Featured Offer for B2B customers

Selling on Amazon FBM
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Cross posting from the “other” forum, because I’m concerned that Amazon will delete the post, and I think it’s important. Synopsis: FBM merchants’ listings are not being shown to B2B customers:

OK, now we’re getting somewhere.

Using the report “Business Reports | Detail Page Sales and Traffic By Child Item”, I’m now able to identify a FEW items that don’t have the buy box when viewed in a browser from my account. However they also don’t have a competitive price or featured offer price. We mostly have exclusives on the platform.

However, the “Featured Offer (Buy Box) Percentage - B2B” is generally 0%, and generally no higher than the “regular” BB%. We are not a business account, because we do not buy on Amazon, so I do not see these “missing buy boxes”. The question is, which of these am I “violating” (if any):

"We feature offers with an Add to Cart button when an offer meets our high standards for:

Quality Price,

Reliable delivery option, and

Seller who offers good customer service"

There are no competitive prices, and our metrics are perfect, so I have to think this comes down to delivery options, as we are FBM, and Amazon is doing everything short of requiring FBA to push sellers to FBA.

We do use the same shippers that Amazon does (FedEx and UPS only), and our “business hours delivery rate” is 100%.

My theory is this discrepancy is much worse recently due to two things: 1. we are FBM, and Amazon hates us for it, and 2. Amazon has recently started pushing metrics, new articles, webinars etc. on B2B shipping, and this is now a bigger piece of the Buy Box formula.

Prediction: business delivery methods will be required, even when it requires buying more expensive shipping. Attempts to add lead time to allow for cheaper shipping options (i.e. the ones you always used) will result in suppression, or automation leading to bannination. These requirements will NOT apply to FBA, which will continue to use standard shipping methods. (This is clearly anti-trust actionable, but that won’t happen in the current regulatory-capture environment).

Sidebar: our B2B page views are a tiny fraction of our total page views, and support claims the BB% on the SS home page reflects traffic, not % of products. But I’m guessing it is in fact some hybrid of the two, or simply a dumb calculation giving business traffic equal weight, because ours continues to hover around 50%. The detail traffic report also claims that >50% of our traffic goes to one of our 90 currently active ASINs, even though that ASIN has zero sales, which seems highly sus.

SUMMARY: Amazon continues its anti-trust push to force sellers to FBA, and will not show B2B customers the buy box even though it’s “good enough” for “regular” customers. The claim they’ll make is that “regular” shipments won’t deliver during business hours, even though our metrics say otherwise, and Amazon will continue to use the same shipping labels for FBA that we do for FBM.

(Seriously Amazon? I resize the window and you throw out the TEXTAREA contents? Why would you go out of the way to make the UI dumber?)

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Amazon likes to do this. It is evident in how the % is effected in the product review ratings. With this calculation, Amazon will give a heavy weight to a 1 star review that will knock the overall % way down. In other words … if you had 99 five stars and 1 one star, the rating should be 99% but Amazon will rate it at 90% as they give more stock to the 1 one star than the other 99 five stars.

It would not surprise us if this type of calculation was going on within the calculation that you are working with.

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I think you may be discounting this possibility too easily.

Even if there are no other offers for an item on Amazon, even if the item doesn’t exist for sale anywhere else, Amabots will bend over backwards to find some kind of price to compare it to (how else can they tell you that your price is bad?) This can even be a different item for sale on another website which has little if anything to do with the item you sell. The more ridiculous and far-fetched prices don’t show up as “competitive prices” on any Amazon dashboards, but they are still used to high-price-bot your listings or remove your BB.

I have items for sale on Amazon that a bot compares to another item from a different manufacturer with a similar part number. I only figured out the connection by accident.

This is all just supposition, as I have no better information about this issue than you do.

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I totally believe this happens. However, the issue is that it only applies to B2B pricing, which makes no sense, unless it’s a function of business shipping-specific issues, of which business hour delivery is the only thing I can think of.

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And those discounts are usually proprietary to Amazon, as far as “viewability” online

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I’m unclear on what the “discounts” are here … I’m not discussing normal buy box issues. Many products have 100% of the consumer buy box, and 0% of the business buy box. They’re all exclusives … it’s not like there’s a business price outside of Amazon that’s lower than the consumer price, so the question is why is the buy box suppressed for business buyers? I can’t think of a better answer than “business hour delivery times” (although our metric there is currently perfect).

I’m guessing this is just another fig leaf to force sellers to FBA, which can ship outside of business hours without punishment.

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Consider the fact that Amazon B2B business is much smaller than you assume it is.

Consider whether the Amazon B2B buyers will actually shop for your type of product on Amazon.

The B2B program on Amazon is not an Amazon success story. My limited experience with Amazon Business Buyers has been they have been companies who I would not have offered Net 30 terms to or sought out.

My shipments to major corporations on Amazon were NEVER to buyers who were displayed as part of the B2B program.

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I agree with all of that, and yet I continue to see my displayed buy box % way below my actual non-B2B rate, but above my B2B rate, and it’s very predictive of sales. My suspicion is that this low B2B rate – even though it is a small fraction of my traffic – is impacting overall sales by a lot (and that moving to FBA would “fix” this … but cause more problems than I want). I’m guessing it’s affecting the surfacing of products (e.g. search results) in unexpected ways. What I’m looking for is a “why?” or a “how to overcome this problem.” Thanks to all for responses, though.

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