How to become Buy Box Eligible?

Your average Amazon marketplace customer will never think about the Buy Box one way or another and may never even hear the term in their life. But seasoned Amazon marketplace sellers know all about how powerful the Buy Box is. eCommerce experts believe the Buy Box accounts for a significant percentage of all Amazon sales. If you’re a relatively new Amazon vendor, one of the first things you need to figure out is how to become Buy Box eligible.

Why the Buy Box is important?

Every product listing on Amazon marketplace has a box on the right side of the screen that includes: Pricing information, Prime eligibility, Shipping information, Product availability, “Add to cart” and “Buy Now” buttons, and Seller name. If you sell any products that other vendors on the platform also sell, all of you will be competing to be the seller in that Buy Box each time a customer clicks on the product.

Most consumers won’t notice the seller information toward the bottom of the box. As far as they’re concerned, any time they click on the same product listing, it might as well be the same seller. They’re not making a decision based on your specific reputation. They simply decide if they want the product, and like the price and shipping options they see show up in the box. While there are other factors that influence whether you’ll win the box or not, the first step to even having a chance is making sure you’re eligible.

What makes a Seller eligible for the Buy Box?

Any Amazon seller that opts for Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) for their products will automatically be eligible for the Buy Box. In fact, FBA products are believed to win the Buy Box at much higher rates than any others. For vendors that prefer not to go the FBA route, eligibility is still possible. There are three main criteria you must meet.

The Right Selling Account – You need to have a professional seller account. Selling items as an individual on Amazon can make sense for small players that are just out to make a few extra bucks with items they have laying around. But for anyone who wants to treat it as a genuine business, upgrading to the professional level is well worth the monthly fee it costs. And it’s required if you ever want to claim the Buy Box for your products.

Maintain Order Volume - Amazon wants to know that whoever wins the Buy Box will deliver an experience to the customer on par with their reputation they seek to uphold. In order to evaluate whether you’re capable of providing the level of service they require; you need to have completed enough orders for them to see how well you do. The catch here is that they don’t outright say what a high order volume is, but do say that it varies across different categories of products. If you’re a fairly new seller, or even a long-term one that hasn’t sold many products, this requirement could keep you from becoming eligible.

The Right performance metrics – The reason a high order volume matters is directly related to this requirement. When deciding who’s worthy of the Buy Box, Amazon looks at data on how well you’ve performed on past purchases. For eligibility, they consider – Your order defect rate, Cancellation rate, Late shipment rate. These all need to be as close to zero as absolutely possible if you want any chance of success on the Amazon marketplace and they directly affect your eligibility for the Buy Box.

How to make sure your products are Buy Box eligible?

While that covers your seller account, you also want to make sure your products are eligible for the Buy Box. When logged into your Seller Central account, go to the Manage Inventory page and select preferences. Select Buy Box eligible and click save.

How to win Buy Box?

Eligibility is step one but winning the Buy Box is something you have to do over and over again, day after day. And it’s tricky, because everyone competing against you wants it too. While Amazon doesn’t provide specifics how they decide who to feature in the Buy Box, most Amazon specialists are in agreement about the main factors they weigh:

Price – They want to feature the lowest price for a product at any given time, so it pays to track your competitor’s prices constantly and adjust your as needed.

Feedback – The customer experience matters, so if you’re getting negative reviews and ratings, it will hurt you here.

Inventory levels – Will your product be available to ship out right away? You’re more likely to win the Buy Box if you have enough stock to fulfill the order immediately.

Whether you see it as fair or not, the Buy Box will determine how successful you are on the platform. Take steps right away to assure your eligibility, then get to work on the other factors that will make you more consistently competitive.

How to Cross Sell Products on Amazon?

Amazon uses different automated tools to the entire users to increase order size, from product recommendations at checkout to ‘frequently bought together’ widgets on the product listing. These are great tools for Amazon to cross-sell, but not for ideal sellers given that Amazon could be recommending a competitor’s product alongside yours.

It is clear that Amazon is not the best platform when it comes to sellers wanting to cross-sell other products within their portfolio. There is no specific tool or feature that allows sellers to make recommendations or give visibility to other products in their range on a specific product listing. Instead, sellers need to be creative. Today, I’ll explore some ways to cross-sell your products on Amazon.

A+ Content - There are a couple of modules that allow you to add in different products, such as comparison charts. These are great modules to show alternative options and additional products in the range that might complement one another or that could create a set, for example, a treadmill and an elliptical.

Images - Despite Amazon having strict guidelines when it comes to the main product image, brands can get more creative with secondary images and display additional products within their range.

Videos - Similar to the images, at the end of the video you could highlight the family of products. Make sure it is clear to the customer that they will only get the one product and that there is no way of them being misled into thinking they are buying multiple products or a set.

Packaging - Some brands add leaflets or flyers in their packages that introduce the customer to their wider portfolio of products. If you do this, just make sure you adhere to Amazon’s Terms of Service. For example, you cannot offer customer incentives to purchase additional products in the range through coupons or redirect them to your website.

Amazon Sponsored Brands - This ad option allows you to display three different products from the range. Instead of having three competing products in your range you could offer different products that complement one another.

Amazon Brand Store - This is where sellers have the greatest space and freedom to highlight the full range of products to the customer to cross-sell and upsell. This can be done through the use of graphics, content and product images across multiple category pages.

