Amazon Featured Offer 0%

Friday morning, I opened my laptop and went about my daily routine of checking the Amazon accounts I’m currently managing.

To my surprise, all active listings of one of the accounts have lost the buy box. Featured offer % literally went from 98% to 0% in a matter of 24 hours.

Did I panic? Slightly. But Amazon pulling something like this is not surprising at all.

Anyway, I checked everything that could cause this — account health, performance notifications, pricing health, etc. — but nothing stands out. Account is in good standing/healthy–everything is within target, no unread performance notifications, and no pricing health issues (i.e. external competitive pricing).

Having found nothing, I messaged Seller Support knowing full well that I won’t get any substantial response from them. And I was right–

Please note that “A seller with the only offer for a specific ASIN does not guarantee that a seller will win the buy box for that ASIN.” Also note that the Buy box feature is a Totally an automated process and it cannot be changed manually and if you are eligible to win the buy box they will be selected automatically by the system and also even though Amazon is selling the product other sellers can win the Buy box. In this we will not be able to assign the Buy box to you manually as it is not possible. We personally wish we were able to do a lot more in this regard. However, as the policies are determined by our Business team we at Seller Support would not be able to influence those decisions.

What’s worse? I can only send an email to Seller Support–the chat and call function were not available–how convenient for them. So that seemed like a dead-end.

Next thing I did was contact account health to see if there’s an account-related issue that can fix this but upon talking with Account Health support, they confirmed that the account is healthy and they couldn’t see anything wrong on account-level that could have contributed to this issue. Another dead-end.

What else have I tried?

I tried lowering the price to see if the buy box would be visible, but that didn’t work either. I also tried reactivating the vendor listing to see if the buy box would be visible if the SHIP by and SOLD by are both Amazon. That also didn’t work.

Now, I’m starting to panic because if the root cause is not visible, how the hell can I fix the issue?

I searched Seller Forums to see if other sellers are experiencing the same thing. Lo and behold, a lot of sellers were also affected with the same buy box issue and in the same timeline! So this is apparently a system error that Amazon needs to fix ASAP. How fast Amazon fixes something like this? Only time will tell.

If you’re experiencing the same, here’s the Amazon seller forum thread for reference. You can continue messaging Seller Support until you get a response that you’ll be satisfied with but I’m not gonna lie, resolving this kind of issue is also out of their hands.

Got questions? Drop a comment or send me an email.