How to Win Back Your Amazon Buy Box from Rogue Sellers

Protect Your Amazon sales from Illegitimate 3rd party merchants.

The coveted Amazon Buy Box — the top prize for an eCommerce brand. When you control the Buy Box you win more than 80% of sales. When a 3rd party seller drops price or otherwise manipulates the system, that stolen Buy Box takes a deep cut into your profits.

The ever-evolving Amazon algorithm

Everything in the digital world seems to move at lightning speeds. As an online seller, you know the importance of staying on trend, keeping up with rapidly changing search engine algorithms and maintaining a spot in the top results. It’s a competitive market, but for good reason.

The problem is, it can become a full-time job to keep up with algorithm changes and ensure your product listings are optimized. Competitive share of the Buy Box is part of the reward for mastering the algorithm and why it’s so important to stay apprised of the constant changes or work with someone who can.

Identify and eliminate illegitimate sellers of your products

When you’ve lost a significant share of your Amazon Buy Box to rogue sellers, it’s clear you can’t rely just on MAP enforcementBrand Registry, or brand gating to fully protect your brand. You must deploy a new arsenal that includes:

  • A comprehensive audit that identifies all gray market sellers of your product

  • Uncovering the relevant Amazon policies these sellers are violating

  • Warning sellers directly to remove their illegitimate listings or risk action on their seller accounts

  • Reporting their violations to Amazon

  • Rinsing and repeating when new rogue sellers arrive (which they will)

Expand brand protection for stronger Amazon sales performance

Buy Box win rate is the primary metric for tracking sales success on Amazon for good reason. However, it shouldn’t be the only measure of Amazon sales performance for your brand, because it doesn’t always equate to overall sales performance.

It can be easy to dismiss rogue ASINs as being inconsequential to your overall sales performance. However, third-party sellers are rational and opportunistic. They deploy tactics proven to capture meaningful sales. When you see sellers persistently selling on rogue ASINs, you can safely assume that sellers are making good money. When you see an increase in that behavior, it means they may be making great money on your products which means your Buy Box win rate is under-representing your total lost sales.

It’s important to pay close attention to your top performing products whether or not they are being listed on legitimate ASINs. e The top ten are driving a majority of the total addressable market, often up to 80% of the total Amazon sales of your products. The illegitimate third-party sellers most disruptive to your sales are likely targeting these, making them fairly easy to identify so you can begin the eviction process. Start with these steps:

  1. Identify the five most active rogue sellers on your top ten ASINs (if applicable)

  2. Consolidate your list and sort by the total number of listings

  3. Start by addressing the top ten sellers on that list

By removing rogue ASINs, your Buy Box share will then be equal to the share of your total addressable market. While it’s possible your Buy Box win rate may go down, ultimately your overall sales will be higher. By simultaneously removing rogue sellers from your authorized ASINs, you’ll be capturing a larger share of the total available market.

Find a partner that can help protect your brand and recover lost revenue

You want your consumers to have the brand experience you intended for them. Unfortunately, the work required to protect your eCommerce brand and Amazon sales is never-ending. Companies that try to do this on their own quickly discover the reality of the resources required to monitor and evict illegitimate sellers.

For true sales protection, companies partner with Gray Falkon to effectively and efficiently take down brand violators at scale, eliminating between 85% and 95% of the problem. Discover Gray Falkon’s process which recently helped a large health and nutrition brand increase their Buy Box win rate by 37% which increased their Amazon sales 27%.

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