The Buy Box is crucial to getting higher visibility and more sales on Amazon. Earning one is tough enough, so it’s pretty devastating to suddenly lose it one day. Every hour you go without that Buy Box represents a reduced sales volume and slimmer profit margin, so RepricerExpress is here to help you with lost Buy Box strategies.
What’s So Important About the Buy Box Anyway?
For the unfamiliar, the Buy Box is the option for buyers to either click Add to Cart or Buy Now. Listings without the Buy Box won’t have those convenient options; instead, they’ll display a button that says See All Buying Options. This is known as Buy Box suppression and makes it tougher for you to nab that sale.
The difference between listings with and without the Buy Box is like shopping at multiple grocery stores for dinner ingredients vs having a ready-to-make meal delivered to your door. One is straightforward and easy, while the other forces the user into several steps and risks them finding a better deal than at your store.
Getting a Buy Box on your listing is no easy feat, but we’ve written several posts on how to help.
- How to Win the Amazon Buy Box in 2020
- 5 Factors That Consistently Contribute to Landing the Amazon Buy Box
- Can You Win the Buy Box Without Lowering Your Price?
- Amazon Buy Box Eligibility
Now that you have a solid understanding of what the Buy Box is and why it’s so important, let’s move onto why you could lose it and how to get it back.
Different Ways You Can Lose a Buy Box (and How to Fix Things)
Because Amazon’s A9 algorithm is a closely-guarded secret, we only have strong theories about getting a Buy Box and losing it. And because there are multiple ways to get a Buy Box, there are also multiple ways of losing it, too.
1. Your Inventory Isn’t High Enough
If your inventory is too low — or even empty — you could face losing your Buy Box. A Buy Box tends to greatly increase traffic to a listing, so if Amazon sees you don’t have enough in stock to meet the potential spiking demand, it could remove it. Its top priority is ensuring a smooth and seamless customer experience, which means preventing people from getting frustrated with not being able to order what they want.
On its own, this might not be the sole factor for losing the Buy Box, but it becomes a lot more probable when you have competitors who DO have an ample enough inventory to meet demand. You can change this by spreading out your inventory to various regions to ensure products are still deliverable.
However, one thing to watch out for is an empty inventory across all regions you’re selling in. If this happens, Amazon has the option of ordering from wholesalers and taking the credit for it, meaning that you’d lose out on the sale.
2. Your Inventory Isn’t Prime-Eligible
It’s not a set-in-stone rule that having Prime-eligible products means getting a Buy Box, or that not making your products Prime-eligible automatically takes the Buy Box out of the equation. Buy Box eligibility consists of a lot more than that.
But making your inventory Prime-eligible is one of the easiest and surest ways of getting it. If you’ve decided to opt into a different fulfillment method and noticed your Buy Box is gone, this could be a reason why. You could switch back to a Prime-eligible method of fulfillment or keep with your current one and work on the other contributing factors to get it back.
3. Your Inventory Isn’t Priced Competitively Enough
If we had to pick one factor that affects getting (or losing) the Buy Box the most, it’d be competitive product pricing.
It’s important to distinguish that a competitive price isn’t necessarily the lowest one, as a competitive price is made up of several things, like whether shipping costs are included or must be added on.
But it’s almost always the case that you need to have the lowest price by meeting certain criteria. One of them is being close to the Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP), or even a bit below it.
Amazon repricers make being competitively priced a breeze.
4. Your Inventory Has Been Highjacked
This one’s tough. Dealing with an unauthorized seller or someone selling counterfeit goods (that appear identical to yours) can be a huge headache to hunt down and eliminate, so much so that some brands won’t sell on Amazon anymore because they don’t feel it’s worth it.
But if you’re still up there and encounter a highjacked inventory, follow our tips on how to protect your brand and steer clear of the most common scams on Amazon to get your Buy Box back.
Related: Dealing with Amazon Product Listing Hijackers
5. Your Inventory Isn’t Profitable for Amazon
Lastly, one of the reasons for a lost Buy Box is Amazon’s determined your inventory isn’t profitable for them, and it could be for one of several reasons:
- The minimum order quantity is too high.
- The profit margin is too small.
- The product is too big or heavy.
- Your sales volume isn’t high enough.
Work on fixing these things, and you should be back on track to getting the Buy Box appearing on your listing again.
Final Thoughts
Having a competitive price is one of the top ways of getting — and keeping — a Buy Box, and you can do that easily with RepricerExpress. Set your pricing rules and let it run in the background while you tend to other tasks, secure in the knowledge that software is working 24/7 for you to get you to the top. If you’re not already a user, sign up now and we’ll start you off with a free trial.
