Owning the buy box on Amazon can be a huge battle for sellers who are fighting off multiple sellers on their listings.

However, many Brands fail to recognize that they can lose the buy box due to lower pricing on channels outside of Amazon and so they fail to take the proper precautions to prevent this from happening. Amazon’s algorithm will search other marketplaces such as Walmart and Target to ensure the lowest price is listed on Amazon and if it doesn’t have the lowest price it will suppress the buy box accordingly.

When the buy box becomes suppressed the customer is forced to take the extra step of pressing “See All Buying Options” and must select from a list of sellers in order to add to cart. Not only do these few extra clicks cause conversions to go down, but the listing itself is not eligible for advertising. These two factors combined can cause a severe decline in sales.

Our brand partner was faced with this challenge because Walmart had unexpectedly reduced pricing for 40% of their products, and therefore Amazon suppressed the buybox for all products. At the same time, our partner had no ability to lower the Amazon price to match Walmart’s pricing to regain the buy box because their items were selling via a direct relationship with Amazon, namely Vendor Central or 1P, so therefore Amazon set the pricing and typically matches the lowest price both on and off Amazon. Time was of the essence because the partner was transitioning to the third party platform or Seller Central (SC) from Vendor Central (VC) and needed to deplete the VC inventory as quickly as possible as inventory was shipping into SC.