The following is a case study featuring a leading consumer electronics brand that leveraged ChannelAdvisor Brand Analytics to dramatically decrease Buy Box losses on Amazon.

As a leader in the electronics vertical, one enterprise seller based in the UK had an ambitious goal: expand business while improving profitability. It was an aggressive objective — one that company representatives say would work only if the e-commerce team could find a way to decrease ad spend significantly.

The team tells ChannelAdvisor that it went to work and quickly identified a promising area for organic growth: By increasing Buy Box “wins” on Amazon, the brand had an opportunity to avoid losing sales to third-party retailers.

“Maintaining the Buy Box is a key driver for ‘free’ growth,” explained the company’s e-commerce manager. “Whenever we lose the Buy Box, sales go to third-party players, and they are essentially lost. Although these sellers are shipping our brand’s products, it’s usually all grey market and parallel imports. It undervalues our products and brings more price instability, which, in turn, other retailers complain about.”

(View a PDF version of the case study here.)

THE CHALLENGE

Before any efforts were made to increase Buy Box retention, the seller says its lost Buy Box rates were as high as 38% in European Amazon stores.

It’s not that the brand hadn’t already attempted to combat the problem. The seller’s key account manager for Amazon.co.uk says the team invested a lot of time and resources to find and solve lost Buy Box issues. But while the brand was paying for a dedicated account manager at Amazon, the team says the available tools and weekly reporting proved insufficient. According to the company, staff was forced to manually crawl the product pages for about 50 ASINs several times per day. They say it took two hours a day, every day. And yet lost Buy Boxes were still around 15%.

THE CHANNELADVISOR SOLUTION

When the brand turned to ChannelAdvisor Brand Analytics, the team was introduced to a different method for increasing Amazon Buy Box wins: high-frequency monitoring and real-time notifications, all available within one comprehensive dashboard. Today, the solution is used by over 100 team members worldwide. With ChannelAdvisor’s help, the company can monitor around 150,000 product pages at a high frequency, including all Amazon stores.

Ultimately, the Amazon account manager says they were able to:

  • Create a custom group of products for the top 50 ASINS
  • Create an email notification for Buy Box losses in this group
  • Set it to “real-time”

Through ChannelAdvisor Brand Analytics, marketplace experts collaborate with successful brands and retailers to consistently address the daily mishaps that naturally come with multi-channel e-commerce distribution. This robust platform is designed to help eliminate the hassle of manual monitoring, freeing e-commerce account managers to focus on other value-added tasks.

THE RESULTS

Within three months of using ChannelAdvisor Brand Analytics, the company says the time spent monitoring pages manually dwindled from two hours each day to none. Plus, they received notifications for lost Buy Box events within two hours of them occurring, allowing the team to investigate and solve issues within minutes.

Ultimately, the customer reports ChannelAdvisor Brand Analytics helped a key account manager meet sales targets while freeing up 10 hours a week — time now used to pursue new business opportunities.

What’s more, the electronics seller says its team made an important observation. They noted that the Buy Box was often lost because of an availability issue — or because a marketplace seller was offering a price that Amazon just couldn’t beat. In these scenarios, the account manager’s responsibility is to work out a solution to help satisfy both parties. 

Enter ChannelAdvisor Brand Analytics, which the seller confirms has helped their team maintain a productive, partner-to-partner working relationship with Amazon. As a result of the team’s new strategy driven by ChannelAdvisor Brand Analytics, the electronics seller says its direct sales grew by 9%. And that’s not all. The company reports its lost Buy Box rates slowed significantly, dropping from 14% to just 6%.

“We’ve been able to discuss issues as they happen instead of after it’s too late,” explained the account manager.

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