Posted on September 21st, 2022

Should you compete with Amazon on listings where they are also a seller is a question I have seen pop up in various Facebook groups.

The easy answer is “YES,” and I'll tell you why.

It appears that many people see Amazon as someone they should not compete against, which is farthest from the truth as it can be. I may have, at the beginning of my Amazon selling career, had some of the same thoughts that many of you have now about Amazon, possibly biting the hand that feeds you and possibly not getting any sales because you assume that they will dominate the buy box because after all, they are Amazon.

I'm here to tell you from my experience and the evidence below that this typically is not the case. I'd say probably 90% or maybe even 95% of all the listings that also have Amazon as a seller, they are willing to share the buy box because they are in the business of making money and if they can make money off of you and your fees they certainly will.

Amazon, in most categories, will make 15% off your sales price straight off the top without having to do anything else but allow you to sell on their platform. Amazon makes billions of dollars every year just from the fees they charge us to sell on their platform, and they're not going to stop doing that so that they can sell their items.

Now there is one way you can check to see if Amazon allows different people to have the buy box, and that is by looking at the listing with KEEPA. KEEPA is a must-have for any serious Amazon seller, and I would recommend for you to get a subscription to KEEPA before any other software that’s available on the market. This is my affiliate link to KEEPA, for which I may receive a small referral fee, but I would recommend them even if I weren’t an affiliate.

This is from the Keepa graph that will be shown on every Amazon product detail page after you have selected "DATA" and then "Buy Box Statistics" Now, you can see on this graph that Amazon does have 45% of the buy box wins. Still, you can also see that the other sellers are getting shares of the buy box even at a higher price point. Over to the right in the oval green circle, you can actually see the last time that the different sellers won the buy box, and according to this most recent data, you can see that GREAT DEALS TODAY just now won the buy box against big bad Amazon.

So, to sum up, this post, consider Amazon to be just like any other seller that you would compete with.

PS.  If in a slight chance that Amazon doesn't give the buy box and constantly undercuts you so that they stay in the buy box, drop your price significantly so that Amazon will also and eventually they will sell out. You can raise your price back to what you wanted in the first place, possibly even higher, with Amazon not being able to compete while they are out of stock.