Quick answer. The Featured Offer, still widely called the Buy Box, is the offer shown with the Add to Cart and Buy Now buttons on a product detail page. Amazon says it ranks qualified offers on total price (item plus shipping), delivery promise, free shipping, free returns and seller performance, including order volume, chargeback rate and Voice of the Customer complaints. Star ratings are not used, and Prime and fulfillment method are not tie breakers. As of September 2026 Amazon no longer keeps a seller eligibility requirement, but an individual offer still drops out when it is out of stock, not shippable, priced above the competitive external price or recent prices, or deactivated. Check stock, shipping, Pricing Health and Account Health before you assume a suspension risk.

Most sellers notice a lost Featured Offer the same way. Sales on a steady ASIN fall while page views hold, the listing is live, the inventory is there, and no message explains why. Many assume the account is being quietly penalized. Sometimes it is. Far more often the cause sits on the offer, such as a price above an outside retailer’s, a shipping template that excludes part of the country, or stock that ran out.

Below is how Amazon says it selects the Featured Offer, what changed in September 2026, why offers lose it, how account health problems remove offers from contention, and the order in which to check things so you fix the right cause the first time.

What the Featured Offer is and how Amazon picks it

Amazon’s help page Becoming the Featured Offer defines it as the offer that appears with Add to Cart and Buy Now in the Offer Display on a product detail page. Offers that are not featured stay available from the All Offer Display, but most shoppers buy from the featured one, so losing it feels like losing the listing.

A ranking, not a badge

Amazon says it ranks qualified offers on the factors customers care about most, the same way for every product, with no manual overrides. Nobody at Amazon can hand the Featured Offer back to you, and a support case asking for that without fixing the cause goes nowhere. The ranking is also relative. A healthy offer can lose because another offer is more attractive at that moment.

Decided per variation, location and shopper

Amazon determines the Featured Offer separately for each variation, so you can hold it on one size and not another. Shoppers in different locations, Prime members with faster free shipping, and shoppers using a delivery date filter may each see a different Featured Offer. “I lost the Buy Box” usually means your offer is featured on fewer page views for this ASIN, a measurable share rather than a yes or no.

Rotation when no offer clearly wins

When no single offer is clearly more attractive, Amazon says the Featured Offer could rotate among the best offers. A share that moves through the day after you match a competitor is not a penalty. Your offer is in the group Amazon rates as equally good.

What changed in September 2026

Sellers long treated “Buy Box eligibility” as an account-wide status. Amazon’s help page now says that as of September 2026 it no longer maintains a seller eligibility requirement, and offers from all sellers are eligible to be evaluated, a new seller’s alongside an established seller’s.

Not every offer gets featured. Offers that are not competitive may still not be selected, and Amazon will not feature any offer if none meet its customer experience requirements, even when only one exists. The question now is whether this offer is qualified, and whether it is the most attractive qualified offer right now.

Three layers to keep separate

Account layer. Is the account active, with seller-fulfilled privileges intact? A deactivated account has no offers to evaluate.
Offer layer. Is this offer active, in stock, shippable to the customer and clear in Pricing Health? Most losses sit here.
Ranking layer. Among qualified offers, is yours the most attractive on total price, delivery, free shipping, free returns and seller performance?

A seller who works only the ranking layer, for example by cutting price, can give away margin for weeks on an offer that was never qualified.

The factors Amazon says it ranks

Total price

Amazon says total price, item price plus shipping fee, plays an important role, and that lowering either or offering promotions such as coupons can help. It also points to Automate Pricing, which adjusts prices in real time within parameters you set. A low item price with a shipping fee on top is judged as the combined figure.

Delivery promise

Faster offers, and offers with a specific delivery date rather than a range, are more likely to be featured. Amazon warns that late deliveries can affect your Late Shipment Rate, so the promise must be one you keep.

Free shipping

Amazon favors free shipping because shipping fees are not refundable and an all-inclusive price is clearer. In its own example, a $40 offer with free shipping is preferable to a $35 offer with $5 shipping. An offer does not count as free shipping if it carries a cart-level fee, an item-level fee, or a free shipping threshold the customer’s cart has not met.

