What is the Amazon Buy Box, and why is it important?

Understanding the Amazon Buy Box first requires a firm understanding of the opportunities available to brands and merchants selling their products on Amazon and the two routes to market and reach millions of potential customers.

1. Firstly, it's possible to sell your products as a 3rd Party Seller using the Amazon Seller Central platform. It's commonly referred to as the Amazon marketplace. Your company name will be visible during the purchase journey to highlight that you, a 3rd Party Seller, are offering the product at this price and fulfilment method.
2. The second is the Amazon Vendor Central programme. Vendor Central is an invite-only platform where Amazon purchases your products via a Purchase Order and sells the product to shoppers as Amazon. Typically Amazon will dispatch the product to the shopper.

In light of these two programmes, Amazon has designed the Product Detail Page to create competition between each programme to give the Amazon shopper the best customer experience for price and delivery time. Each offer will compete to win the Buy Box and the opportunity to secure a sale based on an algorithm. The algorithm will consider factors such as; the price, delivery fee, delivery time and recent performance, to name a few.

Where is the Buy Box?

The Buy Box is the rectangle located on the right-hand side of the Product Detail Page where the "Add to Basket" and "Buy Now" buttons. Where there are multiple sellers, the ownership will rotate between each seller based upon Price, Available Stock, recent Seller Performance ratings and other undisclosed factors.

As a 3rd Party Seller, you're winning the Buy Box when your company is visible next to the "Sold by" label. For Vendor Partners, you're winning the Buy Box when Amazon sells the product. For example, in the screenshot below, we can see that below the Buy Now button, this particular product will be dispatched from an Amazon warehouse and sold by a 3rd Party Seller called Bedsure Little Ones EU.

Why is winning the Buy Box crucial?

If you're consistently winning the Buy Box, it dramatically increases the likelihood that an Amazon shopper will purchase your stock. Winning the Buy Box is the optimum situation, especially where your business is the registered brand owner. Ideally, there will be no other 3rd Party Sellers selling this particular product.