Amazon Product Targeting - Select products from your range that you want visible on your other product pages. While this comes at a cost, this is a good way to get exposure to certain products that might complement other products in the range.

Variations - Amazon has strict guidelines when it comes to variation creation. Products should only be added to a variation if they are the same product but just vary slightly, for example in size, flavor, color or scent. By displaying multiple variants, a customer might opt to buy more than one variant.

Amazon Bundles - An easy way to cross-sell is by creating bundles and putting different products together as one single set. The only downside is that Amazon doesn’t support virtual bundles on the seller side and the item must be pre-packaged before arriving at the Amazon Fulfilment Center if you are selling via FBA.

Offering Promotions - To introduce other products in the range, sellers can create a promotion. For example, buy X product and get product Y free or get 5% off X when you purchase Y.

As you can see there are lots of ways to cross-sell on Amazon for both resellers and brand owners. Many sellers focus heavily on driving sales on an individual item, but with a few simple tricks they could end up doubling the size of the customer order by cross-selling.

How to move from Vendor to Seller on Amazon?

Amazon always takes the long view. Though it’s hard to imagine Amazon’s domination of e-commerce changing any time soon, the retailer has set its sights on also challenging the giants of brick and mortar including Walmart, Costco, and Target. To that end, Amazon is poised to implement a long-rumored change to force smaller vendors (less than $10M per year) to move from Vendor Central to Seller Central. If you’re among the tens of thousands being forced to make the change, you need to understand the implications of this change in order to properly adapt and prepare yourself a smooth transition.

What is Seller Central - Amazon is really two different marketplaces stacked on top of each other. The first party (1P) marketplace is where Amazons sells inventory directly, buying stock in bulk from 1P vendors and then pricing and selling those products to consumers. 1P suppliers use Vendor Central (VC) to control their product detail pages and manage purchase orders. In the third party (3P) marketplace, instead of selling wholesale to Amazon the merchant uses Amazon as a platform to sell directly to consumers and pays a commission. These sellers manage their product offerings using Seller Central (SC). The 3P marketplace has grown more rapidly than 1P and now accounts for roughly two-thirds of sales, leaving plenty of opportunity for those making the switch. Though this transition may prove to be a challenge, many vendors have willingly made the move, preferring the advantages of SC over VC.

Impact on Advertising - Perhaps the biggest downside of Seller Central is the advertising limitations. 1P vendors have access to three main types of ads: Sponsored Product, Sponsored Brand, and Product Display. Seller Central only gives access to sponsored product ads. 3P sellers can only access sponsored brand placements if they are registered with Amazon’s Brand Registry, which requires holding a trademark for the product. Product display placements are not available in SC at all.

Product display ads, which appear on the right side of a product detail page (PDP) below the buy box, serve several strategic functions. They can be used by vendors to advertise on their own PDPs in order to prevent competitors from gaining visibility there, to generate brand awareness by targeting shoppers by category or interest, and to upsell or cross-sell (for instance, by placing a product display ad for a brand’s bestselling product on all other PDPs). Losing access to these ads while moving from vendor to seller is a major downside.

Many sellers will also see a decrease in ad performance. Amazon’s advertising algorithms leverage historical campaign performance data for relevancy and moving from vendor to seller often means starting over from scratch. Without historical data, a new Seller Central campaign, even if it’s otherwise identical to a previous Vendor Central campaign, will take time to regain the lost momentum.

The transition will be rocky, but it’s not all doom and gloom. In recent years Amazon has been improving SC to have much of the same functionality as VC, so it’s likely that at some point Amazon will introduce product display ads for sellers. In the meantime, the ability for sellers to directly manage product pricing gives them more strategic control, allowing them to execute marketing campaigns without the risk of lost profit margins or inter-channel conflicts.

How to make a smooth transition - 

1.     If possible, register with Amazon’s Brand Registry. This is available to trademark holders and will provide you with two important capabilities.

1.     Sponsored Brand Ads – These appear as banner ads at the top of a search results page. These ads are often more effective than product ads for attracting new customers in the discovery phase of their path to purchase.

2.     Brand protection – PDPs that are not controlled by vendors or sellers within Amazon’s Brand Registry can be edited by any third party selling the product. If you’re registered, you can protect your brand by preventing 3Ps from editing your content.

2.     After registering your seller central account, recreate your product listing using the same ASINs. This will allow you to inherit the PDPs from your vendor account keeping all the valuable ratings, reviews and search relevancy you’ve built up over the years.

3.     Transfer your ad campaigns by bulk downloading them from Vendor Central and reuploading to Seller central when launching new campaigns. This will save you all the time and labor required to rebuild your campaign structure, keywords and bids. Note that you may be required to update the format to match the SC bulk operations template.

4.     When creating new ASINs, it’s important to boost traffic early on to establish placement and visibility. Kickstart initial sales with coupons and other promotions and leverage the early reviewer program to incentive authentic reviews from Amazon shoppers so that you can quickly populate your PDPs with ratings and reviews.

Transitioning from a wholesale supplier to a marketplace seller can take several months. With the mounting evidence that Amazon is indeed planning to reduce smaller vendors in favor of taking their hands of the wheel and reducing direct human intervention in their retail business, it’s a good idea for vendors to have a backup plan in place.