How Amazon Test Buys Help You Improve Your Buy Box Win Rate

Amazon test buys are often associated with professional investigators or legal teams. Traditionally, performing product test buys is one of the first steps that legal professionals use to determine whether a product sold online is counterfeit. However, test buys are an often-underused component of a marketplace manager’s toolset and can help to drive increased Amazon Buy Box win rates.

Savvy Amazon managers know that it’s vital to know who is competing with you for the Buy Box, why they are winning and how those sellers are sourcing products. After all, some of those competitors could be unauthorized sellers, damaging your relationships with your authorized sellers, providing inauthentic brand experiences for your customers or even exposing your customers to risks of harm from counterfeit or non-compliant products.

This is especially true if you are in a highly regulated product category such as health, cosmetics or personal care products. In a recent blog post, we illustrated how Parallel Imports, which are typically motivated by cross-border pricing differences, can risk your customers’ well-being and also damage your relationship with Amazon. Why? Even though products may appear identical, their packaging may be in violation of US Government regulations and Amazon policies.

Benefits of Amazon Test Buys 

The preceding blog post demonstrates how unauthorized sellers can infiltrate your supply chain and distribution channels, impacting your go-to-market strategy, operations, and, of course, your Buy Box Win Rate. If your business is successful at selling products on Amazon and other marketplaces, then it is inevitable that you will face competitors for your Buy Box, whether those competitors are authorized sellers who are following your distribution policies or unauthorized sellers who are trying to siphon business away. When rogue sellers are promoting counterfeit goods or regulatory non-compliant goods, Amazon test buys provide multiple advantages in helping you protect your business and your brand. 

• Gathering Evidence – When you purchase the product, you can examine it closely and confirm whether the product is authentic and in compliance with government regulations and platform terms of service.
• Gather Seller Information – Test buys provide knowledge about the seller's business names and shipping address. These pieces of information help you learn more about the seller’s fulfillment process. Are they a 3P (third-party) seller performing all their own sales, fulfillment, and shipping? Sellers using FBA (or fulfillment by amazon) will have their products delivered to you via the closest Amazon distribution center. That impacts the type of actual seller data you can collect and identify. However, contrary to some perspectives, products shipped via FBA can be counterfeit or non-compliant. Amazon doesn’t have the ability to inspect the millions of products annually passing through their FBA warehouses.
• Identify Grey Market Sellers – If the product you have purchased is authentic, then you can rule out counterfeits, but you must consider whether the seller is contractually authorized to sell the goods. If not, that seller is what we call a ‘Grey Market Seller'. It's important to note that Amazon will not take action against unauthorized Grey Market Sellers if the product they are shipping is authentic, regulatory compliant, and unaltered. This point further highlights the importance of performing product test buys.

Armed with this knowledge, you can carry out an effective plan to regain your Buy Box. You may find information that indicates that an authorized distributor is violating the terms of your distribution agreements, either knowingly or unknowingly. In that case, your channel management team will want to know. That team may choose to inform the distributor by letter and/or with a conversation. If you are not dealing with an errant authorized distributor, you may choose to file a Terms of Service or other Brand Registry complaint with Amazon so the platform can act against that seller. In either case, the Amazon test buy provides vital evidence that you need to remedy the problem.

Target Efficiency

Efficiency is at the core of an effective test purchase strategy. You do not have to carry out test buys with every unauthorized reseller; rather, you want to separate the signal from the noise and prioritize the resellers who are causing the most harm to your Buy Box Win Rate. With IPSecure, you can quickly identify who is competing with you for your Buy Box and determine which of those sellers you should target for a test buy.

In fact, the IPSecure platform helps you manage the entire test buy process. With thousands of sellers on Amazon, it is critical to be able to implement a test buy strategy at scale. The following case study summarizes our work with one customer, a global OTC skincare brand, who faced a problem with unauthorized sellers. We used a test buy program to remove those sellers and dramatically increase the customer’s Buy Box Win Rate.

Case Study:  Global OTC Skincare Brand

A customer approached us with a problem earlier this year. Their Buy Box Win Rate was hovering below the 50 percent mark and, based on complaints received from their Customer Service team, they suspected sellers of counterfeit goods and regulatory non-compliant Parallel Imports had attached themselves to their product listings.

Based on our experience, we recommended a product test buy program and began the process in July of 2024. At the start of the program, the customer’s Buy Box Win Rate was 47 percent. The program ran for six months, with 38 test buys per month.

Amazon Test Buy Program Results

During that six-month period, two factors operated in parallel. As the results of the test buy program were fed into our AI-driven platform, the platform became ‘smarter’ in selecting sellers to target with test buys. By the end of the initial test buy period, 79 percent of the test buys identified sellers who were offering counterfeit or parallel imports. Working with our customer’s guidelines, we were able to take enforcement actions to stop unauthorized sellers on Amazon.

At the same time, the customer’s Buy Box Win Rate doubled. As IPSecure identified and removed unauthorized sellers who had infiltrated the client’s listings, the client’s Buy Box Win Rate rose from 47 percent at the beginning of the program to 94 percent after six months of the test buy program. Remember, we achieved these results with a highly-targeted test buy program, using 38 test buys per month.

The graph below illustrates this relationship and the detailed data derived during the test buy program.

While we can’t promise 100 percent Buy Box Win Rate increases for every customer, IPSecure customers who perform test buys on a regular basis have experienced Buy Box Win Rate increases of 30 percent or more. How? The IPSecure Buy Box Protection platform tracks and scores every seller so our customers can identify sellers who are causing harm and prioritize the worst offenders for further enforcement actions. And, the platform allows our customers to perform in-app test purchases from those sellers anonymously and seamlessly, making it straightforward to scale your test purchase program. 

When brands are in demand by consumers, they risk rogue sellers cashing in on their popularity with fake or regulatory non-compliant goods. It’s important to be proactive to protect your consumers, your reputation and your Buy Box Win Rate. If you are facing counterfeit or regulatory compliance issues on Amazon – or if you suspect that you are – why not speak to one of our Amazon Buy Box Protection experts for a no-obligation consultation?