We track the same Amazon products from ten US cities. Every day. Here is what 76
By Michael Erickson Facchin · August 17, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
We track the same Amazon products from ten US cities. Every day. Here is what 764,000 Buy Box checks show.
The Buy Box is not national. About 1 in 5 products we track demonstrate this.
On any given day, about one in five of the products we track in more than one location has a different Buy Box status depending on where the shopper is standing. Won in Dallas. Lost in Denver. Same product. Same moment.
The gap between cities is 14 percentage points.
Los Angeles wins the Buy Box 76.7% of the time. Seattle wins 62.5%. Same catalogue. Same instant. If you check your Buy Box from one location, you are seeing one answer to a question that has ten.
And price does not explain it.
We looked at 54 products whose Buy Box status differs by city. Only 7 were winning in the city where they were cheapest. Twenty-four were winning at a higher price than the city where they were losing.
One more thing sellers underrate. Roughly as many of our tracked listings are suppressed, showing no Buy Box to anyone, as are lost to a competitor. Both sit near 15%. Everyone watches for hijackers. Fewer watch for the Buy Box simply vanishing.
Two notes on the data, because they matter.
This is not a random sample of Amazon. It is the catalogue our customers chose to monitor, so it skews toward products already suspected of having problems.
And our charts start on 29 July for a reason. Before that our scraper had a bug that inflated suppression counts. We could have plotted those weeks with a caveat. We cut them instead.
The full data updates on its own, with the method written out.
https://lnkd.in/egkNKsKS