If you feel like you’re losing the Buy Box for no reason, you’re not alone. If y
By Chris McCabe · May 20, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
If you feel like you’re losing the Buy Box for no reason, you’re not alone.
If you see Amazon's "price matching" teams matching the wrong prices from a totally different product, we see that all the time now, too.
Amazon’s "Competitive Price Threshold" is regularly causing havoc for brands, and the problem is getting worse based on the numbers of panicky contacts we've received the past 7-10 days.
Prime Day isn't that far off anymore, who wants to deal with this?
I recently saw a great YouTube video by Fred McKinnon at eComCatalyst that perfectly lays out the crisis: Amazon’s AI-driven scraping bots are comparing your premium products to the wrong items, smaller sizes, or (even worse) cheap counterfeits on sites like Temu and Shein.
Why anyone internal would want that to happen is anybody's guess.
As Fred points out, Amazon is obsessed with being the lowest price on the internet. But their bots/ page scrape automation are making massive errors:
Wrong Quantities: Comparing your 2lb bulk pack to a competitor's 7oz "travel size" and demanding you match the tiny price.
Wrong Items: Matching your branded product against a completely different item that just looks similar.
The "Temu Trap": Scraping ultra-cheap, potentially counterfeit versions of your product from marketplaces like Temu, Etsy, or Walmart, and suppressing your listing when you don't match those "fake" prices.
When this happens, you don't just lose the "Featured Offer" (Buy Box). Your PPC ads stop running. For many brands, this means sales don't just slow down, they fall off a cliff.
While some say "there's not much you can do" --we disagree. We have been doing plenty to shortcut the timeline to resolution.
If you have no strategy or waste time on the wrong teams, then yes. That won't work.
You can't just wait for Amazon to fix it or open a standard support case.
You have to be proactive:
- Don't just lower your price to match. This "handcuffs" you for future events like Prime Day because it screws up your 90-day price history.
- Don't just tell Seller Support they're wrong, prove it. Provide direct links to every legitimate retailer where your product is sold at the correct price.
- Take screenshots of Google Shopping results for your UPC, circle the correct prices, and show Amazon that the "competitor" they are scraping is an incorrect match.
This is sloppy, automated price-fixing that is creating havoc for branded sellers. Between now and Prime Day, this is going to be a major battleground. Don't let a bot destroy your margins.
Check out Fred's full breakdown here: https://lnkd.in/ez9CHVZt