Free returns

Customers prefer free returns, especially for frequently returned items such as apparel. You can set them at account level or per product in Return settings.

Seller performance

Amazon says sellers who fulfill reliably are more likely to be featured, and names three dimensions. Order volume, treated as one reliability signal with steps so smaller sellers are not disadvantaged. Chargeback rate. Voice of the Customer complaints such as damaged or defective item, inaccurate website description, missing parts, wrong item sent, wrong size, condition not as expected, and expiration date issues.

What Amazon says it does not consider

Customer reviews and star ratings are not used. Prime eligibility and fulfillment method are not tie breakers. With all other factors equal, Prime and non-Prime offers, and FBA and FBM offers, are equally likely to be featured. The qualifier matters, because how you fulfill still changes your delivery promise and shipping cost.

Factor	What Amazon says	What you control
Total price	Item plus shipping plays an important role	Item price, shipping fee, coupons, repricer limits
Delivery promise	Faster and more specific promises favored	Handling time, carrier, regions, inventory placement
Free shipping	Favored. Unmet thresholds do not count	Shipping settings and price structure
Free returns	Can improve chances	Return settings
Seller performance	Order volume, chargebacks, Voice of the Customer complaints	Product quality, accurate listings, packing, billing
Not used	Star ratings. Prime and fulfillment method when all else is equal	Nothing to chase

The factors Amazon ranks qualified offers on, and the one it ignores. Open each factor to see what Amazon looks at and what you control there.

Why an offer loses the Featured Offer

The offer is out of stock

An out of stock offer cannot become featured. Sellers skip this check most, because other offers still show and they assume theirs is merely losing.

The offer cannot ship to the customer

Offers must be shippable to the customer, and an offer that excludes certain locations is never shown to customers there. A template that leaves out a region removes your offer from every page view from that region. Your share falls but not to zero, which is easy to misread as a pricing problem.

Pricing Health marks it ineligible

Amazon’s Pricing Health page lists offers ineligible to become the Featured Offer because they are not competitive with retailers outside Amazon (the competitive external price) or are priced significantly higher than recent prices on Amazon or elsewhere. The comparison uses total price, selling price plus shipping.

Amazon defines the competitive price threshold as the lowest price plus shipping for an item, or items customers may consider equivalent, recently found at a reputable retailer outside Amazon. It may check online and physical stores and does not name the retailers. Its examples include a $10.99 garlic press found elsewhere, a six-pack’s per-unit price scaled to a 12-pack, and near-identical products sold under generic brand names. If your product matches a cheaper generic in size, material and features, that price can set your threshold.

Reference prices Pricing Health can use include the Featured Offer price, the 60-day average selling price, the highest 14-day price for items shipped and sold by Amazon, the list price, a per-unit price from a smaller bundle, the typical price and the 60-day average offer price. Our guide to Amazon List Price and Was Price rules covers reference prices and the Fair Pricing Policy in depth.

The offer was deactivated for a pricing error

Pricing Health also lists offers deactivated for potential pricing errors. Amazon detects these using factors including the Fair Pricing Policy and the limits you set, such as a price below your own minimum, then notifies you and deactivates the listing. A deactivated offer cannot be featured anywhere.

Another offer is more attractive

Pricing Health lists eligible offers priced within 5% of the Featured Offer price, and says matching or beating it on total price improves your chances. Nothing is wrong with the offer. The decision is whether matching is worth the margin.

The offer was removed for performance

The Order Defect Rate page says Amazon may remove an offer with a history of negative feedback, A-to-z Guarantee claims or chargebacks in a compressed time period. The Late Shipment Rate page says the same about multiple late shipments. Both say the offer can be reactivated through Other policy violations on the Account Health dashboard.

No offer meets the bar

If no Featured Offer shows for anyone, Amazon’s guidance is to confirm your offer is shippable to the customer’s location, in stock, and clear in Pricing Health.

