This is a repost of a previous Tiny Marketing Lab Newsletter. If you haven’t been receiving my email newsletter, you can subscribe here.
Hello,
Last week, Amazon took the buy box away from all my products.
As you know, the buy box is super important.
Without it, making sales on Amazon can be really tough.
And of course, this happened during the busiest time of the year.
My sales dropped by over 80%…
Even if I got it back today, it wouldn’t change much since the items won’t ship in time for Christmas, and fewer people are shopping for gifts now.
But you know what? I’m totally okay with it.
I feel like I’ve learned a lot over the past few years.
Amazon removing my buy box?* It’s just part of the game. I’ve faced problems like this many times before.*
Sales lower than last year? That happens too. Luck doesn’t always play on your side.
I’ve learned to ACCEPT any outcome—good or bad.
Life goes on. Didn’t get the result you wanted today?
You still have tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year to work toward your goals.
Just keep moving forward.
Anyway, I got my buy box back today!
Let me share what I learned from this experience.
Last week, I thought there were three main reasons why Amazon might have removed my buy box:
- Too Many Canceled Orders
- Too Many Negative Reviews
- Low On-Time Delivery Rate
My Pre-fulfillment Cancel Rate was over 4% last week. Amazon wants this number to be lower than 2.5%.
But now, my Pre-fulfillment Cancel Rate is at 0%!
Luckily, Amazon has checked stats for this metric over the last seven days, so as long as I didn’t cancel any orders during that time, I was good to go.
My Order Defect Rate (ODR) caused by negative reviews is still over 1%, which is above Amazon’s requirement of less than 1%.
But I’ve dropped it from 4% to 1.12%. Still a bit over, but better!
My On-Time Delivery Rate is still around 70%, while Amazon wants that to be over 90%.
The deactivation notice has been removed from my account, and everything looks good now, even though my ODR and On-Time Delivery Rate are still not quite where Amazon wants them.
I’m pretty sure my buy box was removed mainly because of the high Pre-fulfillment Cancel Rate.
Once it hit 0% again, I got my buy box back almost instantly.
And getting that rate back to 0% isn’t hard because Amazon checks stats from the last 7 days.
Plus, when you lose the buy box, it’s tough to make sales, so you won’t have many orders to cancel, right?
I even hired a freelancer from Fiverr to help me, but honestly, I don’t think they were much help.
They just opened a ticket with Amazon, mentioned my 5-star reviews, and asked Amazon to review my products.
As expected, Amazon’s bot sent a standard reply. They suggested lowering prices, keeping performance metrics in check, and improving customer service.
You can find that answer easily on Google. Don’t waste your time with Amazon support.
This Fiverr person didn’t do anything else. So, I started looking for solutions on Google and found other sellers who lost their buy box like me.
They said keeping seller performance metrics in check is key, and some of them got their buy box back in three months.
I decided to let it go and focus on other things.
A few days passed…
Then, boom! I got my buy box back today.
So, if you want to avoid losing your buy box like I did, keep your Pre-fulfillment Cancel Rate under 2.5%.
Even though my Order Defect Rate and On-Time Delivery Rate aren’t perfect yet, I still got my buy box back.
That tells me this is the key metric to watch.
Alright, that’s it for this email.
I hope you found it useful.
—Bank K.
P.S. While I was waiting on Amazon, I upgraded Jesse PODMan and moved it to its own domain—now you can find it at JessePODMan.com.
We’ve optimized over 150,000 products for our members.
I’ll soon be adding Valentine’s Day keywords, so your products will be ready for next year’s Valentine’s Day!
