Winning the Amazon Buy Box with World-Class Support

The Buy Box: Amazon’s most coveted sales tool. According to Feedvisor, it's responsible for roughly 82% of all Amazon sales. Virtually all successful Amazon selling strategies aim for it. But how can you hope to take it from more established sellers—or even Amazon itself?

Last updated 12/31/2021.

What Is the Buy Box and Why Do I Want It?

First, you probably want to know what the Buy Box is. I’ve surrounded it with a red rectangle in the image below.

In Amazon's documentation, you'll often see the Buy Box referred to as the Featured Offer.

Only one seller can have the Box at a time. Whoever ends up there gets the biggest and most conspicuous “Add to Cart” button on the page. It’s also that seller’s pricing and shipping information that dominate the listing.

The result: most people buy from the seller in the Buy Box as instinctively as they click on the first result in a Google search.

How Do I Win the Buy Box?

Amazon’s requirements for winning the Buy Box are equal parts strict and vague. You can learn how to check whether your current listings are eligible here and then see their metrics for determining who wins here. In short, you must do five things:

1. Have a Professional account.
2. Provide fast shipping options and free shipping.
3. Offer competitive pricing.
4. Keep your product in stock.
5. Deliver unbeatable customer service.

1. Professional Account

This, at least, is easy. Simply check your account type on Amazon Seller Central and upgrade to Professional if you have not done so already.

2. Shipping

Competing on shipping deserves an article of its own. However, the basic idea here is clear: you should offer at least some form of free shipping and some form of fast shipping. If you offer faster free shipping than any of your competitors, you should be in good shape.

If speed and price are challenges for you, there are a few ecommerce shipping solutions that can help. You can also just use FBA and let Amazon handle your shipping, becoming eligible by default. (Hold that thought for now.)

3. Pricing

Pricing deserves not just its own article, but its own degree. It’s virtually impossible for humans to always find the perfect price point to maintain Buy Box eligibility and ideal profit margins. There are simply too many factors to consider, and we let our emotions get involved far too often.

Using Amazon repricing software that crunches big data is the best way to set all your prices at the perfect points. Such software automatically adjusts your prices to deal with changes in supply, demand, and competition. Machines really can do the job better than people in this case.

4. Avoiding Stockouts

Amazon states you have to keep your product in stock to win the Featured Offer. On top of that, one of the most important performance metrics they take into account is your Cancellation Rate.

If a product is out of stock with no restock ordered, your offer won't get featured. If a customer buys something and you cancel the order because you ran out of stock, that also counts against you.

These issues shouldn’t happen more than once in a blue moon. If they do, inventory management software like Volo Commerce can automate the process and cut back on human error.

With those four things out of the way, everything else comes down to the absolute most critical factor: your customer service. Therefore, we’ll spend the rest of the article on:

5. Amazon Customer Service That Wins the Buy Box

As with shipping, you can just use FBA to have Amazon take over your customer service. This will instantly win you Buy Box eligibility on the customer service factors.

It’s nice and easy on the outside. But remember, Amazon’s fees are designed to make money off you using FBA. If you'd rather keep that money for yourself, there's good news: you absolutely can win the Box without FBA.

However, you must be willing to invest in the right infrastructure and find the right employees. Here are the challenges you can expect to face, and how you can overcome them:

Amazon Rules

Knowledge is power. And on Amazon, there are so many rules and systems that many sellers don’t bother to gain the knowledge they need to succeed before diving in. Know the rules and you’ll have a huge edge over those guys.

One of the most important rules of winning the Buy Box is that you must have a very low Order Defect Rate. That means few negative reviews, A-to-z Guarantee claims, and chargebacks.

Another, as mentioned above, is a low Cancellation Rate. You must carefully monitor and update stock levels and avoid disappointing cancellations. It's better to lose the Buy Box briefly by marking your listing as out of stock than to lose your eligibility (and possibly selling privileges!) by cancelling orders.

The last of the top three metrics is your Late Shipment Rate. Ship on time!

Amazon also states that to win the Box, you should pay attention "to all aspects of your account health." That implies all their performance metrics matter to some degree.

Note that Amazon tracks how well you follow virtually all of their selling policies and takes this into account. It’s critical to understand things like the Amazon return policy and Amazon refund policy so you know exactly what standards you need to meet.

Learn these rules. Then build your customer service around playing by them—and exceeding Amazon’s expectations—to win the Buy Box.

Customer Communication and Support Infrastructure

Even more important than knowing the rules is how you interact with your customers. Effective customer communication basically boils down to three things:

1. How quickly you respond. (Originally, you needed 24/7 customer service for Buy Box eligibility, though it seems Amazon has removed this requirement.)
2. How well you answer the customer’s question.
3. How diplomatically you handle the customer—friendliness, courtesy, and professionalism all matter.

Now, you could just have your phone wake you up every time you get an email. Odds are, though, that some of your 3:00 AM customer interactions will go poorly. You need to sleep like anyone else.

Start by creating a customer service team. This might be you and a business partner who works the night shift at first. Later, you might build a team of global contractors who answer during standard business hours in their time zones.

Next, you need to work out your messaging infrastructure. Seller Central messaging is often enough if you only sell on Amazon and you have a low volume of support requests. You can even have multiple users on one Amazon account, with specific permissions for each, if you want to field a customer service team there.

Things get more complicated if you also sell on other platforms like eBay or a Shopify store, though. The more systems your support team has to use, the slower they become.

You can use Gmail as your Amazon email service and manage support for Amazon and your own site in one place. But its customer service capabilities are limited. Also, critical data in your Amazon messages will arrive in a jumble, and you can’t answer messages from many other marketplaces (like eBay) there.

If you want to provide great service for your entire ecommerce operation (not just Amazon), you’ll want to manage everything from one place. There are several ways to do that.

Messaging System Options

The first option is Zendesk. This wildly popular customer relationship management software makes providing customer support way easier. It comes with an enormous suite of automations and tools for managing customers and employees alike.

Normally, Zendesk only works with channels like standard email and social media, and it can get Amazon messages just as jumbled as Gmail does. But connect it with an Amazon messaging service and it will work like a dream. ChannelReply can do this for you—and it even supports Zendesk integrations with eBay, Shopify, Back Market, and Walmart.

Above: An Amazon message in Zendesk with ChannelReply.

You can also use Freshdesk. Freshdesk has won its fair share of awards and is just as effective as Zendesk. As with Zendesk, you can combine Freshdesk with ChannelReply to support Amazon, eBay, and other marketplaces.

Above: An Amazon message in Freshdesk with ChannelReply.

Don't like Zendesk or Freshdesk? Try Gorgias, Help Scout, or Re:amaze instead!

Whichever you choose, you’ll have a system that makes complicated customer service situations easy. You’ll be able to manage your international team and support buyers from Amazon, eBay, your own website and more from a single screen. This will enable you to provide Buy Box–worthy support no matter how enormous your ecommerce operation becomes.

Putting It All Together

Having the right tools and knowledge will only get you so far. The rest comes down to how you use them.

Price optimization tools only win the Box if you give them the flexibility to set competitive prices. Offering fast shipping options only helps if you get your packages in the mail quickly and reliably. Even integrating Amazon with a helpdesk will only make a difference if you provide exceptional customer service.

Ultimately, winning the Buy Box depends on the answer to one question: do you work harder than anyone else to make your customers happy?