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Winning the coveted Buy Box is a game-changer for your business’s growth. After all, you’ll gain a competitive edge and get the lion share of sales. So how do you actually get and stay in the Buy Box?
First, you have to meet Amazon’s Buy Box eligibility requirements, which include being a Professional Seller, having a low Order Defect Rate, positive performance metrics, great customer service, and more. Second, you want to implement strategies to actually meet — or better yet, exceed — these requirements and really set your listings apart.
Winning and Keeping the Amazon Buy Box
To help you get there, here are five ways to win and keep the Buy Box.
1. Choose a repricer
How you price your product could make or break your Buy Box eligibility. If you price too high, customers will find a better price elsewhere. If you price too low, you risk stocking out. In either case, you are losing sales and, if you had the Buy Box, you don’t anymore.
Figuring out the optimal price point for a product is a full-time job in itself, especially if you’re continuously dueling with a competitor. Thankfully, there are repricer tools like Seller Snap that determine how much you should sell for at a given time and adjust your listings’ prices accordingly. Using data analytics and Game Theory, Seller Snap will help you gain Buy Box share, maximize profit and quit pricing wars once and for all.
2. Automate order fulfillment
Outsourcing order fulfillment with a service like FBA can help your listings stand out to both customers as well as Amazon. For example, if you and a competitor have identical listings, but you offer Prime 2-day shipping and your competitor does not, who will get the sale? That’s a no brainer.
Plus, FBA also helps your customer service efforts since Amazon essentially runs point — in other words, you won’t have to worry about finding time to field questions, help with order issues, etc. All in all, the faster you can fulfill and ship orders and the quicker you can respond to customer questions and complaints, the better — and automating or outsourcing these functions just might be the right move.
3. Avoid a stockout at all costs
You absolutely need to stay in stock to win and keep the Buy Box. In fact, when you run out of inventory, you risk losing a lot more than the Buy Box — sales, positive feedback, competitive edge, even your selling privileges are all in jeopardy.
To ensure that you stay in stock, you’ll need a solid inventory management strategy — one that monitors your levels and tells you exactly when and how much to reorder at a given time. You can find this information in your inventory reports in Seller Central or by using a third-party inventory management tool.
4. Diversify your inventory
This should go without saying, but the more competition a listing has, the harder your chances are of getting the Buy Box. That’s why you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket — or in this case one listing. Expanding your inventory with products that are in demand and in short supply will help your Buy Box chances.
Not only that, demand changes all the time due to things like seasonality, which means you might have a really popular listing that gets you the Buy Box one month but then sits relatively stale the next. If you sell other products well in the meantime and have Buy Box share on other listings, you’ll still be able to improve your overall seller rating. For help finding the right products to sell, check out a third-party product research tool or look into an item’s selling history on Amazon.
5. Get paid sooner for your sales
Having a steady flow of cash increases your chances of Buy Box ownership because it decreases your liabilities. For example, if demand suddenly spikes, you’ll be able to make a last-minute resupply order to meet said demand and avoid a stockout. You’ll also be able to turn inventory more quickly in general, which will help you maintain your sales momentum and grow your business. To bridge cash flow gaps and actually get paid the next day your sales, you might want to consider a service like Payability.
Payability is a financing company designed specifically for marketplace sellers. They offer a variety of cash flow solutions — next day payouts included — so you can avoid stockouts, increase sales and grow your Buy Box share. Approval is based on account health and sales performance. So there are no credit checks and sellers get approved for financing in 24 hours. In addition to next-day payouts, Payability also offers an Instant Advance giving you up to a month’s worth of payouts in one lump sum. This is great if you need to buy last-minute inventory as you can get your money in 24 hours hassle-free with no credit checks. Since 2016, more than 2,500 marketplace sellers have used Payability to grow 2.5x faster than their competitors. You could be next.