The Featured Offer can be lost at three layers. Most losses sit on the offer layer, not the account.

How account health problems take the Featured Offer away

With the seller eligibility requirement gone, account health is no longer an on or off switch for the Buy Box. It still matters in three ways.

Seller performance feeds the ranking

Chargebacks and Voice of the Customer complaints are ranking factors. Amazon’s Voice of the Customer page rates each offer’s CX Health from excellent to very poor by comparing its negative customer experience (NCX) rate with similar offers. The NCX rate is orders where a customer reported a product or listing issue divided by total orders, drawn from returns, refunds, contacts, messages, feedback, A-to-z claims and reviews. Fixes may take several weeks to show, depending on order volume.

Metric breaches remove offers and privileges

Amazon requires an Order Defect Rate below 1%, meaning the share of seller-fulfilled orders in a 60-day period with negative feedback (1 and 2 star seller ratings), an A-to-z Guarantee claim or a credit card chargeback. Above 1%, Amazon may suspend Fulfilled by Merchant privileges or deactivate seller-fulfilled offers. The Late Shipment Rate, measured over 10-day and 30-day periods, must stay below 4%, with the same possible consequences. See our guides on how Order Defect Rate is graded and late shipment suspensions.

Two hypothetical FBM offers with 500 orders over 60 days, one under the 1% ODR requirement and one over it. Compare the defects and what each does to the offer.

The Account Health Rating and deactivation

Amazon’s Account Health Rating runs from 0 to 1,000 and shows the risk of deactivation for non-compliance with certain policies. Green (200 to 1,000) is Healthy, yellow (100 to 199) is At Risk, and red (99 or lower) means eligible for deactivation or already deactivated. A critical violation, such as a counterfeit found by test buy, turns the rating red at zero and starts a three-day grace period before deactivation. Amazon may also deactivate immediately, regardless of score, for suspected fraudulent, deceptive or harmful activity. A deactivated account has no offers to feature.

The Account Health Rating page does not describe the rating as a Featured Offer requirement. A yellow rating is a deactivation warning to act on now, but it does not explain why a specific offer stopped being featured. Read the two signals separately.

Pricing can become an account issue

The Marketplace Fair Pricing Policy says that for pricing practices that harm customer trust, Amazon can remove the Featured Offer, remove the offer, suspend the ship option, or in serious or repeated cases suspend or terminate selling privileges. Named practices include a misleading reference price, a price significantly higher than recent prices on or off Amazon, multipacks priced higher per unit than the single, and excessive shipping fees. One ineligible offer is a pricing question. A pattern across many ASINs is the repetition the policy warns about.

Diagnose the loss before you assume a suspension risk

Run from the cheapest check to the most serious, and change nothing until you know the layer. Record each finding with the date, ASIN, SKU and a screenshot. If the loss becomes an account health case, that record is your evidence file.

The diagnosis order for a lost Featured Offer, from measuring the loss to the ranking signals. Step through each screen to see what it tells you.

A worked example

A hypothetical seller of a kitchen scale sees units drop from about 40 a day to 9 while sessions hold. Business Reports shows the Featured Offer percentage fell from 78% to 20% in a week. The instinct is to cut the price by $3.

Work the path instead. The account is green with no new violations. The SKU is in stock and shipping settings have not changed. Pricing Health lists the offer as ineligible, with a total price of $34.99 against a competitive external price of $29.99. The seller never changed the price, so the repricer log is next. The competitor that anchored the repricer went out of stock six days earlier, and a “stay competitive” rule with no ceiling raised the price in steps. The fix is a defensible price, a hard maximum on the SKU, and a weekly check that every repriced SKU has a minimum and a maximum.

The Offer Display, Pricing Health row and Account Health page laid out as one record. Open each tab to read the part that explains a lost Featured Offer.

Where to verify each signal

Each question has one place where Amazon shows the answer. Use it instead of a third-party estimate.

