The Buy Box is the area of an Amazon detail page that provides the offer on the item being viewed. It is where the “Add to Cart” and “Buy Now” buttons are located, informing the shopper of almost all the buying and delivery details they will need to decide whether on not to buy the product. Businesses must avoid Lost Buy Box (LBB) in order to keep their sales. LBB percentage is the percentage of glance views where Amazon’s offer was not the featured offer.
More than one seller or vendor can create offers for the same product on the Amazon Marketplace. However, the Buy Box can only list one of those offers. The offer that is presented in the Buy Box, or featured offer, “wins” it because it is the first offer that shoppers see. Normally providing the best customer experience, that offer usually provides the lowest price.
Why is LBB an Issue?
More than 82% of sales occur on the featured offer, making the ability to ensure you win the Buy Box a priority for vendors and sellers.
3rd party sales will not help you increase your purchase orders. So, while a 3P seller wins the Buy Box, Amazon’s sales decline, as will their order quantities.
Vendors must align their goals to Amazon’s to bolster strong cooperation with their account. One way to do this is to ensure the Vendor Manager’s key performance indicators are positive, like LBB percentage and ordered product sales.
In the end, even when shoppers love a vendor’s product, a higher LBB percentage will cause Amazon to order less, resulting in lower purchase orders and lost revenue.
Monitoring LBB
Such a critical component of selling on Amazon needs attention for a business to be successful on the marketplace. Monitoring whether your products are losing the Buy Box needs to be a regular and constant task in managing an Amazon account. Tracking this will help you spot spikes in lost Buy Box percentage so you can take action to correct the issue before it begins to affect Amazon’s ordering.
3P Data Helps Guide Action
If LBB is an issue for your products, analyzing 3P sellers and those that are winning the buy box will help guide your actions in fixing the issue. Seeing the price at which the Buy Box winner is offering the product customers can show you how much of a discount you can provide to shoppers to win the buy box again. Seeing your available inventory, margin, PPM, and historical pricing will help you decide on the discount size and duration.
Results of Action
With proper monitoring and measured discounts, lost sales due to LBB can be significantly reduced. For one of Navazon’s clients, they cut the LBB % in half, from an initial 8% to 4.2% over the course of the year. That might sound like a small percentage difference, but the sales they lost due to LBB went from $503k to $286k. Reducing the yearly loss by about $217k is not insignificant when you can get that money going to your pocket rather than a competitor.
Listing products on Amazon has no benefit if shoppers aren’t buying from you. Make sure that your offer is the one they see by making sure that it will provide them the best customer experience while remaining profitable for you and Amazon. Navazon’s experts have experience in reducing LBB percentage for vendors to increase their revenue. Contact us to day to find out how we can help regain your lost Buy Box.