Leverage Near Real-Time Price Updates, BuyBox Insights, and Competitor Analysis to Boost Your Amazon Sales Performance
Amazon provides sellers with continuous data points that deliver valuable insights into everything from pricing changes to inventory levels. These data points enable businesses to make informed decisions quickly, whether adjusting prices, monitoring sales trends, or ensuring products are eligible for the BuyBox.
Rather than manually checking for updates, third-party tools, or waiting for reports, this data can flow directly from Amazon, delivering data in near real-time. This is first-party, authoritative data directly from Amazon systems, which includes product-level price adjustments by competitors, shifts in BuyBox eligibility, and changes in product rankings.
Has A Product Offer Changed On Amazon?
Amazon will send data whenever the top 20 offers for a product change, such as a price adjustment or a change in the BuyBox winner.
What can you do with this data?
- Pricing Optimization: By constantly monitoring the landed and BuyBox prices, you can understand changes over time and optimize pricing strategies that balance sell-thru and profitability.
- BuyBox Eligibility Tracking: Monitoring the BuyBox eligible offers and BuyBox prices allows you to understand when and why you lose the BuyBox. This data can help inform adjustments to your pricing, shipping, and fulfillment strategy to increase your chances of winning.
- Competitor Analysis: By analyzing the lowest prices and the number of offers in various conditions, you can identify when competitors are undercutting your prices. This can trigger strategic adjustments in your offers, such as free shipping or discounts, to regain a competitive edge.
- Sales Performance Monitoring: Tracking the sales rank in various product categories helps you understand how price changes affect your product’s visibility and performance. A decline in sales rank could indicate the need to lower your price or offer promotional deals.
What Triggers Cause Changed Offers Updates?
There are a few primary types of changes to offers that will trigger new data to be sent by Amazon:
- External: A price change from a non-Amazon seller.
- Internal: A price change on Amazon’s retail site.
- Featured Offer: A change in the BuyBox winner or BuyBox price.
In addition to those changes, the item’s condition may experience a change (e.g., new, used, collectible), triggering an update from Amazon.
Now that we know what will trigger Amazon to send data, we can dig into the available data.
What types of offer data are available?
Amazon offers various products and competitive offers of data specific to the Amazon marketplace.
Number Of Offers
- Condition: The condition of the item (e.g., new, used, collectible).
- Fulfillment Channel: Whether the offer is fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) or the seller (MFN).
- Offer Count: The total number of offers for the specified condition and fulfillment channel.
Tracking the number of offers for each condition and fulfillment channel helps monitor market competitiveness. For example, many new offers suggest increasing competition, requiring you to revisit your pricing or inventory management.
Lowest Prices
- Landed Price: The price of the item plus shipping minus any Amazon Points.
- Listing Price: The price of the item before shipping costs.
- Shipping: The cost of shipping.
This pricing information provides a view of the cost to the customer. Comparing your landed price against the lowest offer enables you to refine pricing and offer strategies to remain competitive.
Buy Box Prices
- Landed Price: The total price (item price + shipping — points) for the BuyBox-winning offer.
- Listing Price: The price of the item for the BuyBox-winning offer.
- Shipping: The shipping cost for the BuyBox-winning offer.
Understanding the current BuyBox price allows you to adjust your offer to increase the likelihood of winning the BuyBox. If your landed price is too high compared to the BuyBox price, consider adjusting your listing price or offering free shipping to stay competitive.
ListPrice
- Amount: The suggested retail price from the manufacturer.
Comparing your price to the list price helps you gauge how aggressively you are pricing your item. Offering discounts below the list price can make your product more attractive to buyers, especially if competitors are sticking close to the MSRP.
Sales Rankings
- Product Category Id: The product category (e.g., lawn_and_garden_display_on_website).
- Rank: The rank of the product in that category.
Monitoring sales rank in specific categories helps track the performance of your product over time. If you notice a drop in rank, it might indicate that your product is priced too high, or that competitors are offering more attractive deals.
Number Of BuyBox Eligible Offers
- Condition: The condition of the item (e.g., new, used, collectible).