Question	Where to check	What to look for
How often is my offer featured?	Business Reports	Featured Offer percentage per child ASIN, read against sessions
Is the offer blocked by price?	Pricing Health	Deactivated for pricing error, ineligible, or within 5% of the Featured Offer
Is the account at risk?	Account Health	Rating color, each violation, severity, repeat labels, Next steps
Are defects removing offers?	Account Health, Order defect rate tab	ODR against 1%, and the orders behind it
Are late shipments removing offers?	Account Health, Late shipment rate	LSR on 10-day and 30-day periods against 4%
Are customers complaining?	Voice of the Customer	Poor or very poor CX Health, NCX rate, top complaint reasons
Can the offer ship everywhere?	Shipping settings	Excluded regions, fees, handling time
Are returns free?	Return settings	Free returns for the account or the product

Reading your Featured Offer percentage

Amazon calculates it as page views where your offer was featured divided by total page views for your products. In a hypothetical month, 1,300 featured views out of 2,000 is 65%. Read it per child variation, since one variation at zero can hide in a parent average, and read it against sessions. A falling percentage with steady sessions points at your offer. Falling sessions point at traffic.

Downloading the evidence

Pricing Health lets you download up to 50,000 Featured Offer pricing opportunities, but offers deactivated for pricing errors are not yet included, so capture those from the page. The ODR and Late Shipment Rate tabs each have a Download report button. Save every file with the date in its name.

How to fix a lost Featured Offer so it stays fixed

Whether the cause is a price, a shipping template or a defect rate, the fix that holds follows one pattern. Identify the exact cause, correct it, keep proof, and add a control so the same mechanism cannot repeat.

The hypothetical repricer case laid out as an evidence file, from the measured loss to the control that stops a repeat. Tap each stage to see what it proves.

Fixing a pricing block

Amazon’s guidance is to set total price at or below the competitive external price where an offer is not competitive, and to align it with reference prices where it sits above recent prices. Pricing Health offers a one-click default action, other one-click actions, and editable price, minimum and maximum columns. One-click matching can also lower your business, sale and minimum prices, so check those first. For bulk changes, use the List Your Products tool. If you use a repricer, see our article on the pros and cons of automated pricing.

Disputing an outdated competitive price

If you believe the outside price behind an ineligibility has changed, use Amazon’s self-service dispute. From the Help menu choose Get help and resources, select the Featured Offer tile, enter the ASIN and SKU, answer yes to disputing that the competitive external price has changed and yes to having it checked, then create the case. Without the tile, choose My issue is not listed and follow the wording on the Pricing Health page. Automated resolution can come in as little as 30 minutes. Dispute only when you have reason to believe the price moved.

Fixing a shipping or stock block

Review Shipping settings for excluded regions and fees, and test whether folding a shipping fee into the item price gives a better result, since Amazon compares total price. Keep delivery promises honest. The Federal Trade Commission’s Mail, Internet or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule requires a reasonable basis for any shipping time you state. For stock, restock and fix the reorder point.

Fixing a performance block

Download the ODR or Late Shipment Rate report, list the orders behind the defects, and group them by cause, such as transit damage, wrong item picked, a description that does not match, or a late carrier handoff. Read Voice of the Customer comments on any offer rated poor or very poor. Amazon suggests removing damaged, defective or mislabeled inventory and updating the detail page. Chargebacks are decided by the card issuer, not Amazon, through the process the FTC describes in using credit cards and disputing charges, which covers items not delivered as agreed. Accurate descriptions and on-time delivery prevent them. Reactivate removed offers through Other policy violations once the cause is fixed.

Lost the Featured Offer and cannot find why

Send us the case and we will tell you plainly whether it is an offer problem or an account health case.

Submit Case →Book a call

For a closely related case, read Lost Amazon Brand Registry Access? Why Brands Get Restricted and How to Restore It.

When a Featured Offer loss is part of an account health case

If the diagnosis lands on the account layer, the work changes. A violation, a deactivated offer that needs an appeal, or a Fair Pricing pattern needs a written response Amazon can verify, in three parts.

