Julie Broad explains how third-party sellers can take over your Amazon Buy Box, cutting into profits and blocking sponsored ads. You can reclaim it by buying out copies, lowering your price, or contacting Amazon's Buy Box team. Loss of the box often means your book is selling well.
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There is something that happens to authors selling books on Amazon that cuts into your profits, wreaks havoc with your book pricing and your ads. But fixing it is easy, so long as you notice it's happened. And if you want to keep control of that buy box on Amazon and make sure you're getting paid as much as possible, then this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the book broad from Book Launchers. We're your professional self publishing team helping you write, publish and promote a nonfiction book that will help you have a huge, huge impact on your readers. And done right will help you grow your brand, build your business and make you money. The best part? You keep all the rights and royalties. It happens more than you realize. Other companies will be selling your book on Amazon, not just Amazon, and it may not seem like a big deal until you dig a little deeper. But first, you may not know what the heck I'm talking about. So let's back up and talk about the Amazon Buy Box. The Amazon Buy box is that spot on the right side of an Amazon Product Detail page. Here, check this out where customers can add a product to their cart or Buy Now. What does Buy now mean on Amazon? Well, the Buy now button in the Amazon Buy box lets shoppers make an instant purchase right from the Product Detail page. Here's a screenshot from Ron. Here's a screenshot from Ronald Worley's book Ditches to Riches. It's where you click Add to Cart or Buy Now. If you run Amazon ads, there's a more compelling reason to care about whether you own or in this case, Amazon owns the Buy box. When a product loses the Buy Buy box, all sponsored product ads stop running. Amazon's guidelines for how to win the Buy Box states that vendors must excel in pricing, availability, fulfillment and customer service to win that Buy box. If you're published through KDP Print for your Amazon distribution, obviously they control all of that except pricing. And that's how your buy box can be lost. Sometimes third party sellers can obtain the books wholesale from IngramSpark and then sell the books at any price they wish. We may give a seller the suggested price of $19.99 for a retail price, but if a seller is see a lot of traction, they might lower that price to try to sell more. Or if a book was doing well and then stopped selling, a supplier like Book Depository might have stock on hand that they put on sale to try and get it out of their warehouse. There's plenty of reasons why the pricing can be played with. But here's what it looks like if you lose the buy box because it's happened with a lot of clients, including Carol Sanford. You can see here the sold buy is Book Depository us and you can see the box below for other sellers is Amazon and Amazon's the top backup box, not the primary seller. So the issue Book Depository had the best price of 1156. Of course, as a savvy prime buyer, I know that Amazon's still the best deal because I don't pay for shipping and with Book Depository I'll pay for shipping. But many buyers won't know to look for other sellers. And again, your ads won't run if you've lost that box. So to maximize your profit and ensure your Amazon ads are running, you need to make sure that Amazon has that buy box. So what can you do? Well, if Book Depository only has one copy of your book, buy it. You could also drop your Amazon price down to regain control of the box. But what we do when ads stop running is we usually contact Amazon. They have a buy box review team and they'll dig into it and usually fix the problem with some prompting. If you're not running ads though, they're not going to care as much about this issue. So you're back to buying out the copies or dropping your Amazon price to try to win it back. Ultimately, it's usually a good sign that your book has other parties selling it. It means there's momentum and other parties see value in carrying your book and selling it. If you're not running ads, I prob wouldn't stress about the buy box, but I did just want you to know what it is in case it ever happens to you. Now I'm super curious. What other video topics should I cover in the next few months? Let's share ideas in the comments below. And when you comment the day a video is released, you'll be entered to win some sweet noboringbook swag like our oh so soft journal and our fabulous mug where coffee, tea and hot chocolate are proven to taste better. New videos every Tuesday and Friday so make sure you catch every one of by subscribing to the channel and turning those notifications on. You are really lovely to hang out with. Would you like to hang out a little bit more? Okay, good. This video right here is one I did on another little thing you might not know about called Universal Book Links that will help you with book marketing. Or this one is the latest and greatest from the channel. So go ahead, click on the one you want to watch. I'm in the mood for tea today, so I'll get that going so we can share a cup when you get there.