- Fulfillment Channel: Whether Amazon or the seller fulfills the offer.
- Offer Count: The total number of BuyBox-eligible offers.
Knowing how many offers BuyBox is eligible for allows you to better understand the competition. If there are many eligible offers, BuyBox becomes more competitive, requiring more aggressive pricing or fulfillment optimizations.
Understanding Competitive Product Offers
This section provides details about the top 20 competitive offers for the product, including seller ratings, shipping times, and prices.
- Seller Id: The identifier for the seller of the offer.
- Sub Condition: The sub-condition of the item (e.g., new, mint, very good).
- Seller Feedback Rating: Data on the seller’s feedback rating and total feedback count.
- Shipping Time: The estimated minimum and maximum shipping times for the offer.
- Listing Price: The price of the item.
- Shipping: The shipping cost.
- Is Fulfilled By Amazon: Indicates whether the offer is fulfilled by Amazon.
- Is BuyBox Winner: Indicates whether this offer is currently the BuyBox winner.
Analyze competitive offers to understand how they compare to your own. Offers with better seller feedback ratings or shorter shipping times might win the BuyBox even if their prices are slightly higher. Monitoring whether an offer is fulfilled by Amazon or eligible for Prime can also guide fulfillment decisions to stay competitive.
The Power of Storing Offer Snapshot Data for Long-Term Analysis
Many of these data points, such as pricing changes, offer fluctuations, and BuyBox eligibility, are transitory, meaning they reflect the current state of the market at a particular moment. If you do not store the snapshot, it is gone forever.
Without retaining this information, you cannot look back and see how these metrics evolved over time. Storing this data in your private data warehouse or data lake allows access to the cumulative history of how your offers, prices, and inventory have changed over time. This historical perspective allows for a level of analysis and strategic planning that competitors relying solely on real-time data will not have.
Here are a few opportunities:
- Historical Trend Analysis: By capturing data in real-time, you can build daily, weekly, or monthly trends for price fluctuations, inventory levels, and sales rank changes. This enables you to see how your pricing decisions impacted sales or how seasonality affects your product categories.
- Performance Benchmarking: Over time, you can use this data to set benchmarks for your performance. By comparing current metrics against previous weeks, months, quarters, or years, you can assess how well your strategies are performing and make data-driven decisions to adjust course if needed.
- Competitive Pricing Insights: Analyzing historical pricing data allows you to spot patterns in competitor behavior. For instance, you may notice recurring discounts from competitors at certain times of the year, allowing you to proactively adjust your pricing strategy to stay competitive.
- BuyBox Eligibility Monitoring: Monitoring changes in BuyBox ownership and tracking how often you’ve won or lost the BuyBox can reveal opportunities for optimization. By understanding the factors that influenced past BuyBox wins, such as pricing or fulfillment methods, you can refine your approach for future success.
- Seasonal and Market Trend Identification: Storing data over long periods allows for detailed analysis of broader market trends. Whether identifying product seasonality or spotting shifts in consumer behavior, long-term data can provide unique insights that are not available from real-time data alone.
Looking back over weeks, months, or even years can offer powerful and actionable insights, turning data into a long-term strategic asset.
Openbridge: A Code-Free, Fully Automated Solution
Teams seeking a rapid, hassle-free implementation with minimal setup time and no coding required will find Openbridge the perfect fit.
- Automation Accelerates Insights: Seamlessly integrate data with tools like Tableau, Looker, Power BI, Looker Data Studio, and AWS Quicksight for forecasting, analysis, reporting, and marketing efforts.
- Unify Data in Your Cloud Warehouse: Consolidate data in a trusted, private data lake or cloud warehouse such as Snowflake, Azure Data Lake, AWS Redshift, Databricks, AWS Athena, and Google BigQuery.
Openbridge provides a code-free, fully automated solution that swiftly and securely gets your offer data up and running.
Ready to harness the power of your Amazon data?
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Mastering Amazon’s Near Real-Time Offer Data was originally published in Openbridge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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