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Is it a bad idea to compete with an amazon item?
 

When im doing research on amazon I see that amazon has the same type of item that I want to sell, for that item it has ie 400 reviews and says Dispatched from and sold by Amazon. Then it has the sell yours here option. Would it be a bad idea to undercut amazon's own item? :typing:

No, it is normal. Keep in mind you have to beat amazon by either 1%, 1.5%, 2%, or 2.7% to be able to take the buybox. It is completely item specific and can be set to different values sometimes. Also being FBA may affect these values and everything gets thrown out the window when it comes to Books & Movies&TV categories.

Competing with Amazon is a fact of life. The listings they are on are most likely not monitored by humans 24/7.. and it is doubtful that they would be instructed to scrutinize a seller for competing with them.

As long as you sure that your item is match with that item, you are oOK to click that link to sale. That is the reason they have the link for you to sale :)

I do it all the time not problem as long as you list the exact item. Amazon will usually compete with you until they can go no lower

IF too many sellers come on board with insanely low prices, the whole listing gets flagged and WILL cause issues for the relatively new sellers. Just saying to be aware of that trend

Good fact of the matter is the option is there for you to sell it too.

But here's where you must use your head.

Carefully look at the options and sell if you can sell alongside amazon.

That may mean you might not need to undercut them.

Approach carefully.
:ranger:

If you sell too cheap, amazon may question how you can sell so cheap bearing in mind seller fees also.

They may go to the distributor and ask why you can sell cheaper than amazon.

If your selling legit goods the distributor may get pissed with you and if you are selling ⊗⊗⊗⊗ they will ban you.

My experience with .ca and .com is that Amazon has software that monitors their prices. When you go lower and get the buybox, they do the same. Then you lower again, and they do the same. This creates a price war between you both until Amazon hits a preset lower limit. Once you beat that, you get the buybox until you run out of stock. Then Amazon puts their price back up to its original before this price war. If you do this with another seller (other than AZ), it is possible to share the buybox by keeping your price about 2% higher than the other seller.

Phd, this is the case in US too. I tried to sort of encompass this with my earlier post, but thank you for touching on the parts I forgot about.

I have dealt with "beating" their repricing software on a number of occasions. And I have done so very aggressively with no consequence. Rather than hitting their rock bottom floor price, what you want to do is keep beating their buybox during the day and then repricing high again late at night when hardly no sales occur. Amazon resets their price back up to their "max value" and then the process resets for the next day without the price degrading any lower than the day prior. The caveat to this method is that IF there are other aggressive sellers on the listing, they will quickly ruin this process as Amazon will match whoever is the lowest.

Very nice experimentation and observation of the platform. I have noticed that the agressive sellers will destroy the listing and future sellers of the listing get auto-canned...part of the software identification