect rate as an Amazon seller. Your order defect rate is a metric Amazon calculates based on how often your orders end up marked as defective or damaged.

Another factor related to how often you earn the buy box is your customer service as an Amazon seller. For FBA sellers, Amazon handles the majority of our customer service, but we still need to handle communications with customers correctly and provide good service when issues arise. In particular, if you receive emails from customers, you must make sure you are replying within 24 hours and not constantly marking emails as “no response needed” without first sending some type of reply.

One more potential factor is your time and experience as an Amazon seller. This factor might not be as heavily weighted as others, but it does make an impact. A more experienced seller tends to earn more time in the buy box than a “just launched” seller.

To find out more information about your performance metrics, log in to your account in Seller Central and click on the “Performance” tab to see different areas of your account.

4. Have multiples of an item in stock.

Amazon wants to make it easy for customers who might want to buy more than one of an item. If you have multiples of an item in stock, you are more likely to receive the buy box over a seller who only has one item in stock. For certain items (like shoes or clothing, for instance) it doesn’t matter as much if you only have one item in stock, but for consumable items you might want to try keeping multiple items in stock as a strategy for earning the buy box more often.

5. Sell via Amazon FBA.

Chances are if you’re a regular of this blog, you’re already an FBA (fulfilled by Amazon) seller as opposed to an FBM (fulfilled by merchant) seller. For so many reasons, the FBA program is a more profitable and more efficient way of selling on Amazon than selling via merchant fulfilled. If you weren’t already convinced to commit the majority of your Amazon inventory to the FBA program, hopefully the buy box will convince you – Amazon strongly tends to award the buy box to FBA sellers over FBM sellers, even if the FBM seller has a much lower price. If you’re only selling through FBM, you are losing out on sales that you could easily win if you used the FBA program and earned the buy box more often. The Amazon selling platform is very centered around Prime shoppers, and you want your inventory to be fulfilled by Amazon and available to those Prime shoppers.

Before we finish with this topic, I want to let you know how to find out which of your inventory items are eligible for the buy box. You can follow these steps to see the buy box eligible items when you’re looking through your Amazon inventory:

1. Log in to Seller Central.
2. Click on the Inventory tab.
3. Click Manage Inventory.
4. Go to Preferences and click to show whether items are buy box eligible.

I really hope the above strategies are helpful for you and your business and that you are able to win the buy box more often and get more sales. If you implement some or all of these strategies, you should be able to increase your time in the buy box and, as a result, increase your sales. If you’ve tried any of these methods and found success, let us hear about it in the comments!

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