The Amazon Buy Box Competitive Dynamics Guide

The Amazon Buy Box – When you have multiple competitors for the same product that you sell, winning the buy box will enable you to get the attention of potential buyers and thus higher sales. Amazon awards the Buy Box to the seller who has the product listed usually at the best price along with other factors.

We know that 83% of all sales made on Amazon are made through the Buy Box. Having a Buy Box increases the probability of the sale of your product. But, since there’s vast competition among retailers on Amazon, only the best of the best can win it.

Amazon is well known for its customer-oriented mentality and has done the best it could to preserve the rights of customers. It owes a great deal of its popularity to such a customer policy. The Amazon Buy Box is a complex and multi-faceted system. Amazon gives a lot of control to third-party sellers and you should always try to take full advantage of its incredible potential. Thus, finding the optimal pricing point by analyzing the market share for every product is crucial and challenging.

-> Want to know more about how to win the Buy Box in 2020? Read our ultimate guide here on how to win the Amazon Buy Box.

-> Want to know more on how to use Datahawk Buy Box Tracker? Stay on this page!

Get started by creating your projects and adding products to it once you are logged in to the platform. Once the project is created, move ahead for analysis by selecting the product from the “Tracked Products List”. Once you have selected the product for which you want to analyze the seller metrics, click on the “Buy Box Tracker” tab available on top of the “Product Details” page. And, you see all the important KPIs for Buy Box tracking including:

for all the sellers winning the Buy Box on different days or the averages for a particular range of time.

Take a tour to all the features inside the DataHawk Buy Box Tracker and become a Buy Box pro…

DataHawk allows you to monitor the available product quantity that’s available for purchase from the Buy Box, with a maximal trackable quantity of 30 units. This is done through the metric we call “Buy Box Available Quantity” that can be seen in a Product Metrics page on DataHawk. If a product has less than 30 units that are available for purchase, as reflected by the seller winning the Buy Box, then the tool allows you to monitor this sort of inventory availability on a winning-seller-basis. Here, we can see the available quantity is 3 for ”Tech & Beyond” which is quite low in comparison with the previous day winner “Direct Distributor” with 30 SKUs. This indicates clearly that there could be different factors at the same time contributing to winning a Buy Box, for example, inventory, shipment, seller history, etc.

We have also monitored the pricing on average for a week. It was found that the average price for “Roku Ultra | HD/4K/HDR Streaming Media Player” the 3rd week, that is from Jan21 2020 to Jan26 2020, is $72.89 and the sellers have been ranked as follows.

Setting up price drop alert Amazon could be super helpful to apply quick changes to maintain consistency in winning the Buy Box.

 “Direct Distributor” has the highest feedback count amongst all the above sellers. Accompanied by all the other factors, 95% positive feedback in the last 12 months and a rating score of 4129 somewhere justifies the highest win rate of this seller.

We also monitored that this product has 84 sellers on Amazon out of which only 15 sellers have made it in the  last one month.

With the  win rate of 34% from  7Jan 2020 to 7Feb 2020 “Direct Distributor”  has been awarded the BuyBox for the maximum number of days. We see that, “Direct Distributor” with 34% & “M-X-C Tech” 13% have  been the closest competitors for the Buy Box for this product in the given time range.

 Here is a quick analysis of the last four Buy Box winners:

When you click on “Export Product Data” it allows you to export your product data as an Excel file and make your own analysis with your favorite data visualization tool of your choice on your computer. It is a  product performance report generated by DataHawk in which you can directly find the list of BuyBox Sellers and all the related indicators for your analysis.

For analysis of Buy Box, it includes the Product History with, the ASINs, Buy Box Seller name, Buy Box status, Buy Box Price and Buy Box Remaining Quantity.

You can use the Amazon Hijacker Alert and Amazon Buy Box Alert to get notified of the changes on the product’s Buy Box status, Buy Box winner the number of sellers and prices. Here is how you can do it super quick :

Click on the “Product Actions” on the top right-hand corner of the page and select “Setup an alert”, and then, from the pop-up box “Edit monitor information & rules”.

You can create an Alert Group which is a combination of multiple alerts or monitors. This will send you an email with a group of alerts based on the triggers that you include. To illustrate, you could create alert groups like:

1. Buy Box lost

2. New Seller competing

It is also possible to create your own Group name. For example, New seller for Buy Box.

The next step is to define the “Scope” of what you want to monitor, a product or a number of products grouped under a single project. To do that, click on “Search among projects” to select one or multiple projects or products that you have added to be tracked on DataHawk account.

Triggers:  You could select the triggers you want to apply, these could be the already given templates or customization is also possible. And to create an alert for Buy Box, you can choose the “BuyBox is lost” and “New seller competing” trigger.

You could also customize the triggers using the custom rules tab, just choose a “property” related to Buy Box and an “operator” and receive customized Buy Box alerts.

Once you save the alert, you start receiving emails on any change as per the set alert. The alert report, as you can see here gives you the list of changes on daily basis based on the triggers you have set.

1. Focus on the important metrics: Sellers choose to focus on those metrics which have the most impact on the Buy Box. Your Buy Box metric is an important component, this is one of the reasons sellers use the Buy Box Tracker.
2. Improving performance: It is important to have the right Amazon product metrics tool to analyze the key areas of performance you need to improve on.
3. Be priced competitively: This does not mean having the lowest price. Analyzing your competitor’s pricing and the BuyBox pricing trends to decide your pricing is imperative.
4. Delivering a first-class customer experience gives sellers the ability to raise their prices and still maintain a healthy Buy Box share.
5. Selecting the right fulfillment method and speeding up the shipment could help you beat your competitor on Amazon’s list.
6. Maintaining the inventory levels: Keep Products in Stock. If you don’t have an item in stock, you can’t win the Buy Box with the exception of a back-ordered item.

Ready to bring the Buy Box home?

Try DataHawk now!