The Amazon Buy Box is not national

Location changes the answer

A national Buy Box check gives you one answer. The question has several. On any given day, about a fifth of the products we track in more than one location show a different Buy Box status. It depends on where the shopper is standing.

The gap between cities is large

Win rates are not evenly spread. The best and worst city we track are 16.3 percentage points apart. Same catalogue. Same moment.

Price does not explain it

The obvious theory is that sellers win where they are cheapest. We looked at 52 products whose Buy Box status differs by city. Only 8 were winning in the city where their price was lowest. 26 were winning at a higher price than the city where they were losing. Another 18 showed no price difference at all.

The sample is small. 52 products is an indication, not a law. It is still enough to say that price alone does not decide the Buy Box.

Losing the Buy Box and having none at all are about equally common

Sellers watch for competitors taking the Buy Box. They should also watch for it vanishing. A suppressed listing shows no winner at all. Roughly as many of our tracked positions are suppressed as are lost to another seller. Both sit near 15%.

We do not claim one is commoner than the other. The two are within a point. The ordering reverses depending on how you measure it. A snapshot of current status puts suppression ahead. An average over the last seven days of checks puts loss ahead. A gap that small is not a finding. We would rather say so than pick the cut that reads better.

What changes on a product page

We snapshot product pages daily and diff them. The most common change is not the one most sellers watch for.