Ecommerce and Retail • Neto
Your Guide to Winning the Amazon Buy Box
05 Apr 2018 • 6 min read
Your business may well and truly be up and running on Amazon Australia but there’s always little things you can do to improve your listing and your sales through this channel.
And all those little things, can lead to what’s considered to be a BIG DEAL in the Amazon retail world – the Amazon Buy Box.
So what is it and how can you win the coveted Buy Box? While the Amazon Buy Box algorithm is a closely guarded secret, here’s what we can tell you:
Before we get you too excited, let’s just check if you’re eligible:
If you’ve ticked yes to the above requirements, let’s get into the details.
When a customer searches for a particular item on Amazon Australia, they’ll be directed to a main product page (rather than a seller page). Located on the right side of this page in an eye-catching box, complete with a yellow ‘Add to Cart’ button is the buy box.
It’s estimated that this little box accounts for up to 82% of sales through Amazon so there’s no underestimating its importance.
Not only is it prime real estate, it also tells shoppers that you’re a trusted Amazon merchant.
The good news is that it is free but it’s certainly not easy to secure and it constantly changes.
As we’ve mentioned, there’s just a little bit of mystery surrounding how the Amazon Buy Box works and many will tell you that it’s purely based on price, but this isn’t the case. We’ll explore a number of points that need to form part of your strategy towards securing the buy box.
Yes, price definitely plays a part in winning the buy box and it’s in your best interests to research competitors and set your price accordingly. But price is only one factor, says Neto CEO, Ryan Murtagh;
We have very successful customers selling a SKU on Amazon US that other retailers are selling; they’re not the cheapest but their customer experience rating is the best, their fulfilment offering is the best and therefore they’re winning the Buy Box.
And take some lessons from our customer CyclingDeal.com. Their initial tactic was to forgo profit and list products based at cost price, however CEO, Nick, learnt that drastically reducing prices shouldn’t be your main focus, but rather offer good value for money.
Each merchant on Amazon is given a seller rating based on customer experience scores. While not all of the details are spelled out for merchants to follow, we do know that it includes your Order Defect Rate (the percentage of times you’ve generated negative feedback or needed to fulfil refunds) and this is balanced against your Perfect Order Performance (the percentage of perfectly accepted, processed and fulfilled orders). Overall you’ll need to keep your seller ratings higher than 98% and that means proactively communicating with buyers, responding to queries and rectifying problems quickly.
In our eBay vs Amazon story, we mentioned that Amazon shoppers have an expectation of super fast delivery but this is also tracked by Amazon so you’ll need to be within a two to three day delivery window if you want to stay on top.
We can’t emphasise enough, how important it is to maintain your inventory at a level that will satisfy your Amazon sales channel. No doubt you’re also trying to ensure your ecommerce website remains fully stocked so you’ll definitely require a consolidated stock system. Neto helps by keeping your stock in sync across multiple channels automatically and allows you to set buffers for marketplaces such as Amazon to give peace of mind that you won’t accidentally oversell.
| Related Reading: How to Sell on Amazon Australia and Other FAQs
The Amazon Buy Box will favour those with a longer, more positive history of selling to Amazon customers. And with Amazon Australia being fairly new the market, the sooner you start selling, the sooner you can build your presence and history.
We could take quite a deep dive into this subject but basically you need to think of Amazon as a search engine like Google. And your aim is to optimise your listing so that more potential customers find you, which in turn leads to sales - the more sales, the more chance you have of building your history with Amazon and achieving a high customer service rating. All of which is vital for the grabbing the buy box spot.
Amazon is still so new to Australia that many sellers are in the same boat as you, and that gives everyone a fair chance of obtaining the elusive Amazon Buy Box. Start building your strategy and setting your standards so that your business can stand out from the crowd on Amazon.
If you’re yet to venture into the Amazon Australia sales channel, download our guide with everything you need to know about getting started.
P.S Neto's deep integration with Amazon Australia let's retailers easily manage their listings, customers, orders and inventory from the same platform they use to manage their other sales channels. Have you tried it yet?
