Marketplace Briefing: Sellers say Amazon’s ‘buy box’ rules mute tariff relief
This is the latest installment of the Marketplace Briefing, a weekly Modern Retail+ column about the ever-changing e-commerce marketplace landscape. More from the series →
In a letter sent to many sellers last week, Amazon acknowledged the growing strain of trade disruptions — but it stopped short of saying the word on everyone’s mind: tariffs.
The memo, signed by Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s vp of selling partner services, was titled “Supporting your business through global trade changes.” It offered logistical advice to sellers, such as exploring bonded warehouses and expanding into international markets. A copy of the letter was viewed by Modern Retail.
But half a dozen merchants and consultants who reviewed the letter and spoke to Modern Retail for this story said it didn’t go far enough, especially on the issue that has defined their spring: whether sellers will lose the all-important “buy box” if they raise prices to offset rising import costs.
“There wasn’t anything in there that was really helpful for us,” said Chuck Gregorich, who has run an eight-figure Amazon business for nearly 20 years selling goods like fire pits and patio furniture.
Gregorich said he’s now testing price hikes of 5-10% on 200 SKUs to gauge Amazon’s response before making broader price hikes. His plan is to first raise prices on other marketplaces where he sells his wares, like Walmart.com, and then implement price hikes on Amazon to try and skirt the site’s price-matching policy.
“I wanted to do our price increases a while back, but I was afraid of doing it in our busiest time of the year,” he said. “We can’t afford to lose our buy box on 60-80% of our products; our sales will just dry up.”
While many sellers who spoke to Modern Retail for this story said they appreciated the proactive messaging on Amazon’s part, they also said it lacked clear guidance. “Most Amazon comms are around policy changes, especially fee changes, and new advertising opportunities,” said Jon Derkits, an ex-Amazon corporate employee turned seller and consultant. “I can’t remember the last time that I saw proactive communication like this.”
“None of it was new,” said Corey Thomas, CEO of the agency AMZ Atlas. “The reiteration that their Fair Pricing Policy still applies will create challenges as brands try to offset cost increases due to tariffs.”
“We’re working with our broad, varied range of valued selling partners in our store to support them in adapting to the evolving environment while maintaining low prices for customers,” an Amazon spokesperson told Modern Retail in an email statement. The spokesperson also reiterated that the company’s Featured Offer eligibility and Marketplace Fair Price Policy continue to apply. “As always, sellers set their own prices, and we regularly monitor how we highlight great prices as Featured Offers to provide customers with low prices across a wide selection.”
Buy box or bust
Amazon’s price-matching policy and “winning” the buy box have become flashpoints as brands face the reality of sky-high tariffs, with goods imported from China subject to duties of 145%. Wedbush Securities estimates that up to 70% of goods on Amazon come from China. For sellers, the buy box — which determines whether their listing is the default purchase option — can make or break a business. Amazon’s algorithm heavily weighs pricing, suppressing listings if they’re more expensive than the same item on another site.
That policy, sellers say, discourages them from raising prices, even when their costs have skyrocketed.
“It’s the No. 1 issue we’re getting calls on,” said Brandon Fishman, CEO of coffee brand VitaCup, as well as Prime Team Agency, an Amazon consulting agency that works with about 60 sellers. He said that “quite a bit” of his clients have recently lost the buy box when attempting to raise prices because of tariffs. “But they have no choice,” he said. “They can’t sell things at a loss.”
Last month, Fishman started a seller petition demanding Amazon revise its buy box policies. To date, more than 100 sellers have signed the petition, according to Fishman.
Some sellers say they’ve seen leniency in recent weeks. A Fortune report last month said Amazon quietly stopped penalizing some top sellers for price increases up to 25%. But others haven’t been so lucky. “We always lose about 80% of our buy boxes when we raise prices,” said Gregorich, who’s already out $1 million in new tariff costs this year.
Gwen McShea, president of Vermont-based Lean Edge Marketing, said Amazon’s letter was “one of the worst-timed reminders” of its pricing policy. “Not only are they not trying to accommodate the current situation, but they’re highlighting the exact policy that sellers are struggling with most,” she said.
Her clients have learned through trial and error that price increases beyond 10% in a 30-day window often trigger buy-box suppression, though Amazon doesn’t explicitly state any such limit.
Amazon, for its part, maintains that sellers set their own prices. “We regularly monitor how we highlight great prices as Featured Offers in line with macroeconomic trends,” Mehta wrote in the email.
Still, sellers say that Amazon’s enforcement of its price-matching limits their ability to set prices freely. For example, Scott McIntosh, founder of Cell Phone Seat, said he’s lost the buy box even though he manufactures his own products and is the only one selling them on Amazon.
“Amazon tells me my own price is inconsistent with the ‘going rate,’ but I’m the only one selling it,” said McIntosh. “If I drop the price to clear inventory and try to raise it later, I lose the buy box, even though I’m the only seller.”
Amazon has said relatively little publicly about tariffs, although it recently surveyed some sellers about how Trump’s trade war was impacting their businesses, as Modern Retail previously reported.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told CNBC in an interview earlier this month that the company is prioritizing keeping prices low for customers. That has included “some strategic forward inventory buys” and renegotiating terms with suppliers, he said.
In the absence of clear answers, sellers are left to navigate a murky landscape. Gregorich is proceeding with caution: “If this test fails, then we’re sitting here with a real hard business decision,” he said.
Amazon rolls out new AI tool to help sellers update product listings
Amazon is launching a new generative AI-powered feature called “Enhance My Listing,” with the aim to help sellers more easily update and improve their existing product listings, the company announced Thursday.
The tool is designed to save time and boost listing quality by automatically generating optimized content such as titles, bullet points and product attributes. It builds on Amazon’s earlier generative AI tools for creating listings, which have been adopted by over 900,000 sellers, with sellers accepting AI-generated content with “little to no edits” about 90% of the time, according to the company.
Using Enhance My Listing, sellers can get AI-generated recommendations tailored to seasonal trends and customer insights — then review, customize or reject them. The feature is powered by Amazon Bedrock and integrates directly with existing seller tools.
“We’ve seen great results and received positive feedback, but we also learned that sellers want to use these capabilities for more than just creating listings; they also want to leverage these tools for their existing listings,” Mary Beth Westmoreland, vp of worldwide selling partner experience at Amazon, said in a statement. “Our selling partners told us that keeping listings unique and relevant requires adaptation to customer preferences, for example, by adding new attributes, adjusting to retail trends or updating listings to attract holiday shoppers.”
The rollout of Enhance My Listing is currently underway for select U.S. sellers, with broader availability expected in the coming weeks.
The move reflects Amazon’s broader investment in generative AI. “If your mission is to make customers’ lives better and easier every day, and you believe every customer experience will be reinvented by AI, you’re going to invest deeply and broadly in AI,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in his annual letter to shareholders last month.
What I’m reading
- In response to new U.S. tariffs eliminating duty-free exemptions for low-cost imports, Chinese e-commerce giants Shein and Temu are significantly increasing their digital advertising efforts in the U.K. and France, per Reuters.
- E-commerce lenders are tightening credit for Amazon and Shopify sellers amid rising trade risks and tariffs, leading to a cash crunch for merchants, according to The Information.
- Alibaba has partnered with content platform Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote, to integrate direct shopping links from RedNote to Alibaba’s Taobao platform.