Title: Winning the Amazon Buy Box: A Natural Experiment and Case Study
Author(s) : Amazon Research
Amazon has assumed by far the dominant role in e-commerce accounting for over 15% of total e-commerce sales. However, for some categories, such as books, music, and video Amazon is totally dominant and accounts for 83.2 percent of total ecommerce sales according to eMarketer. Hence, having the opportunity to win the buy box, or appear as the vendor of a given product or brand is increasingly crucial. The rise of Amazon has corresponded with Amazon's launch of private label brands and aggressive merchandising. In this paper we report on results on what happened when a manufacturer launched a store on Amazon and offered all of its inventory at the lower possible prices in an attempt to win the buy box. Implications for marketers and public policy makers are also presented.