Root cause. The specific mechanism. “Our repricer raised the price on this ASIN after the only other offer went out of stock, with no maximum to stop it” is a root cause. “A technical error” is not.
Corrective actions already taken. What changed, on which date, with proof, such as the corrected price, new repricer settings or removed inventory.
Preventive controls. What stops a repeat, who owns it and when it started, such as a hard ceiling on every repriced SKU and a weekly Pricing Health review by a named person.

Stay factual, address only what Amazon raised, and attach evidence for every listed ASIN. Never alter or create documents. If a record does not exist, say so and offer what you have. Our guide to writing a plan of action covers the format. On price claims, the FTC’s Guides Against Deceptive Pricing (16 CFR Part 233) explain why a former or comparison price must be genuine, the principle behind Amazon’s reference price rules.

When the wrong seller holds it

If the winning offer on your brand’s ASIN ships a different or counterfeit product, a price cut is not the answer. It is a listing integrity problem, handled through Amazon’s reporting tools with evidence such as a test buy. See our guide to defending listings against hijacking.

Common mistakes that keep offers out of the Featured Offer

Cutting price before checking eligibility. If stock, shipping or a deactivation is the block, a lower price only costs margin.
Repricers with no maximum. When the last competitor leaves, the price can drift up until Pricing Health flags it.
Ignoring one-click side effects. A match can also lower business, sale and minimum prices.
Reading only the parent ASIN. Each variation is decided separately.
Chasing reviews. Star ratings are not considered. Product complaints are.
Treating a yellow rating as a Buy Box issue. It is a deactivation warning. Work the listed violations first.

A weekly Featured Offer routine

Sellers who rarely lose the Featured Offer for long check before the sales report tells them. Score your current routine below.

A weekly Featured Offer routine scored by coverage. Toggle the checks you already run to see whether offers are exposed, partly watched or covered.

Review in this order. Account Health first, since it is the only place that can show a deadline. Then Pricing Health, then Business Reports by child ASIN, then Voice of the Customer and the metric tabs. Log the ASIN, SKU, date and action for each finding. Sellers who want this run as a service can use our Amazon account health maintenance team.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Buy Box the same as the Featured Offer?

Yes. Featured Offer is Amazon’s current name for the offer shown with Add to Cart and Buy Now on a product detail page.

Do I still need to be eligible for the Buy Box?

Amazon says that as of September 2026 it no longer keeps a seller eligibility requirement. Each offer must still be in stock, shippable, competitively priced and active.

How does Amazon choose the Featured Offer?

It ranks qualified offers on total price, delivery promise, free shipping, free returns and seller performance, the same way for every product, with no manual overrides.

Does FBA or Prime help me win it?

Amazon says that if all other factors are equal, FBA and FBM offers, and offers with or without Prime, are equally likely to be featured. Delivery speed and shipping cost are what matter.

Why is my offer ineligible when my price looks fine?

Pricing Health compares your total price, including shipping, with the competitive external price and recent prices on and off Amazon, which may include an identical or near-identical item sold elsewhere for less.

Can a bad Account Health Rating cost me the Buy Box?

Not as a published rule, but account problems remove offers. Deactivation removes all of them, and ODR or late shipment problems can deactivate seller-fulfilled offers.

Where do I see my Featured Offer percentage?

In Business Reports in Seller Central, calculated as featured page views divided by total page views.

Does losing the Featured Offer mean a suspension is coming?

No. Most losses come from stock, shipping, price or competition. If Account Health shows no violations and a healthy rating, treat it as an offer problem.

Get Help With Amazon Featured Offer and Account Health Problems

If offers keep getting deactivated, Pricing Health flags the same ASINs, or Account Health shows violations you cannot trace, we will find the root cause and build a response Amazon can verify. Submit your case or book a consultation.

This article is educational information about Amazon’s published policies and tools, not legal advice. Amazon changes its rules and tools, so confirm the current version in Seller Central before you act. No outcome or timeline is guaranteed.

Our Amazon account health maintenance team can take the case from here. If the account itself is restricted, start with our Amazon suspension service. See all our marketplace suspension services.

Amazon Featured Offer (Buy Box) Eligibility and Why You Lost It