4 Ways Buy Box Suppression Blocks Your Sales

Rebecca Brown

August 1, 2023

 4 minute read time
buy box suppression

The Buy Box is the main conversion point on Amazon, making it the most important detail on your product listing. Buy Box suppression on Amazon is an enemy to brand executives because it hinders their brand’s visibility and blocks sales. And, it takes massive time and resources to restore the Buy Box once it’s been lost.

Pattern is an ecommerce accelerator who understands Buy Box suppression and provides the resources and expertise for brands around the world to take back control and continue growing profitably. Keep reading to learn 4 ways Buy Box suppression blocks sales and what you can do to prevent it.

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What is Buy Box Suppression?

While you may have previously faced losing the Buy Box to other sellers, suppression is different. When the Buy Box is suppressed, no seller wins the Buy Box for that ASIN—it’s not just you being blocked, it’s anyone selling that product. However, similar to losing the Buy Box, customers can still purchase from you, it just becomes much harder.

In order to purchase from you, customers now have to click the gray “See All Buying Options” button, scroll through the list of sellers, and click “Add to Cart” on your listing.

buy box example

Why does this happen? It’s Amazon’s way of supporting customers. Amazon wants to provide the lowest price, so it scrapes prices from across the web to find lower-priced competitors. If Amazon finds a lower price for the same product elsewhere, it will suppress the Buy Box until the price on Amazon is equal to or less than the prices found elsewhere.

While this sounds like a simple fix, it always takes longer to get out of suppression than to get in. And in the meantime, suppression blocks your sales in more ways than you may realize.

4 Ways Buy Box Suppression Blocks Your Sales

While Buy Box suppression has an immediate consequence of adding more steps to the purchase process, it affects your sales beyond creating friction for customers.

1. Your Best Seller Rank (BSR) Goes Up

Every product you sell on Amazon gets a Best Seller Rank (BSR) that shows how well it’s selling in its category. Just like golf, you want a low BSR—being the #1 best seller is better than being #86. The higher your BSR, the less relevant you are in your category, the worse you rank for search terms, and the harder it is for customers to find your listing.

When Amazon suppresses your Buy Box, your sales decrease and your BSR is raised, penalizing your product even after you’re no longer suppressed. At Pattern, our Amazon experts know how to help you improve your BSR, search rank, and sales, even after suppression.

2. You Lose Time and Resources Fixing Your BSR

Because your BSR is so important to your Amazon business, you’ll have to spend time improving the rank when it increases. In order to fix your BSR, you’ll have to solve the price difference causing your suppression, which may include identifying and removing unauthorized sellers. Then, you’ll have to regain traction to increase product sales, which may mean running promotional discounts that give up margin or increasing ad spend to drive traffic.

Whatever strategy you use, improving your BSR will take time and resources away from other important aspects of your online strategy and may impact your short-term goals. When you partner with Pattern, our team becomes an extension of yours, handling the extra tasks needed to get back in control on Amazon so you don’t miss a beat.

3. Your Inventory Goes Stale

The longer your Buy Box is suppressed, the longer you sit on your inventory. Depending on your product category, old inventory can be a death sentence for sales. If you have food or supplements with expiration dates or fashion products that go out of style, time is of the essence.

Even without time sensitive products, being overstocked can complicate inventory planning and sales forecasts, consume your Amazon storage allowances, and force you to discount and liquidate what you can’t sell, opening the door for leaky distribution.

4. Impact on Your Offline Channels

66% of U.S. consumers begin their product research on Amazon, so it’s vital to be available on the marketplace. If you’re not showing up on Amazon, new customers may have a harder time finding your brand. In turn, they may not look for you when shopping in-store.

When your Buy Box is suppressed, you don’t just lose Amazon sales, you lose the opportunity to build awareness and generate sales across other channels. Buy Box suppression eliminates your price control, bars your traffic, and complicates your conversions, damaging your performance in all aspects of the ecommerce equation (profitability = price x traffic x conversion x availability). In short, suppression inhibits the profitability flywheel.

Avoid Buy Bux Suppression With Pattern 

At Pattern, we specialize in keeping your growth and long-term profitability as our top priority across all sales channels. Pattern helps you take control of your brand on Amazon to prevent the unauthorized, lowered prices that cause Buy Box suppression. When your brand has true control on the platform, Pattern can better help you forecast, advertise efficiently, and improve your BSR.

Using expert strategies and proprietary technology, Pattern always upholds our brand partners’ MAP policies. And, we can put you in touch with excellent resources to manage ecommerce brand control issues like stabilizing online price and taking control of the Buy Box.

Ready to stop Buy Box suppression? Get in touch today.

 

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