As an Amazon seller, you’re more than likely aware how feedback is consistently listed as one of the top factors in winning Amazon’s Buy Box. The report your buyers write after purchasing one of your products is a mini reflection of your reputation as a seller. It goes without saying a barrage of bad reviews will strongly hurt your chances of winning a Buy Box, but RepricerExpress has been examining how much the opposite holds true.
Multiple Factors Funnelled Together for One Result
If Amazon only counted one thing when they decide to award a Buy Box, it would be incredibly easy to win one. All you’d have to do is focus all your energy into pricing or shipping time or availability or feedback — the competition would be fairly one-sided and the best all-around sellers would never get a chance. The Buy Box would be reduced to a contest among masters of one instead of jack-of-all-trades, and as well all know, Amazon’s algorithm is far more complex than that.
Although sellers have a pretty good idea of how Amazon determines which seller will have the Buy Box, their formula isn’t known for certain. The only thing that’s known with any certainty is there’s a group of factors in which sellers have to excel and they roughly include:
- Price — this doesn’t necessarily mean having the lowest price, but being competitive with costs (and factoring in shipping costs)
- Availability, including long-term reputation of having products in stock
- A really short list of items you’ve had to refund
- As excellent a score as possible with customer feedback
- Responding quickly to customer concerns and questions
- Shipping your item within the time-frame listed on the item’s page
How Heavily is Feedback Weighted in Amazon’s Algorithm?
The formula Amazon uses is complex, with each component weighted differently — even within the same category. For example, consistently shipping within the time you’ve listed for that item is good; shipping it faster is even better. But how about if you take something like positive customer feedback? That seems like it’d be independent of the separately-weighed formula Amazon uses for other factors because you can only have positive or negative feedback, right?
Well, sort of.
Buyers can assign you one to five stars depending on how they viewed their interaction with, as well as including comments with it. This is when feedback for the Buy Box becomes a little more complicated and why Amazon doesn’t look at it as being the absolutely most important part of your selling history. There are several reasons for this:
- Product feedback: Sometimes, buyers’ only comments are centred around the item itself, which doesn’t always have a whole lot to do with the seller. Say you sell snow globes and one got cracked during the shipping process, ending up as glass shards and snow in the packing material. Understandably, a buyer would be upset about this but damages during the shipping process are one of the risks that take place.
- Seller feedback: This is where the buyer comments on their interaction with you, such as if you responded super promptly to their message or went the extra distance to rectify something that could have gone wrong. Amazon tends to look at this a little more closely because while product damages are sometimes out of the control of the seller, the fallout isn’t.
- Date of feedback: There are four different chronological sections by which Amazon measures your customer feedback — the last 30 days, the last 90 days, the last 365 days and the lifetime of your existence of selling on Amazon — but the fourth is more of just a way to see the totality of your work. And of the three left (30, 90 or 365 days), Amazon only takes into account the most recent when determining your eligibility for the Buy Box. So, if you’ve made mistakes a couple months ago but have since pulled up your socks, you’ve just put yourself in the running for a Buy Box again. But the opposite is also true, where if you’ve historically been a strong seller but recently ran into a rash of bad reviews, you’ll have to set your sights on the next month.
With RepricerExpress, one of the things you’ll never have to worry about in your quest to win a Buy Box is competitive pricing. And because pricing is one of the most strongly considered factors in winning a Buy Box, there’s no good argument against using repricing. Sign up for your free 15-day trial today.
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