Insights Metrics: How To Protect Your Brand From Competitors on Amazon

To sell on Amazon and win the buy box, you don’t have to have the lowest price — or be cannibalized by Amazon, your competition, or third-party (3P) resellers. You can still offer a competitive price while protecting your brand if you pay attention to the right metrics and take swift action.

Selling on Amazon Is a Must — and a Challenge

The sheer volume of sales and the number of items for sale on Amazon are staggering. Each month, millions of consumers can purchase more than 350 million products from Amazon, and there are almost 3 million active Amazon Marketplace sellers.

While Amazon is an essential channel to reach a vast audience, it is hard to compete for the buy box. With 81.9% of all Amazon revenue coming through the buy box in 2013, the stakes couldn’t be higher. To secure a competitive share of the buy box, brands must understand how the Amazon buy box algorithm rates sellers.

There are several factors included in this algorithm, including:

• Landed price;
• Reviews and ratings;
• In-stock inventory of new product;
• Fulfillment by Amazon or the seller; and
• Shipping time.

To score well and secure the largest share of the buy box, brands must monitor these variables using the most relevant metrics. Teams must also act on these insights to:

• Make continuous corrections and enhancements;
• Quickly enforce brand compliance;
• Stop the sale of counterfeit products; and
• Stop the spread of cloned product pages.

How to Leverage Metrics to Protect Your Price Points and Brand

Remember that price alone doesn’t determine your share of the buy box. You must also ensure that products are available, sold at the right price, and sold and fulfilled by the right party. The need to monitor regular changes to the buy-box algorithm, the high number of resellers, and multiple SKUs — along with the challenge of walled-off data — makes this even more challenging for your ecommerce team.

Salsify Insights helps brands drive commerce strategy while simultaneously improving operational execution by turning insights into action. With these capabilities, your ecommerce team can act on metrics that will increase your buy box score, allowing you to drive success on the digital shelf.

Your digital shelf analytics solution needs to be integrated with your product experience management (PXM) platform to remain competitive on the digital shelf. This integration will give your ecommerce team a top-line view of performance, giving them the ability to adapt and adjust quickly.

To defend your profitability and safeguard your brand, you need to know how to:

• Protect pricing and profit margins;
• Monitor what shoppers see on product pages; and
• Check 3P resellers and competitors to see how they are pricing products online.

With insights in hand, you and your team can sell at the best pricing to meet your goals while ensuring that customers have a consistent brand experience across all of your priority channels.

Protect Pricing and Profit Margins: MAP Violation Metrics

The Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) Violation Report compiles product pricing data and shows you if any retail partners of third-party sellers are listing products below your set MAP. It monitors buy box prices, current offers, and third-party front-page offers (FPOs) across top retail channels, including Amazon, Walmart, and Target. Salsify MAP violation workflows will also flag violations to the appropriate member of your team and help them take action.

This report enables you to streamline the process for identifying violations, helping you enforce product pricing and ensure that retailer partner or third-party seller websites aren’t cutting into your profit margins. These capabilities can help you defend profitability and ensure compliance. With your products spread across so many online retailers and resellers, it can be challenging to track prices manually.

Monitor What Shoppers See: Buy Box and Availability Metrics

The Salsify Buy Box and Availability Report report lets you monitor what shoppers see when they visit one of your product pages, enabling you to easily track product availability, whether you are the buy box seller, and buy box price. It also gives you insights into other sellers offering your products, as well as their listed prices for said products.

This report can help you quickly identify critical listing issues, such as out-of-stock products, lost buy boxes, third-party seller MAP violations, and potential counterfeit product listings. Having a consolidated view of these data points within Salsify can empower you to take action to combat issues with speed and agility.

Check 3P Retailer Pricing: Competitive Price Intelligence Metrics

The Salsify Competitive Price Intelligence Report lets you see exactly where your products are being offered for lower prices and highlights the lowest current price and recent price increases and decreases. It also enables you to compare prices across a wide range of products and outlines the percentage of products by the retailer with the current lowest price.

This report can help your ecommerce team determine which retailers may be affecting your profit margin, and give you the information you need to protect your margins and increase your revenue. As pricing is the top factor that determines online conversion, this report helps your team closely monitor product pricing so they can take action quickly.